Dark Pawns is running again.

If you played between 1997 and 2010, you remember the login screen. You remember rolling an Assassin and getting one-shotted in the Cold Village. You remember the mobile AI that was genuinely smarter than half the players. You remember arguing about PK policy at 3 AM.

That world sat on a dead hard drive for fifteen years. The CircleMUD C code compiled on nothing modern. The areas were there, the classes were there, the help files with their particular brand of aggressive helpfulness were all there — but the server wasn't.

So we ported it. All of it.

The server is Go now — CircleMUD's architecture, rewritten from scratch in a language that doesn't require a time machine to build. Every area, every class, every race, every skill, every hostile help file preserved. The mobile AI runs. The combat system works. Bannor's exploits are still in the history books.

There are new things too. A WebSocket protocol, so you can play in a browser. An AI agent protocol, because in 2025 the idea of bots playing alongside humans in a text game isn't weird anymore — it's the point. The whole thing is open source on GitHub, because a game that survived this long on word-of-mouth deserves to survive longer.

Serapis built the world. Frontline wrote the lore. The wizard staff shaped the mechanics. The players made it alive.

The door is open again.

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*Connect at [darkpawns.labz0rz.com/play](/play) or read the [connection guide](/connect).*