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From the site: Ancient Anguish is a text based adventure game (or MUD) for which coding began in 1992, and was opened to the public in February, 1992. Today it is one of the largest and most popular LPMuds on the Internet. It is entirely player-run; anyone with a character in the game can eventually become a developer if they so wish. Or they can just keep on playing.

Ancient Anguish is played via a telnet application (a remote terminal for connecting directly to another computer). MUDs are very popular, and so there are numerous mud clients available (the windows application is a little basic). Zuggsoft produces an excellent one, and the Fire Client from Firebolt is a very good freeware version. Search download.com for mud clients if you want to find alternatives.

Why would I play this game?

It's seems odd that so many people play a text-only adventure game with the wide variety of sumptuous environments around. Coming to think of it, it's fairly weird that people play a text-only adventure game now that the VIC 20 is no longer a premium gaming machine. However, AA is pretty much the same played over a modem or with a huge cable; it's very "low rent". And it's an enjoyable game that's been developed over more than ten years and which is played by a varied and largely friendly community of players. Besides, you can play it pretty much from anywhere. This includes, of course, sneakily at work. Try doing that with Everquest.

Why the game guide?

There's an enormous amount of information available on the web about AA, and plenty more in-game. AA is one of the most newbie friendly muds out there, with an emormous amount of in-game help files available. Nevertheless, there's an awful lot of stuff that the new player could do with knowing which only gets discovered once it's no longer useful, and that's where this site comes in. Reputedly, the AA site, which has sadly fallen into disrepair, is going to be fully updated (another reason why I started to design this site), at which point this site will probably become redundant unless the tone of it is changed.

Bear in mind that this is not intended to be a highly detailed guide. There are plenty out there; players like Ghanima have created superb resource sites going into detail about which item weighs how much etc. There is little out there for the newbie. That's what this is about.

In any case, I hope that people find the site useful. If you've got anything to add or have found information which is incorrect, please mail me or leave a comment.

About commenting. The system is this; if there is some information which is is incorrect, then you can leave a correction as a comment. When i've corrected the information, the comment will be deleted. Alternatively, if you want to leave a comment referring to a particular section of text, then it'll probably be added to that section as a footnote. All other useful comments will be left ranged over to the right hand side of the relevant page. At the moment, the commenting system has the most basic of security on it, so you can use html tags or whatever if you wish. i'd prefer to leave it password free and to assume that folk are going to be at least vaguely responsible, at least for the moment.

Chris "Bigcalm" Moore.

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Site in progress 23/10/03
Submitted by Bigcalm
I've been fiddling with things and I've got about half my total content up. Most of the classes are there (no adventurer, paladin and a very incomplete shapeshifter, but all the others are there in terms of basic information). Guilds are not up yet at all, and i'm working on old information for those.

I have also added a weapons section - this'll probably be integrated with the weapons and skills section at some point to avoid confusion.

To come is a geography section - I just want to go through the various towns in Anguish and explain what you can find there in terms of shops, food and drink, loot, and points of interest.

If anyone want's to contribute majorly (i.e. write a new section) then i'll gladly host 'em. Otherwise, please feel free to comment on any of the sections already in existence.

Nice!
Submitted by Peblo
Keep up the good work biggy ;)

Just fixed the commenting system
Submitted by Bigcalm
It now goes back to the page that you were on rather than leading to a completely blank page. yay me!

WOW
Submitted by MTYQ
Hi - Nice site you have here I hope all goes well for you, and it.

Lost
Submitted by Fairydust
Ok... the page is great... now where the hell have you gone??? *frowns with worry and points to the 37 days not online*

At last!
Submitted by Bigcalm
Would you believe it? I actually found a backup :)



The Ancient Anguish website can be found at http://ancient.anguish.org
You can connect to the game through your telnet/MUD client by connecting to the machine ancient.anguish.org via port 2222.
The information on this site takes the form of an unofficial guide written by a player. Chris Moore/Bigcalm has no official status in the game other than that of a player.
Site written in php 4.0 & html and is backed up onto a MySQL database.