Over the past months, traffic to Westeros—both to the various website sections and the forums—has grown steadily, in no small part due to the buzz surrounding HBO’s Game of Thrones project. Given this, we thought it might be fun to take a little look at the various sections that make up the site and introduce them to both new and old visitors.
First up, Blood of Dragons MUSH, the reason that this site exists at all as all of Westeros was originally envisioned as a website with information for players of the MUSH. As it happened, the website grew so that the pages associated with the game became one section among several and the MUSH itself took longer than expected to complete. But in November 2006 it finally opened and the story has been unfolding ever since. Perhaps you want to be a part of it?
Of course, you may wonder what a MUSH is? It is a text-based online roleplaying game, a cousin to MUDs and a distant kin of MMOs. On some MUSHes stats, skills and various coded systems for determining success or failure are an important part of the play, on others the roleplay is almost entirely freeform. Blood of Dragons falls somewhere in the middle, with the majority of the roleplay happening without any use of coded commands. One way to describe it would be cooperative storytelling in real-time. The “real-time” aspect is what separates it from for example forum roleplay and compared to roleplay in a chatroom a MUSH offers a more structured world with an explorable grid of rooms representing the world or the parts of the world that the game focuses on.
In our case, that world consists of King’s Landing (with most of the roleplay focused around the Red Keep) and Sunspear and players are allowed to control one character in each area. The year on the game right now is 161 after Aegon’s Landing, about 140 years before the start of A Game of Thrones, which allows us to follow canon history as far as its known while still leaving plenty of room for the actions of individual players. King Daeron’s Conquest of Dorne was recently ended as he was murdered and Dorne is once more an independent region that does not recognize the authority of the Iron Throne on which now the pious King Baelor sits.
If playing a character in this world sounds like something you would like to try out, we’re always happy to welcome new players, including those who have never MUSHed before as long as they have some familiarity with the books. To check out the game, and maybe catch us online to ask some questions, connect with a telnet client to bod.westeros.org: 3000. Just keep in mind that we’re in Europe, so we won’t be around US evenings.