Aardwolf is a great place to be
2025-10-10
This is a short review of the MUD Aardwolf, which is still going strong with 200+ players online during peak hours as of 2025. Created back in 1996, it is not the oldest MUD still around, but almost 30 years is still decent all things considered. It's similar to other MUDs based on DikuMud (popular codebase started back in 1991 and used by many), but today's incarnation seems to be fully custom made and contains and Lua engine for scripting (according to documentation).
The theme is fantasy and the setting is original and set in the world of Andolor. The website is not heavy on lore and focuses mostly on the geography of the game world.
I've so far played the game for around 10 hours, which is admittedly only scratching the surface, yet still enough to give a general impression of the MUD from a new player's perspective. So here goes. Any mistakes in the following are my own, and I didn't take notes while playing, so there is a chance that I got something wrong or misremembered something. Just so you now.
New player experience
If you have never played a MUD before, then there will be a learning curve. I highly recommend the official "Aardwolf MushClient" for desktop if you want an easier start, but it does take a bit away from the pure telnet experience where you have to know all the commands and set things up yourself. The desktop client is a more curated experience but a good one.
Creating a new character is easy enough. Pick you race, class, name, and so on and be on your way. You can easily spend an hour at least reading through all the options and consider what is most interesting to you, or you can do what I did and just pick something that looks interesting ("centauer druid" in my case). Except for modifiers in battle and a filter for the skills and spells you can learn, race and class doesn't effect much else in the game (as far as I can tell).
When entering the game, you are nudged towards the Academy which is a traditional "MUD School" for beginners. Many MUDs have those. Even though I'm not new to MUDs I decided to give it a go anyway, expecting to rush through it. Turns out, it's actually quiet long and goes over many parts of the game.
So it the Academy great for beginners? Maybe if you like to read. A lot. I didn't mind, but unfortunately, not all parts were interesting to me, and the way it is presented is lacking. Most early "classes" ends with a quiz, which is fun, but some of the later ones just ends. All classes have you listening to a NPC lecturer explaining some basics concepts in the game, like how to navigate or buy stuff from vendors. Or combat. Only two classes, I think, had you actually do stuff around in the world (one of the gave you a vendor shopping list and had you go around shopping), the rest were mostly focused on theory. I think it took me a few hours to go through it all, and there are certain requirements before you can "graduate", so you will have to go out in the world and do some tasks, before you can go back and finish your graduation.
The good thing about the academy is that you don't have to do it all at once. Feel free to explore and do some questing as soons as you feel up to it.
All in all the academy does a decent job at teaching you the game and where to find help, but it is tedious and feels like work. Luckily, the rest of the game is much more fun.
Gameplay
The gameplay will feel familiar to anyone who have played a modern MMO like Everquest or World of Warcraft. It has turn-based combat (that plays out in real-time), goals (quests that you can do), tasks (area specific quests, usually in the form of puzzles), spells, skills, trainers that teach you new skills and spells, vendors (where you can buy stuff), areas to explore, guilds to join, and many other gameplay mechanics.
The core gameplay loop of finding a level-appropriate area, explore the surroundings, kill stuff, solve the tasks, loot the corpses, etc. is quite fun. And there are many areas to explore.
I'm only level 22 currently, but I'm still breezing through the levels. Each level awards you with new skills and spells you can learn. It's doesn't feel grindy (yet), and I don't know if it will. It's fun so far.
There is supposely PVP as well, but I didn't look into it since it's not something I'm interested in.
Community
There are plenty of players at any time during the game, and there seems to be a small but steady influx of new players as well. Everyday someone new will ask and question in the dedicated newbie channel. It makes the game feel more alive than many other MUDs I've tried recently.
A funny episode played out while I was still doing the academy. Some new player kept asking questions that seems to be answered if you did the classes in the academy. That was pointed out repeatly by one of the newbie helpers, but the newbie refused to do the academy because they couldn't be bothered to read all that text. I chuckled at that. I thought it was a fair critisicm of the new player experience. Luckily many others were still very helpful and the newbie got their answers.
And if you hang around some of the hub areas of the game (like the one you end up in when you "recall"), you will see plenty of other players arriving and leaving. Occasionally they will hand out stuff or send protective spells in your direction. Neat.
Immersion
The game feels very immersive in that everything feels alive and stuff is happening all the time. The weather changes, NPCs will emote behaviours now and then, players will zip around and do stuff. Global announcement will be made when players reach certain milestones. Global auctions well be held. And so on.
Though if you leave the city of Aylor, I feel like the world is much more static. Maybe I just didn't stick around in the wilderness long enough. Also, while the outside world could technically be considered "open world" in the modern sense (think GTA or Breath of the Wild), all the interesting areas are in their own zones. The "overworld" or "wilderness" is mostly just a hub world for you to go search for all the interesting areas and "enter" them. Like the overworld map i Super Mario World.
Not only that, you don't even have to go exploring to find the areas. They are all nearly listed using the "area" command, and you can "runto" any areas using just it's name. It's fast travel made easy and accessable to everyone. The downside is that it takes away the immersion of finding stuff yourself. If you like to roleplay and pretend like I do, this makes the game feel more like an amusement park and less like an actual living world. But it does make playing the game much easier for new players that would otherwise get lost. Obviously I could also choose to simply play on "hard mode" meaning not using the "runto" command in the first place.
World building
As for the world itself, from what I've experienced so far, it doesn't have a lot of lore or history. Or maybe I just missed it. The geography is explained, the moons, weather patterns, etc. but that's it. It doesn't seems to have a coherent story that runs through the areas or any strong theme that binds it all together. It's more like a bit of everything thrown into the same game.
So if you want to feel like you are a part of Middle-earth, Faerûn, or any other rich fantasy world, this is not for you. This is more like a generic setting with a bit of everything.
The actual areas from what I have seen are well-written and immersive on their own, but the game overall just doesn't have any strong sense of any theme.
Conclusion
Overall I've enjoyed the game so far and will likely play it some more in the near future. It's fun and feels alive. As a text-based MUD it is quite enjoyable. As for a rich fantasy setting and for roleplaying, it's less interesting. The gameplay itself is quite standard hack 'n slash and questing, but in a fun way. It's definitely a good place to start if you are new to mudding and think you would enjoy an well put together fantasy RPG with other players around.