Legend of the Green Dragon

Legend of the Green Dragon is a humorous text-based multi-player fantasy CRPG. It is a WWW-based implementation and homage to the classic BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon. Originally written by Eric "MightyE" Stevens, the copyright now contains both his and JT Traub's names.

Game days
Game primarily progresses on daily basis. There are limits on how much combat can be done in each game day. There are usually one or more game days in a real-world day; the primary lotgd.net server, for example, has two game days for every real-world day. All dead characters get resurrected at the beginning of the day.

Characters
The player starts by creating a character. Characters can be male or female (which only affects the level titles, and marrying), and players can pick a race, which somewhat affects the abilities. Typical fantasy races (humans, dwarves and elves) are represented, as are some untypical ones (felynes and storm giants).

Instead of character class, the game has different specializations - Dark Arts, Mystical Powers, and Thieving Skills - which determine what abilities the "use points" the characters collect over time give.

Combat
The basic idea of the game is to gather experience, gold, and gems. This is done either by going to the forests and killing various monsters, or by fighting other players. After the character has gathered enough experience points, he/she must fight the trainer in home village to advance to next experience level.

The monster combat is done in forests around home town. Characters can look for monsters that are of same character level than themselves, or go slumming (looking for easier monsters) or thrillseeking (looking for difficult monsters), which will give an appropriate bonus or penalty to gained XP.

player versus player combat is very integral part of the game, though it is not necessary to participate in it. If a character logs out, he or she goes sleeping on the fields, where anyone logged on can attack him/her. It is possible to go in a well-guarded inn for a night, which helps things somewhat, but even that won't save the character from PvP combat completely.

The combat system itself is turn-based. The combat itself is very simple, the only options available are fighting, using special abilities, or fleeing. There is also automated combat.

Dying in combat, or for other reasons, is not particularly harmful; an experience point penalty and loss of held gold is all that happens. The dead characters get resurrected in the beginning of the day, but resurrection can also be granted earlier by Ramius, the overlord of the dead.

Equipment and special abilities
Aside of experience points, combating gives gold coins and gems. Gold is usually spent on better equipment. Gems can be used on various special things. Primarily, gems are used to buy mounts or familiars, which will fight by character's side for a part of the day. Gems can also be used to purchase various potions, or spent on certain special events.

Goal and secrets
The goal of the game is to fight the green dragon that is terrorizing the land. However, what happens after that is one of the best-kept secrets of the game - though people who play the game can usually guess that earlier.

A large part of the game doesn't have any kind of obvious documentation, and other players tend to refuse telling "game secrets" to other players. Part of the joy of the game is to discover various things, since generally, nothing that happens in the game has any sort of permanent damage - though it may have a long-lasting good effect.

Implementation and extensibility
The game is implemented in PHP, and developed by contributors under a Creative Commons License. Formerly (in versions 0.9.7 and earlier), the game was distributed under GNU General Public License, but the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license was chosen for 0.9.8 and later, due to GPL's (admitted) inadequacy to cover web-based software to necessary extent.

There is an active development community at DragonPrime.net. The game supports an extensive moduling system which enables developers to significantly extend base functionality with out need to modify core code. Thus modules can be distributed to other users given they have a version of the game installed which is at least as recent as that under which the module was developed. Modules can be turned on and off within an administrative interface in the game.

Characters

 * MightyE the weapons merchant
 * Pegasus the armoress
 * Foilwench the sage
 * Bluspring the trainer
 * Ramius overlord of death
 * Elessa the banker
 * Seth the bard
 * Violet the bar maid
 * Cedrik the bar keep
 * Merick the stable keeper