Dark Pawns is a fantasy MUD that first opened in September 1994, built on CircleMUD 3.0 in the DikuMUD lineage. It ran, it closed, and the world survived. This project is its resurrection: the original zones, mobs, and quirks preserved as they were, with the server faithfully rewritten in Go and checked behavior-by-behavior against the original C code.

It is a classic hack and slash world: explore, fight, gear up, and level, alone or with whoever else wanders in. Play instantly in your browser at darkpawns.org, or connect with any MUD client (Mudlet, Tintin++, your terminal) at darkpawns.org port 7777, TLS on 7778.

Dark Pawns is free, open source, and self-hostable: one command installs your own instance. Builders get modern tooling, including a web-based online creation editor for crafting new areas in the original world format.