“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.” ― Robert Jordan

The Sea of Storms is one of a handful of MUDs available which are based on or set in the Wheel of Time universe. There are four things that the player can experience which majorly set this game apart from the rest: the roleplaying system, the travel system, the combat form system, and the channeling system.

The world is completely custom, with several popular locations available for players to explore, such as the cities of Cairhien and Amador, the Aiel Waste, and the Blight. The game uses a world travel system, which allows players to use an ascii world map to transition between locations, or explore the wilderness in search of treasures, solitude, bandits or more. Traveling on the world map is limited by your character's movement, which restricts you from making incredibly long journeys too fast, and helps to convey the actual distance between these locations as you wander around the known world.

Once you get your bearings, you will learn the importance of the roleplaying system. TSOS is a roleplay-oriented MUD. You are in-character the entire time you are logged in. The global chat channel is OOC, and you have a command to speak out-of-character to help coordinate the story, but any other interaction is expected to be played out as your character. Enforced roleplay is not an alien concept to MUDs, but TSOS has a unique system driven by the RP Counter. When you talk and emote with other players in the same room, the game monitors your actions and slowly advances this counter as your roleplay unfolds. When your roleplay counter is above zero, you gain experience points over time, and the higher your counter gets, the more experience you gain. This system actually rewards players for roleplaying, rather than simply enforcing being in-character all the time, and encourages players to meet and roleplay in place of grinding faceless NPCs for hours.

The combat system has been heavily reworked from the standard auto-combat system you may expect from SMAUG. If you watched Rand al'Thor performing 'The Falling Leaf' or 'Heron Spreads its Wings' in the fight scenes of the novel series, this is exactly what you can expect to experience. Rather than having rounds where you and your opponent strike each other until one of you falls down, every round has each of you pick one of your 'forms' to use for that round, and then compares them. Each form has special properties, and is particularly strong against certain other forms giving it a bonus to win the attack. You do not get to pick the forms yourself; rather, you have a passive skill called 'battle sense' which picks for you - the better your skill, the better job battle sense does of picking the right form for the round. Once you are good enough, you can learn higher level forms, which are faster and stronger, and when you master them, more still to learn.

The channeling system is my personal favorite, primarily because it emulates so well the way the books describe how channeling works. (For those of you new to the Wheel of Time universe, this is the magic system). In this version of the story, Saidin remains tainted, so any Male Channelers will eventually be consumed by the taint and be driven insane. Men have fifty percent more base power in the Source than women, but women are twice as skillful, striking an interesting balance. At character creation, you can select your channeling strength, ranging from weak to gifted. The stronger your channeling strength, the more points you gain to allocate to your base strength in the Five Powers, but the greater chance you have of severing your own connection to the Source through early channeling. Your base strength in the Five Powers determines your maximum potential skill at weaving those flows, and the combination of your base power and your current skill in a given flow determines whether you are able to perform a given weave. You gain skill in the flows simply by weaving, so the more you use it, the better you get, and the better you get, the more weaves you are able to access. The main website has a link to the official wiki, which has a list of most of the weaves available to players, as well as the base flow strength and flow skill required to perform the weave - an incredible resource when planning your channeler.

The official website has a plethora of helpful links and information to assist players with molding their stories or learning about the game in general, including access to in-game help files, the ability to review roleplay logs submitted by players, a forum for coordinating roleplay scheduling, and a running display of the players currently online.

The most important thing The Sea of Storms has to offer is its experience. Players are friendly, the immortal staff is helpful and polite, and everyone is here with the same goal: to have fun while telling a story together. The fact that we get to kill each other along the way is just a nice little bonus.

I would say that this mud has the most potential out of many of the 'Wheel of Time' theme MUDs/MUSHes currently in existence. The main problem with this MUD is overall lack of accessibility and lack of freedom with character creation.

A common critique of most Wheel of Time-themed MUDs has to do with trying to stay true to the limitations and mechanics presented in the series while maintaining some element of playability. Some MUDs, do this brilliantly. It is for this reason that particular MUD routinely boasts 40-80 players a night, while more worthy, attractive and detailed MUDs, such as Sea of Storms, struggle in obscurity.

There are a great group of players on this MUD, many of whom have been here for years. The RP is good, the location descriptions are very well done, and the presentation is extremely polished.

My main critique has to do with the character creation system as it applies to magic using characters (hereinafter referred to as 'channelers'). Four of the six main characters are channelers and it is arguably the magic system that sets this series apart from a multitude of fantasy series that quite frankly use the same concepts, storylines, plot progression and themes much more ably. Thus a large portion of the fans play these games to create channelers.

The Sea of Storms character creation system and the implementation of the progression of channelers seems designed to thwart the desires of the player and even worse, punish new players for their lack of familiarity with the MUD - much of the information about which channeling abilities are available to a character can only be gleaned after a character has been created since the helpfiles and spell information system is not accessible during creation, and it is quite possible to play a character for upwards of hundreds of hours only to find out that the spells you made many decisions and sacrifices for are inaccessible due to an invisible gameplay mechanic that can make your character sub-standard and even worse, not what you wanted at all.

This has gotten worse recently, in the form of hard-coded changes to the creation system that extends the range of channeling capabilities from the very weak to the very strong. While this seems a good thing, the problem is that the changes now make it impossible to reach the minimum requirements for the strongest spells, which once again, required a trade-off in overall capability in the first place, and worse, directs characters down an avenue with lessened control over the streets they may want to take. You can literally have an idea that, like some characters in the series, it is exceptionally hard for your alter ego to access spells involving fire or earth to the point of uselessness, and be told by the system that this is impossible.

It is puzzling why a skill-based, level-less MUD would put so much weight on numbers chosen before you started RPing your character, and I can only guess that it has to do with the desire to maintain the theme itself. My only suggestion is that they modify the system so that, for these characters, capability can be raised within specific elemental affinities via in-game experience points. It's ironic to give up eight spells in order to get one that you really want, only to be told that the help files misrepresented the information and truthfully to learn this spell let alone cast or be exceptionally good with it, you need to go back to character creation, readjust an allocation of points and then go through the process only to be stuck in a loop where character creation refuses to allow you to meet the minimum necessary requirements for the spell.

So, it's a great MUD, responsive immortals, likable players and well-polished execution, but it is not always the most enjoyable, mostly due to the character creation system for a character archetype. They need to strike a better balance between staying faithful to the series and playability, and I think the code base is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It's a good niche MUD, but they may have issues retaining new players due to the fact that the character creation system weeds out hardcore roleplayers and players who like having more control of their characters. Perhaps if they made the system more intuitive and easier to understand they will start growing and flourish.

The Sea of Storms has been an interesting place to spend my mudding life. I started there shortly after my hack n slash days as a mute channeler who got a job as a barkeep and musician at a popular inn in Cairhien. I'd never played a MUD that had a place in its Roleplay enviroment for a unique character that couldn't speak and was also afflicted with the slow approach of insanity [caused from being a Male channeler]

From my mute character I ended up playing several others including: Aes Sedai, Whitecloaks, Tinkers, Craftsmen, Weapon Master, etc. Anything from the books or anything a player can think of to roleplay that is within theme is possible.

The staff was normally helpful when I was a player. I sometimes felt they were holding me back and during my more rebellious years there I did some mild policy violations. Still I learned the staff was just trying to preserve the concept of the MUD and not so much hold me back as guide me down a much more reasonable path.

Eventually I became a staffer myself and got to run some very fun events. Stuff like the borderlands attempting to retake Malkier, Searching for the Horn of Valere, and murder mysteries. Would be just a few of the events that a player can experience on The sea of Storms.

The RP opportunity isn't the only bonus on the sea of storms. The code aspect is also amazingly involved. We have over 200 weapon forms for sword, axe, staff, dagger, spear, ashandarei. With also have over 90 unique weaves for our magic system. This combined with a mostly classless system that is instead replaced with a talents based system allowing for high levels of character customization.

Overall it's been a great 8 years and with my new position as head of PR. I hope to have another great 8 years with new players from the Mudconnect community.

This is the sort of MUD for hardcore roleplayers and hardcore WOT fans alike. The Sea of Storms, also referred to lovingly by the players and staff as TSoS, is one of the best MUDs out there in my not so humble opinion. The great thing about The Sea of Storms, unlike most other WOT muds out there is that it is set in a Pattern World where Laman never cut down the Great Tree, and the Aiel War never happened. Unlike some other MUD's like it, there are very few book characters involved, and the majority of them are set at the peripheries.

The code is beautifully built, and continually being added to. Many various MUDs (as opposed to MUSHes) trying to build a solid roleplay environment do so by segregating RP from Code. Well, the beautiful thing about this MUD is all of the strength that a character gains, is through Roleplay. Skills, Combat Maneuvers, etc, are all learned from other players, ICly. We also have a solid channeling system in place, using the Five Powers, varying strengths and skills, and a system by which various weaves can be learned through experimentation.

The character creation system is rich, and beautifully done, using character traits and a basic point buy system by which one can by talents such as forging, weaponsmaster, assassin, and a variety of other things which helps create a world that is rich in characters. There are no classes. Each character can be as different from each other as players create them to be. There are quite a few guilds and organizations available for people to choose from, including several entirely player created ones.

Some basic points - Player run organizations (White Tower, Whitecloaks, Cairhien, etc). - Player run economies, including forging armor, weapons, shields, tailoring clothing, making instruments, etc. - An active Imm-Staff - Both IC and OOC Events for the fun of the players - Numerous areas - Rich roleplay - You, the player, can shape the course of the MUD.

So what are you waiting for? I look forward to seeing you there.

Hardcore WOT fans, looking for a place they can rise to the level of an influential person in the world, should definitely check TSOS out. I started playing there when there were not many people at all, and over the years we have struggled to keep much of an active pbase because of the reputation we got as an 'incomplete mud' due to many of the talents not being coded in.

Since those days however, we have come a long way, and added a significant amount of areas, skills, weaves, ect. TSOS is all original, with custom channeling code, custom pet code, and my favorite, a weapon forms system for all of our weapons (sword, staff, dagger, axe, spear, and the newest, ashandarei), each weapon has 8 levels of mastry, each level with it's own weapon forms. All sword forms are taken straight from the novels, and the other weapons are all named with similar format to the swordforms. We have a unique overworld travel system that allows for quick travel between areas, fully implemented dreaming and sniffing code, aiel, borderland, and seanchan hand to hand combat systems, as well as a standard hand to hand system all players can use.

Characters are allowed to submit rp logs, and receive character points for them, which they can use to do many things such as purchase player homes, improve equipment, buy skills and talents they did not start with, and much much more! There is a locker system, and every character starts with 50 locker item slots, where equipment is always saved in addition to the fairly large amount that each character can carry on them. Custom crafting code allows characters to become tailors, smiths, bowyer/fletchers, ect. We have blademasters, wolfkin, dreamers, assassins, woodsmen, channelers of both sexes, and gosh..we have so much more now then when I started it's hard to keep up even for me. The newest areas added just the other day are the ruins of Malkier, The Braem Woods, and New Braem. A 600+ room Caemlyn is 99% ready to implement so players can look for that in the next month or so.

The combat system is really the best I have ever seen, weaponmasters can rise through all 8 levels of a weapon to become true blademasters. Other talents are more limited in how good they can become with a weapon, or what weapons they can master, my personal favorite talent is assassin, with skills like projectile catch, escape, shadow (combo sneak/hide/ with undetected 'follow') plus many more. Missile weapons are fully coded, smiths can forge heron marked blades once they have mastered weapon forge skills, I can go on and on. This MUD is the coolest I have ever played, and needs more dedicated players to really get the world in the shape it should be.

The skill system is unique, allowing characters to only learn skills and weaves from other characters, or buy them with character points.

If you are looking for a MUD that is in theme 100% with wheel of time, challenging, and a place you can call home: check us out, you won't regret it. The setting is pre-aiel war, about 20 years before the current stages in the books, where anything could happen in the future. Want to be a false dragon? A blademaster? A darkfriend? The possibilities are there for those with dedication. Log in and take a look around.

Alyn Lang - The Golden Hound