Paroxysm - A supernatural dystopian MUD set beneath the boot of a paranoid world government.

Shygaming

Paroxysm is a modern supernatural dystopian MUD built on the Haven codebase. The supernatural is public knowledge. Humanity responded with fear, surveillance and an increasingly authoritarian world government known as the Cortex.

You can play as a supernatural trying to survive outside the system or as someone working within it. Form societies. Build alliances. Compete over territory. Run schemes. Make enemies. Find meaning in failure.

The server is now online and playable:

Host: 51.222.159.210
Port: 3000

This is still a very early alpha. Expect unfinished systems, bugs and the occasional crash while development continues. We’re hoping to move toward a full launch soon.

Development, discussion updates and playtest coordination are happening on Discord: https://discord.gg/Hkx8rcj4k6

Kestrel

Are you open to sharing who you played on the original Haven?

NotSanni

At a glance, this does just mostly look like Haven, with someone starting to file off the serial numbers. The game still references Haven multiple times, there’s still the frankly kind of weird sex code (I didn’t check to see if there was still hard coded S.A., but I can only assume).

I think calling it “early alpha” is a bit of a misnomer, and if this intends to be in any way, shape, or form different from the game who’s engine you’re using, you should probably take more care to make more changes to differentiate it before saying it’s “online and playable”, given the history and reputation that precedes Haven.

Shygaming

@NotSanni said:

At a glance, this does just mostly look like Haven, with someone starting to file off the serial numbers. The game still references Haven multiple times, there’s still the frankly kind of weird sex code (I didn’t check to see if there was still hard coded S.A., but I can only assume).

I think calling it “early alpha” is a bit of a misnomer, and if this intends to be in any way, shape, or form different from the game who’s engine you’re using, you should probably take more care to make more changes to differentiate it before saying it’s “online and playable”, given the history and reputation that precedes Haven.

Hey. Thanks for taking a look.

A lot of the work so far has been under the hood. We’ve done quite a bit of combat optimisation and set up ingame commands to do deployment from Git to make development and testing much easier. The Git is public too if you want to have a look:

https://github.com/ParoxysmRPG/Paroxysm

To give you an idea of some of the bigger gameplay changes:

The game now has an asymmetrical focus. There is one global Cortex faction against a coalition of player created societies.
Alliance code is reenabled. There are 2 alliances rather than 3 with worshipping or opposing Higher Powers being entirely optional.
Territories give you bonuses for owning them.
Karma has been removed. You can earn enough personal karma for a T3 through roleplay.
T4s and T5s are earned through successful monster play or by succeeding as a Higher Power. Higher Powers are now guest characters and need a worshipping society that has done enough to help them ascend.
Too many T4s+ will disable Sanctuary for everyone until there’s an acceptable number of them. This is automated.
Sanctuary has been significantly nerfed. It still prevents things like imprint locking and sexual assault. Murder and maiming can happen through it now though. You respawn afterwards and your society pays for it.
There are new schemes and rituals including ones that disable crime code and prevent a target from entering the Nightmare.
You can attack people in public but the defender will have NPCs come to help them in combat rather than the attack being automatically denied.
Thwarting is now a contested roll rather than a scene. The roll is d100 + 10 × Professional Focus on each side with +5 and ties going to the schemer. This same roll is made with an investigation.
Mancers without large weapons don’t consume their attack while mancing.
There’s a new Dissent patrol where Cortex attempts to break up a protest while player societies try to maintain it.
You can sell other characters to the Syndicate to auction for a cut of the money made.
Most of the rooms in game have descriptions, now.
An affects command that displays everything influencing your LF.
The need to feed was made more oppressive and the symptoms get progressively worse.
NPC werewolves spawn on the full moon.
Psychic is an arcane tree. T3s can have legendries. T4s+ have higher discipline caps.
Hunter poisons are a combat ability that last one round.

There’s quite a lot more than that. A lot of it just isn’t immediately visible.

Since the last merge we’ve also removed all remaining references to Haven. We are trying to make Paroxysm its own game rather than just running a lightly modified version of the original codebase but it is going to take time.