Towers

Hi, all. Just a quick note from TowersMUX staff to clarify.

As some people here have speculated, the intent of this clause is to avoid situations where players contribute content that becomes a major part of the game, and then become disenchanted with the game and attempt to withdraw it. Most of the time, that’s fine, but we don’t want to be placed in a position where someone is trying to abruptly pull popular in-game locations, wiki content that other players rely on, log files that involve other characters, etc., by claiming copyright violation. We hope that’s not something that’ll ever come up (and we’ll be happy to work with players who no longer want to see their content in-game), but it’s also something that has come up in the past on other games.

To be clear: we do not and will not resell or reuse content created for the game and websites outside the context of the game and websites. (Some will likely get scraped off the wiki whether we like it or not; we’ll try to prevent that if we reasonably can, but the reality is that it’ll happen.) We’ll work on rephrasing item 3 so that it definitively closes off that possibility. In the meantime, we hope this isn’t a deal-killer for anyone who would otherwise be interested in giving the game a try.

Thank you!

TowersMUX is a 20th Anniversary World of Darkness game set in modern-day London and supporting Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling. (No Wraith, no Mummy, and no Demon – not for the foreseeable future at least.)

Okay, but what kind of game are we?

What we’ve aimed at is the feel of an old-school World of Darkness game while learning from the problems of, and avoiding at least some of the vices of, actual old-school World of Darkness games.

• We’re trying to encourage player storytelling rather than making it a trial: as long as you avoid a fairly short list of specific story elements, you don’t need permission in advance to run your own stuff. Go ahead and do it and tell us about it afterward.

• We’re trying to provide storylines run by staff without having fixed outcomes set in advance, to let player actions drive the direction of the story.

• We’ve added an in-game system for resolving game-wide conflicts like “who gets elected mayor” or “who gets awarded a new Vampire Domain” that’s based on characters’ stats and what they want to support or oppose, and doesn’t require submitting +requests or staff intervention to put your influence to work.

• We’re trying to avoid the problem of enormous disparity between characters by scaling XP at higher totals and making sure that the mechanics of gaining XP match up with the expected speed of progression. (Which is to say, we did some math.)

• We’re trying to stick as close to the written rules as is practical. Some things that aren’t well-defined in the books have been clarified, and we’ve altered some things in the interest of playability and balance, but we’re not out to rewrite the whole system. If you’re already familiar with a game, most things are going to work the way you expect them to. If they don’t, we try to explain why we thought it was worth changing.

• We’re trying to be open and transparent: there aren’t any secret spheres or extra-powerful characters given out to people staff like. If it’s available, it’s listed as available on the website.

• We’ve tried to avoid asking players for anything in an app that we aren’t going to care about. We will read your whole app, we will provide feedback that’s more meaningful than “your math is wrong, recheck and resubmit,” and we try to have that feedback ready in 72 hours or less.

• We’re not dependent on anyone who is not already a staff member. The game server, the website, the wiki, the in-game code, etc. are all owned and maintained by staff (or are publicly available code).

If you enjoyed Haunted Memories back in the day or Liberation more recently, we think there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this game.

In the interest of full disclosure, there’re also some things that might lead to your not liking this game:

• If you’ve tried World of Darkness 20th Anniversary games and didn’t care for the world or the game mechanics, we’re unlikely to change your mind on that, since we’re not doing much of anything that’s a radical departure from the game lines.

• If you hate the idea of a game set in and focused on London, well – this is very much that.

• If you’re looking for a City of Hope type of game where there’s no real restriction on what you can play or buy in chargen or with XP as long as the math adds up, this isn’t that. We’re trying for a somewhat more curated experience to try and make sure the feel and mood of the games and the world are consistent.

• Because right now the game is run by two people, ST’d events aren’t as frequent as we might like. We try for at least two events per week, but that still means it can be two or three weeks between scenes for any individual sphere, sect or faction.

• For much the same reason, we’re probably not going to be able to run events or NPC encounters for individual players. We’re still happy to facilitate getting IC answers from them, but it will most likely be asynchronously.

• While our player base fills out a bit more, players who are more willing to initiate RP and story arcs will find more engagement with the game.

If you think the pros outweigh the cons (or might, at least), check out our website at https://towersmux.net!

Thanks for the kind words! We’re happy to answer questions about the game as they come up, and we’ll try to check in here regularly.

We did want to talk a little bit about the grid style. We’ve actually avoided doing a street-by-street geographic reproduction of the city; instead, the boroughs that are built – we’ve covered a little over half of the thirty-two-plus-one so far, as @Evilgrayson mentioned – are abstracted into regions that get represented on the grid as rooms. “Battersea,” for example, is a single room (one of a half-dozen that make up all of Wandsworth), and RP-able spaces in Battersea (like the Power Station, and sometimes individual neighborhoods when warranted) are linked off it.

So, when you want to go from the Oxford and Cambridge Club to Harrods and don’t want to use +hangout/jump, you don’t go along Pall Mall to St James’ Street to Piccadilly to the A4 to the Brompton Road to Harrods: you just go from St James’ to Knightsbridge to Harrods. The idea is to make London navigable from the sort of high level view you get from, e.g., Google Maps, rather than requiring knowledge of the city and its streets and landmarks.

Additionally, boroughs become more abstracted (get fewer rooms) the further they are from the city center. e.g., Hillingdon – though the second largest borough by land area – has half the rooms that Westminster does. Because Westminster has a lot more of what people think of as “London” in it than Hillingdon does.

The great majority of what’s built is restaurants, clubs, museums, etc. – things that get cataloged in +hangouts. We love poking around grids and we’ve put some surprises in for people who do, but you can get by just fine never using anything but +hangout/jump and +meet.

As far as an in-game map, stay tuned! We’re looking at how we can provide something that’s helpful but not overwhelming.

@Gashlycrumb said in Active WoD MU*s?:

The London one isn’t open yet and might stay invite-only.

There is at least one London WoD game currently in development that will definitely be open to the public eventually; I don’t know if there’s more than one London game being worked on, though, so this may not be the one you’re thinking of.

Since development time has already been considerably longer than we hoped, I’m leery of giving an ETA, but we’re aiming for “soon.”

@Gashlycrumb said in Active WoD MU*s?:

@Towers Towers is the one I know of. It looks good.

Thank you for the kind words! We know there’s a lot still to do.

@Jennkryst said in Active WoD MU*s?:

Because I am a living meme but also because the British stole all of the artifacts… London Mummies?

We don’t currently have plans for spheres other than Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling. That might change some day, but probably not in the near future.

However … a Mage character with Egyptian past lives and a magickal style based around hekau could be workable?