Category: Accessible Games
Hello all,
I would like to invite all of you to come and check out a great mud. It is called Rising Kingdoms. There are a variety of things to do, the staff is extremely receptive to player suggestions, and the game is ever expanding. Bugs are promptly squashed and new things are implemented on a regular basis.
Rising Kingdoms has a bit of something for everyone. You can roleplay if you want, but it is not required. There are options for playerkilling, but by default you are NPK, which is non player killing. You can go on a killing spree, participate in quests and expeditions, and so much more. I'll give you an idea of some of the features and a brief description of what they do.
Newbie University - Nothing like the stock mud school, this university gives you lessons both on basic mudding and features unique to Rising Kingdoms. You are rewarded for correctly answering questions about the game and can easily gain your first few levels this way. The newbie university also has missions you can do to learn more about gameplay by actually going and doing things, for which you are rewarded with various things to help you get started. Once you've gotten a bit of experience, you can get your feet wetter with Falcon's goals, also found in the newbie university.
quests - Rising Kingdoms has both automated quests where you kill a mob or retrieve an object for a reward, as well as quests in many areas to do a variety of things, some killing, some not. The eventual goal is to have a quest in every area and while it's not there yet, hard work is being done to make this happen. I myself have submitted several quest ideas which have been promptly written into the game. Some of these quests are even repeatable.
Expeditions - Like autoquests, you are sent out to kill mobs, but in this case there are more than one, depending on the size of expedition you accept, and the rewards are greater.
Global quests - These large quests are for people within certain level ranges, 1-11, 11-21, etc. Kill all of them before any other player in the quest to receive a huge reward, on top of being rewarded for every kill you make, even if you don't win.
Scrabble - When you kill monsters, there is a chance they may drop Scrabble tiles, which you can use to build words for quest points and earn crystal fragments for the crystal quest system.
crystal quest - Gather fragments and convert them to crystals, then save them up for a variety of rewards.
chocolate bunnies - Scattered around the mud, pick up these delicious morsals and eat them for a random number of quest points.
Guess the Phrase - Another fun little game. Pick up tiles scattered around the mud and earn quest points for adding them to the phrase. Then, much like Wheel of Fortune, you can attempt to guess what the phrase is for a reward.
Events - At certain times during the week, different events will take place such as double quest points, no quest timers, and double experience. Double experience also activates when someone has killed the 1000th monster, so these can be fun things to be around for.
Monster colosseum - Challenge yourself by fighting 20 monsters that get progressively harder, in 4 different modes, and earn rewards for killing them. They drop coins that you can exchange at the shop, then redeem for various items.
limit meter - As you kill monsters, you have a limit meter that gradually goes up. When it is maxed out at 100%, you can redeem various rewards.
blessings - Every 18 hours, you can go to the temple of your god and ask for a blessing. These will at least give you a double quest point or double experience potion, as well as the possibility of practices, trains, mudpies, another currency that can be exchanged for various things, double gold potions, a gold reward, quest points, crystal fragments, and runes.
runes - Runes are affixed to items through binding and afford the wearer extra stat bonuses or experience/gold/quest point modifiers. They are a great way to customize.
noexp toggle - There are actually several toggleable things, but this one in particular I find useful. If you want to stay at a certain level to complete quests and things in order to get better gear, you can use this toggle so that you do not level until you are ready to begin doing so again. I find this feature extremely useful myself.
Death penalties are not severe. You don't drop a corpse, so you just have to re-wear your equipment, so no worries about dying in an aggressive area and not being able to retrieve your corpse. You only lose 3% of your xp to level, and you cannot lose a level, as well as 3% of your gold on hand. Banked gold is safe. You can also occasionally come across objects that save you from this loss. I love this personally because it means I can be a little more gutsy than on other muds. New areas and quests are added frequently, and tweaks to make gameplay more fun are put into place. Again staff is receptive to player suggestions, so feel free to send them if you notice something that you'd like to see. I know some of this sounds like a lot to take in, but you don't have to learn it all at one time. There is more to find out, but I'll let you discover some of it yourself. There is definitely a bit of something on the game for everyone, so feel free to come check it out. New players are always welcome and existing players are happy to help. I hope to see you on the game, and if you'd like to look me up, my characters are Lunari, Tygrah, and Zhuuraan. Feel free to send any of them a tell or a note, even just to say hi.
I apologize to you all. I invited you to the mud but neglected to include its host/port info. Here it is.
Host: rising.kingdoms.dk
port: 1234
From the little bits I remember when I gave this mud a spin, I have the following to say:
Great staff, welcoming playerbase. Things do get done fast.
However, and this is a big deal for some...it's one of those muds where what you earn each level depends on your stats, so it's often recommended to turn noexp on and grind quests and expeditions and whatever else till you have all the gear that'll get you to over 100 constitution, especially, that way you gain aa ouple of HP more each level if you're lucky. This sort of min-maxing is something I personally find annoying.
If you don't know the mud, it's very easy to outlevel mobs you know well and end up in a level range, even as the tankiest class (warrior), where you're getting destroyed by the mobs that are supposed to be at your level range. They're working hard on this, but it's offputting.
Some of the hard-coded quests and missions are neat, but the autoquests and expeditions are pretty standard fare. Scrabble, guess the phrase, chocolate bunnies and the like are just other ways for you to amass the necessary qp to compete with everyone else who grinds.
Writing in the mud is not top notch, but it's not horrible. It is, at the least, not pure stock, though its main city reminds me a great deal of Aardwolf. Some areas are better written than others.
Quick summary: if you want a mud where you grind, grind, grind just to stay current, then this will work splendidly. If you want to power-level without grinding first, good luck. This is a mud with a fair amount of potential but with some notable hangups.
I love playing this game.
The mud is relatively new as far as being available to the public. Changes are being made regularly to improve the player experience. I myself have played since the end of November and it has considerably improved since then. I build there too, and have had two areas implemented and working on some more. People have complimented me that my areas are well written.
Rising Kingdoms also has a brand new Twitter if anyone would like to follow, @RisingKingdoms. There you can see some of the updates that are being made and ask questions.
I apologize for not responding to this sooner, but I don't come on here much. However, the Twitter is read and responded to regularly, so that's the best place besides in the game itself to ask questions. I'm gonna post it in a separate thread real quickly just so that people can have easier access. Feel free to follow if interested.
Following them.