All this (and more :) is for an online, real-time interactive roleplaying experience whose theme revolves around the X-Men and their trials, you can go and look at the pages about the MUX for more information. Another way of looking at the whole thing is that it's like sitting in a talk room, and gaming with the other people in that room, only it's hundreds of rooms, and you can move about from room to room, and encounter different groups of characters, with players scattered over different continents.

Well yes, that's all it really is. Except that people have taken great pains to describe the rooms and lay them out in a pattern that imitates a realistic gaming environment. That's why it's like living fiction. It's akin to reading a book, and imagining what the world is like based upon what you find in the book. Only it's more than that, because you become part of the book. You get to move through the world, and interact with it. In that way, it's like a group of people collectively daydreaming or acting out the lives of the characters they have chosen to play. The game engine (TinyMUX), also enables you to configure the game, and some extra commands, however you like.

It's just like "regular roleplay" or table top gaming, or sitting in a real-life room with real-life people and gaming, there is a complete set of rules for how the game works and what is expected of the players. These are located in the news files online. You can access them once you have logged into the game, by typing news. The only real difference is that instead of being in a real-life room with real-life people, you are in a virtual room. This has good and bad points. The bad points tend to revolve around having to rely on typing (because it's a text-based environment -- software will eventually catch up with what is easy and cost-effective to run) and you have to rely on your ability to express yourself in writing instead of verbally. (You lose out on body language, and often what you say aloud can come across differently when typed.) But what you gain far outweighs that -- you get a gaming group which can literally span the world, and is up at various times throughout the day. And you get the added bonus of finding groups of people who have similar gaming interests all in one place.

That's great. All you really need is practice playing pretend, being other characters, and acting "in character". The rules are straightforward enough, and people are there at the game to help you get in the swing of things. The staff of the MUX is great at helping you to refine a character application to where it can be used in game play.

That's ok. All you really need is practice playing pretend, being other characters, and acting "in character". It's sort of like interactive daydreaming. The rules are straightforward enough, and people are there at the game to help you get in the swing of things.

You should start off by learning how to telnet to the site: mserv1.sgeinc.com:4520. This means the game is running at mserv1.sgeinc.com on port 4520. (In numbers, 199.181.141.2 4520). Telnet is a program that enables you to remotely log into other machines, like ftp is a program. Some people can just click here to log in, because many web browsers have preference files where you can choose how to telnet to another site. If you do not have it configured to allow you to telnet, or you don't have a telnet program, you are going to have to go to your favorite search engine, or other search engines, and find telnet software which will run on your computer. If you have access to a unix type shell account, you can just go to the shell prompt and type telnet mserv1.sgeinc.com 4520.

You connect as a guest, and then hopefully the information that scrolls past your screen is enough to get you started. Some telnet programs seem to require a carriage return to clear the connection before typing "connect guest" works. Others, like telnetting from a unix shell, don't require such extremes. Just type "connect guest" and you will be given a guest character's body to explore the game a bit. There is information in the room as you conenct, telling you to go to the Guest Room (just type GR) and start from there.

Manage to get to the Guest Room (typing GR from the room you connect in will get you there) and then type l for look. You will get to see the description of the room then, and there is a bunch of information on how to talk to people, which should get you some help.

If this isn't enough help to get you connected, just send us mail describing your troubles as best you can. You can also use the comments form or the guest book to get comments back to us.