iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Elanthe @avendar.net · 14/09/2026

we love being doomed by the narrative right folks

Elanthe @avendar.net · 13/09/2026

The Ruin of Velsk is now available to explore. Located on the border of Earendam and Sythtys, this mixed community of humans and srryn has been destroyed by recent conflict. The area features eight new bosses, new items, and more. The story is ongoing, so if you want in, now is a great time. :)

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ponder @ponder.ooo · 26/08/2026

for a lot of ppl ttrpgs are a proxy for actual socialization. but that's a horrible distortion of what they should be about. at their best ttrpgs are about making up a bunch of really fucked up guys and putting them in situations and laughing at them

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 11/08/2026

I still have to do a writeup about Sythrak dropping the flaming chair of the patrician into the middle of the patrician's palace but. I feel like everything went well, on the whole.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 10/08/2026

why choose when you can have both :v

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 09/08/2026

shunned storytelling so far is the art of making sure everyone gets exactly what they want and no one is happy about it

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 06/08/2026

Also, there's an article about all the lead up to this up! Should have part 2 (religion, culture, government) up tonight, but much of the history is finally written! avendar.net/Republic_of_...

avendar.net

Republic of Earendam - Avendar

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 06/08/2026

Big things happening lately! Sythtys has begun to make diplomatic overtures to Earendam, and Patrician Vhiona is stirring up the old guard by considering it. Earendam and Sythtys have been at war for millennia... so why now? Does Vhiona think she can get the srryn on board with a western expansion?

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 10/06/2026

we're bringing PK back in Avendar :) #MUD

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 16/05/2026

as posted in discord, in the new build we're introducing a new version of the practice system. instead of each lineage receiving a static number of practices, practices will cost money. the cost will scale on level and training tier. every skill has 3 tiers.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 10/05/2026

New house powers for Raiders and Merchants tonight. Will have more posted in Discord and in-game soon. :)

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 06/05/2026

recently tried a prototype NPC healer. the idea is to create a suite of NPCs for various roles to support groups of PCs where that role being missing more or less completely precludes doing some kinds of content. they are strong but not as good as hero-level PCs. gonna do some refinement soon.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 03/05/2026

we should have a working model of the new practice system soon. curious to see how people interact with it.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 03/05/2026

In the past I have attempted to remove my personal feelings from rules enforcement because that is what I thought fairness was but I think that I was wrong about that. if someone is being so consistently belligerent that our interactions with them are just poisoned, that itself is worth acting on.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 28/04/2026

GNU Terry Pratchett, whose words will echo long after we, and our children, and our children’s children have moved on thank you, as always, for making me a better person (quote from Reaper Man)

No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Middlebrow media enjoyers rise up. We want art with complex stories and emotional nuance featuring characters with interiority and yes we also want them to solve a murder or be a spy or kill a vampire or something

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 27/04/2026

Really want to finish the lineage lore books (aka bookman) for the school of heroes this week. shuddeni is probably the biggest lift remaining. "what did the shuddeni do before the war of night?" uhhhhhhh,

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 26/04/2026

It's a big #gamedev day with getting called bitchy by a player for attempting to explain design decisions he doesn't like. I will not be looking at prod or discord for a few days.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 23/04/2026

rapidly approaching the point at which I have to actually sit down and sketch out some fight specs and I Don't Wanna I know it won't actually take me that long now once I scrape it together but there's still plenty of manual work involved!

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 21/04/2026

at what point in a work do they cease being OCs and simply become Cs

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 20/04/2026

When I see a written description of a piece of art in a game and it is only about the subject of the art, with absolutely nothing about how the art itself looks, that's a poor description no matter how cool the subject was. It's like trying to read a novel with every third word blacked out.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 19/04/2026

I'm gonna work on a new guideline document for roleplay and plots. Feels like folks could benefit from guidance.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 18/04/2026

Finished the prototype of my shapeshifter mob that responds to natural language requests to transform into any lineage/gender combo. Most complex prog I've ever worked on by far and IT WORKS 🥳

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 10/04/2026

Engaging imagination in ways like this is why we still love MUDs.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 09/04/2026

LRP isn't totally true, I published three new articles today on the wiki

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꒰ᐢ..ᐢ꒱颖琦Gwyn @gravenmyth.com · 09/04/2026

it do be like this sometimes

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 08/04/2026

finally figuring out why a first gen dev structured his progs a certain way does not actually make those structures less annoying, as it turns out

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 04/04/2026

When a little riff that you play captures your own attention, you can easily sit for hours straight repeating it, refining it, building on it, trying variations of it, and before you know it it’s 3 AM. In my experience, it’s not even right to call this experience “enjoyable”. It’s something else.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 04/04/2026

jolinn. buddy. why are all the female NPCs you made redheads.

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kate @thegladdestthing.itch.io · 03/04/2026

there are altogether too many quotable paragraphs in this must-read article but i think i can restrain myself to just this one

a screenshot from the linked aftermath article below (A Game Doesn't Need to be 'By and for Fans' by Harper Jay MacIntyre) that reads:

Characters don’t deserve anything, and I don’t think fans do either. The goal of a story cannot simply be to satiate the hunger of fanatics or to smooth out the ripples of a world. Even the most indulgent self-insert fan fiction arguably operates on higher goals than this; the writer crafts the silly tale in order to address something in their soul. You don’t write to fix a story; it ideally addresses something inside us. You don’t write because fictional characters need it. You write because you need it. You do it because there’s something in you that needs to be said.

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Erika Chappell 🏳️‍⚧️ Stop Asking For STLs @opensketchbook.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

hypocrisy. characters feel at their most alive when they give advice they'd never follow, think one thing and do another, or display two contradictory beliefs without noticing. too many characters out there are *consistent* in a way humans aren't

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 01/04/2026

I've been annoyed about project tracking tools so much lately I am talking Alil info simply letting me build one in our engine instead not sure this is the kind of portfolio item people are talking about

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 01/04/2026

as it turns out when you train an agent on your scripting language you can make a lot of neat things very quickly

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 30/03/2026

Wrapping up the second draft of the magic documents today and honestly, the setting fiction really underlines the Iandir/Ashur/Jolinn relationship well. Iandir is just the operations officer forcing the HR and IT officers into a room together.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 28/03/2026

I have got to get some Frazetta prints for our house. Frazetta's art is distinct from the usual fantasy cheesecake imo from both a technical skill perspective and the fact that you can tell he really, genuinely loved how bodies really look. it comes through!

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 26/03/2026

first successfully generated are flat file. about 80% done with implementation of this at this point

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 19/03/2026

I should finish the design for the under-Ngahe encounter. Aspiring to do some really weird stuff with it. So much you can do with corridors of flesh.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 19/03/2026

So I'll be honest, and it brings me no pleasure to say this, but this applies to MUDs as well and I have no idea why or how to encourage players to actually read the things in a fully text-based medium. It is becoming a frankly baffling design barrier.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 13/03/2026

holy shit this is so cool!!

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 12/03/2026

okay I've been seeing a lot of videos lately about puzzle boxes and puzzle tables and shit I think I'm gonna make one. Yolsei-themed puzzle with like a dozen different solutions and prizes. why not!

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 09/03/2026

my goal is to never again launch a new area or challenge for players where I had to leave an idea I liked out because it wasn't worth the time or effort it would have taken to implement. more, better stuff for everyone.

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 06/03/2026

working on the magic codex today. most of this process has frankly been talking through all of the various lore things we've spent the last ~decade and compiling it into something that's readable (and hopefully interesting!) to other people

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brennan @brennan.computer · 03/03/2026

some of you have never shone a beam of light through a crystal on top of a staff at exactly the right moment of the sun's date and angle to reveal an ancient secret long buried in a forgotten tomb, and it shows

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 03/03/2026

as someone that recently dealt with a catastrophic database failure triggered by an update the ao3 situation makes me feel such sympathy and horror in equal measure

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 01/03/2026

gonna get me this setup for multiboxing MUD events

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 01/03/2026

an important part of my growth as a creator has been striking balance and telling the difference between "yeah I could totally do that if I applied myself" and "oh that is entirely beyond my skills now and maybe forever" #indiedev

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 01/03/2026

building out nested if statements because our progging language doesn't have an and operator. ah,

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 28/02/2026

currently reflecting on ways to convey size and space through text without relying on mechanisms I find frustrating in other games such as artificial time-gating that was really the primary means of creating space in old MUDs like DragonRealms: drop a 20 minute boat ride in the way

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Elanthe @avendar.net · 27/02/2026

having Arkhural, the shuddeni and therefore eyeless deity, whip out a pair of mirrored spectacles and put them on during a scene is maybe one of the funniest things I've ever done in this game to this day

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