Dragon Realms

A clean-room, text-based MUD inspired by The Crossing. Hunt creatures in the Old Sewers and Wilds, grow your skills through use, advance circles at your guild hall, and find your place among eleven guilds.

Run it

npm install
npm start          # -> http://localhost:3000

Open http://localhost:3000 in a browser. You'll be greeted with a terminal; register <user> <pass> to make an account, create a character, and enter the Crossing.

npm test runs the headless suites (auth, chargen, combat, circling, death, economy, magic — see test/). node scripts/client-corpus.mjs replay <captured.json> diffs a scripted session against the server build, and node scripts/client-regression.mjs drives the web client in headless Chromium. DR_ENABLE_API=1 npm start exposes a secure JSON test API for automated testing and analysis — see docs/api.md.

Systems

• Accounts — scrypt-hashed passwords, per-salt hashing, lockout after 5 failed logins, 12-hour session tokens, rate-limited input.
• Races (12) — each with stat modifiers (Strength, Constitution, Reflex, Agility, Charisma, Discipline, Wisdom, Intelligence).
• Guilds (11) — Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Empath, Moon Mage, Necromancer, Paladin, Ranger, Thief, Trader, Warrior Mage. Each trains a primary and secondary skill set; magic guilds wield a signature spell.
• Skills (83 across Weapon, Armor, Combat Manipulation, Defense, Lore, Magic, Survival, and Guild). Using a skill earns experience toward its next rank; ranks cost ~200 exp plus a small per-rank increase, and Int/Wis/Discipline speed your learning. Rank-ups feed a hidden TDP pool (200 points → 1 TDP).
• TDPs (Training Development Points) — the DR-authentic growth currency: every new character starts with 600, circling grants 50 (+circle) below circle 10 (100 above), and every rank-up feeds a shared hidden pool that converts each 200 points into a TDP. Spend at the Fane of Training with train <stat> twice (DR's designated stat rooms); tdptrain <skill> spends TDPs on any skill; death shaves the pool.
• Skills messaging — skills reports the DR 16-tier ladder (Novice → Avatar, with degree modifiers); exp shows the mindstate ladder.
• PvP & justice v1 — duel <name> [blood|blow|pain] with end conditions, surrender, and pvp stance open|guarded|closed flags. CLOSED characters refuse all challenges; OPEN ones can be attacked without consent; stealing forces your stance OPEN. target <creature> marks a combat focus and slots shows your guild's spell-slot budget.
• Trainers — your guild leader will drill you in your guild's skills for silver: train <skill>. This is how you prepare the ranks needed to circle.
• Circles — to advance a circle, meet your guild's cumulative DragonRealms-style named-skill and Nth-of-skillset requirements, then circle in your guild hall. A band value of 4 means rank 4 at circle 1, rank 20 at circle 5, and rank 40 at circle 10.
• Spells — each magic guild learns five spells through circle 8. Kinds include damage, healing, sleep, escape (flee/teleport), hunter's mark, and a defensive ward. spells lists what you know. Spells occupy slot budgets scaled by your guild's magic tier — slots shows held vs. free, learn <spell> / forget <spell> at your guild hall manage them, and the circle-2 feat grants +2 slots. Magic guilds can also store mana in cambrinth devices — charge, invoke, focus — sold by Marlene in the market and Sergeant Voss at the bank end (type-locked: charging with the wrong mana destroys the device).
• Combat — fully async and server-ticked. Commands issued between rounds (attack, cast, retreat, berserk, backstab, and the maneuvers disarm, trip, shield-bash). Adopt a stance (aggressive, defensive, guarded, balanced) to trade offense for defense. The current named presets are live; custom evasion/parry/shield allocation and meaningful use of bonus stance points remain roadmap work. Thieves can hide and ambush from concealment — even mid-fight. The hunting ladder (ladder) shows which creatures teach which rank bands, and over-levelled prey teaches little. PvP duels let you challenge another adventurer in the wilds (duel, accept, decline). Death drops a corpse with your gear (search + reclaim) and respawns you at the temple.
• Capstones — reaching circle 10 unlocks your guild's signature passive (e.g. the Necromancer's Death Pact lifesteal, the Paladin's Aegis of Faith, the Trader's Golden Touch sell bonus). Announced on circle, shown in score.
• Titles — every guild has ten rank titles, one per circle (e.g. Paladins rise from Squire to Paragon), shown on circle, score, and who.
• Scripting — server-side aliases (alias <name> <command>, $1..$9, persisted), ; multi-command chaining, plus client macro bar (macro <label> <command>), timers (timer <sec> <command>), and triggers (trigger <text> <command> — fires when incoming text matches). All client automation stays sandboxed and never touches the server.
• NPCs — shopkeepers (buy/sell), a tanner who buys hides and high-tier trophies on West Road, banker (deposit/withdraw), healer, guild trainers, a town crier, the quartermaster's circle-gated high-tier gear, and fifteen creature types across seven hunting grounds to hunt and skin for loot.
• Crafting — visit Fennel at the Tilted Retort (north of Market Way) and craft alchemical recipes, or cross to Bram's Ember Forge and forge steel: iron ore drops from trolls, bandits, and the blackwood dead, and quality scales with your Forging skill (practically worthless → masterfully-crafted, and masterful steel hits harder).
• Thief khri — nine concentration-based buffs (khri), from Elusion and Focus through Sight, Swiftness, and Clarity. The pool grows with circle and Stealth; taking a hit shatters your focus.
• Guild tasks — ask <leader> task gives guild-scaled kill quests with silver and guild-skill rewards (crier pest-control for everyone else).
• Rested experience — log out for 2 minutes to bank 1 minute of REXP (cap 120); while banked, learning runs at 2×. rexp shows your pool.
• Moon Mage prediction — predict reads the moons and wraps you in an omen (+defense) while training Astrology and Scholarship.
• Warrior Mage familiars — summon familiar at the guildhall binds a spirit that fights alongside you and trains Summoning (familiar, dismiss familiar).
• Empath wound-taking — mend <player> takes another’s wounds into yourself (half the healing hits you); killing living creatures leaves a permanent empathic stain on your healing.
• Paladin soul — smite burns soul for radiant damage; slaying the undead restores it, pray steadies it, and thieving or striking first dims it — a dim soul blocks circling.
• Ranger companions & beseeches — slay a wolf and its spirit may bond as a combat companion; beseech wind quickens you, beseech sun mends you (the wilds grow wary of overuse).
• Necromancer risen — animate <creature> raises a corpse you have felled as a shambling minion that fights alongside (Thanatology).
• Cleric devotion — pray at the temple deepens devotion (cap 100); holy magic burns brighter with it and dims without it (higher mana cost below 20). devotion reads your faith.
• Bard enchantes — enchant war|bravery|regen starts a cyclic song with mana upkeep: war marches (+damage), bravery wards (+defense), and renewal mends you as you fight. One at a time; enchant off ends it.
• Trader commodity pits — at the Grain Pit (west of Market Way) the board fluctuates every hour: pit reads prices, buy low and sell high (buy grain 10 / sell silk 5); traders earn a bonus on sells.
• Field exp & pulses — all field experience banks in a per-skill pool (DR formulas size the pool by skillset, Intelligence and Discipline) and converts into ranks as one of ten fixed skill groups pulses on DR's 200-second cycle; mindstate reads pool fullness. REXP triples drained learning (2 offline minutes → 1 banked).
• Riverhaven — a second starting city across the river: its own square, market, shrine, and a shared guild-hall row (circle works there too), with a ferry road into the Old Woods and reedwater wilds of its own (mud crabs up to river thugs). The river ferry (ferry, 20 silvers) runs between the Crossing docks and the Riverhaven landing. Choose your city at character creation.
• Justice — theft near a guard can land you in the Town Cells: plead guilty (fine) or plead innocent (serve the sentence).
• Dungeons & rares — the Cinder Cavern (circle 5–7) lies under the bandit camp; the two-level Blackwood Ruins (circle 7–10) waits east of the Deep Wilds, crowned by the Dread Knight. Rare named creatures (Shadowpaw, the Bandit Chieftain, the Cinder Drake King) occasionally replace normal spawns and drop unique named gear.
• World — the Crossing town (guild halls, market, bank, temple, brewery), plus the Old Sewers, Old Woods, Whispering Marsh, Deep Wilds, Bandit Camp, Cinder Cavern, and Blackwood Ruins.
• Interface — the web client is text-first: room prose stays full-width and skimmable, with per-channel styling (room/combat/notice/error), a status bar parsed from the server prompt (HP/mana gauges, circle, silvers), a persistent exits widget, docked info panels (inventory/score/skills/spells), scrollback search (Ctrl-F), tab completion, command history, three themes plus a custom color palette, font/line-spacing controls, a scripts panel for macros/timers/triggers, an on-screen D-pad with haptic taps, and gamepad support for touch and controller play. A roadmap tracker lives at /ROADMAP.html.
• Balance tooling — node scripts/simulate-progression.mjs [guild] grinds a fresh character to circle 10 with the real systems and cumulative source band requirements. It verifies reachability and reports active-time pacing; the current deterministic matrix spans 15.6–75.6 simulated active hours, and live-player balance remains a separate playtest. node scripts/build-skills-doc.mjs regenerates /SKILLS.html and SKILLS.md; node scripts/build-roadmap.mjs regenerates the tracker from data/roadmap.js. A test-only HTTP API (server/api.js, DR_ENABLE_API=1) drives the game headlessly for analysis.
• Barbarian bot + GM spectator — node scripts/barbarian-bot.mjs (or npm run bot) plays a real gortog barbarian: it shops, gears up, hunts, skins, hauls to market, trains, learns abilities, and circles. Watch it after entering the dedicated DR_GM_TOKEN in the GM console: open /spectate.html?name=<bot> for the live viewer, or type spectate <bot> straight into the main client (http://localhost:3000/) — the full interface renders the bot's rooms, combat, prompts, and its typed commands (> attack sewer rat) with the status strip tracking its vitals. unspectate returns you to normal play. The relay is GM-only because it includes private command input. The relay is server/spectate.js; head-starts for fast demo arcs: --silver N, --start-ranks N (needs the API + separately authorized debug API). Options: --minutes N (cap), --circle N (target), --name <n>, --silver N and --start-ranks N (head-starts via the test API, requiring DR_ENABLE_API=1, DR_ENABLE_DEBUG_API=1, and the matching DR_DEBUG_TOKEN, for watchable demos that circle within minutes).
• Barbarian arts — inner fire + voice pool, ability paths (Flame/Horde/ Predator), berserks (Berserk, Wildfire, Mage's Lash), forms (Dragon), meditations (Tenacity, Serenity), roars (Everild's Rage, Screech), whirlwind/stomp/choke/dispel, dual load, passive masteries (Duelist, Juggernaut, Titan, Exemplar), and magic resistance that scales with Defending. Items: warhorn, chakrel, warpaint, roar helm.
• Skill taxonomy — the full clean-room reference (six skillsets + guild skills, sub-skills, governing stats, training sources) lives in SKILLS.md and the interactive /SKILLS.html. New sources this pass: study at the temple (scholarship), hide in the wilds (hiding/stealth), rest (athletics), potions (first aid), strongboxes (lockpicking), and broad magic trickle from casting (arcana/augmentation/debilitation/ utility/warding magic).

Commands

Movement:  n s e w ne nw se sw u d | go <dir> | look [dir] | look <npc/item>
Combat:    attack <creature> | target <creature> | cast [spell] [target] | retreat/flee | skin <creature>
Maneuvers: disarm <target> | trip <target> | bash <target>  (shield required)
PvP:       duel <player> [blood|blow|pain] | accept/decline <player> | surrender | pvp stance open|guarded|closed  (wilds only)
Stances:   stance aggressive | defensive | guarded | balanced
Magic:     spells | slots | prepare <spell> [pct] | cast | perceive | harness | charge/invoke/focus <cambrinth>
Powers:    berserk | abilities | learn <ability> | form/roar/meditate <ability> | whirlwind | stomp | choke | analyze (Barbarian)
           backstab (Thief) | khri <name> (Thief) | smite (Paladin) | beseech wind|sun (Ranger) | mend <player> (Empath)
           predict (Moon Mage) | summon familiar / familiar / dismiss familiar (Warrior Mage)
           animate <corpse> / risen (Necromancer) | enchante war|bravery|regen / enchant off (Bard) | devotion (Cleric)
Companions: companion | call | release (Ranger)  |  pray (soul, Paladin)
Items:     get/drop <item> | get <item> from corpse | inventory | wear/wield <item> | remove <item> | use/eat/drink <item> | search <corpse>
Death:     die -> temple; gear stays on your corpse (search <corpse>, get <item> from corpse)
Shops:     list | buy <item> [qty] | sell <item> [qty] | deposit/withdraw <silvers> | pit (commodities) | heal
Training:  train <skill> (silvers, at your guild hall) | train <stat> twice (Fane of Training) | circle
TDPs:      tdp | raise <stat> | tdptrain <skill>
Quests:    quest | claim | ask <leader> task
Crafting:  craft <recipe> (Tilted Retort) | forge <recipe> (Ember Forge)
Wilds:     forage | hunt | track | ladder | hide | ambush <creature> | rest | wake | study | perform/sing | appraise <item>
Crime:     steal <npc> | pick <strongbox> | plead guilty|innocent  (jail)
Scripting: alias <name> <command> | use ";" to chain | client: macro / timer / trigger
NPCs:      ask <npc> <topic> (try "ask crier help")
Character: score | skills | exp | alloc <stat> <amount> | rexp
Social:    say | emote | shout | who | time | belch | shakehand
Misc:      help | save | quit | deletechar <name>

Layout

data/        game content (races, guilds, skills, items, creatures, npcs, world)
server/      db, auth, player, world runtime, combat engine, commands, session, entry
public/      web terminal client (HTML/CSS/JS)
test/        domain test suites + shared helpers

Durable character state—progression, learned abilities and techniques, items, equipment condition, quests, justice, resources, and cooldowns—persists to data/store/dragonrealms.db (SQLite via node:sqlite). Live combat and other short-lived effects reset when a session ends.