I am looking for experienced coders to work on building a Midkemia based mud from the ground up.

Experience with C and circlemud is necessary.

I am currently in correspondance with the license holders of the midkemia world, attempting to make this an officially sanctioned project, so please email me if you want to be a part this of exciting venture.

Sorry to tell you this, but Raymond E Feist does not allow people to use his work for creating muds. There was a post about this in May 2001 which quoted an email in which Mr Feist described his reasoning, but the short of it was that he has plans for licensing his work within commercial online games, and ignoring your mud would reduce his ability to profit from such ventures. I can reproduce the full email if you wish.

Here is Mr Feist's email:

thank KaVir, that sheds some light on the subject for me. Though, after reading that I still hold plenty of hope that my project will be approved, even if held on a tight leash.

Is anyone aware of the current state of Riftmush?

The world of Midkemia would make a wonderful setting for a mud, but you really should think carefully before going ahead with it, even if you do gain permission. Do you really want to put countless hours of time and effort into something that Mr Feist could turn around at any point and say "I'm creating a commercial mud now, so you're going to have to delete your work"?

This seems particularly a shame as you're building your game from the ground up, rather than deriving it from an existing codebase. Thus I would suggest that if you go ahead with this, you create the game engine in such a way that it has NOTHING to do with the world of Midkemia, and that the game world stuff is simply slotted in. That way if you suddenly lose permission to use the Midkemia setting, at least you don't lose all of your work.

I think the only people with permission to make games using the Midkemia theme right now would be Iron Realms Entertainment - unless that agreement with Feist has fallen through.

Brody is correct, and we would not permit anyone else to build a MUD based on Midkemia. RIFTMush, incidentally, is no longer operational and will not be coming back.

--matt

This is unfortunate for the mudding community and, IMO, short sighted on the part of the author.

It's unfortunate for the mudding community because the author's works will be limited to IRE's interpretation and implementation. I'm not saying the product will be inferior, but now the imagination and innovation applied to these works by third-parties will never be realized.

It's short-sighted of the author because, let's face it, the revenue stream generated by this text-mud enterprise isn't going to be significant - it's a niche market of a niche market of a niche market. Personally, I think it makes far more business sense to get broader exposure for his works through as many mud's as possible with the reasonable expectation that the exposure will translate in more sales of his publications.

The author need not forgoe his rights in doing so, simply by requiring and ensuring mud implementors have his permission. This is actually to his benefit as he can maintain some degree of quality control to protect his "brand".

Just my thoughts on this type of exclusive licensing.

The thing is, if it's a niche market of a niche market of a niche market (which it is) and thus won't generate much revenue for him because of the tiny size of the market, then letting people develop at will is going to be quite ineffective at exposing people to his publications, as it will reach only a relatively few people via said tiny market.

Anyway, it's his decision, of course, and he's in a better position to decide what's important to him and how he's likely to achieve that than we are.

--matt

I'll make a mud based on Midlukemia(sp?) just to spite you all. I bet you couldn't get me to take it down either.

How much you want to bet? I'll get a good european server and tell you to #### off and laugh while doing it. You people think you can stop this?! No one can stop this!

I hereby trademark the name "Midthievia"™ (no relation to Medthievia™) for use in the ironic debate about intellectual property rights that would follow.  I will grant the right to use it so long as the trailing ™ is included.

A Midkemia MUD running on stolen IP wouldn't be the first MUD in Europe that I've had shut down. They have laws and lawyers to assist in dealing with the laws there too you know!

--matt

Hahaha. You think you can shut me down? I'm going to put a midkemia mud up right now and start adding it to databases. I guess I should read the books.

Delerak should go out & get laid so he can take the huge chip off his shoulder!!