Codex of Conquest

A MUD that rolls in the open

A MUD is a multi-user dungeon — the text games people played over terminals before graphics, where a room is a paragraph, movement is a compass direction, and the world is described rather than drawn.

Codex of Conquest is one of those, with the dice showing. You read a room, choose a verb, and walk somewhere. When something is uncertain, the game rolls a d20 and shows you the whole sum — the die, the modifier, the DC, the outcome — the way someone running a game at a table would say it out loud.

Classic tabletop mechanics, kept in plain sight: armour class, initiative, advantage and disadvantage, criticals on a natural 20, damage dice by weapon, six ability scores. What it does not do is hide any of it behind an animation.

You play one Human Fighter Champion, level 1 to 20, crossing a continent alone. You are frequently the hired help in someone else’s story — and the game is honest about that. You witness more than you command.

Three ways in, none an installer

The whole game is one HTML file. Nothing to build, nobody to sign up with, and no dependency tree to audit before you can read the code.

Play it now

The copy on this site is the current build. Open play.html and you are in. Saves live in your browser’s localStorage — nothing is uploaded, nothing phones home.

Take the file

Roughly 5.5 MB, and yours forever:

# just the game — playable offline, for good
curl -L -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vonglurt/codexofconquest/main/play.html
open play.html

# or the whole project
curl -L https://github.com/vonglurt/codexofconquest/archive/refs/heads/main.zip -o codexofconquest.zip

Tagged builds land on the releases page. There is no artefact to choose between — the tag is the file.

Clone and run the tools

git clone https://github.com/vonglurt/codexofconquest.git
cd codexofconquest
make install        # restores src/node_modules
make                # lists every target
make play           # API + monitor, opens the game
make edit           # the world editor
make check          # the full gate chain
make test           # 960 Playwright tests

The node project lives in src/, not the repo root — src/NODE.md explains why, and how to run npm directly.

A journal that stops mid-page

The courier’s name was Froberger. His journal is found early and read in fragments — seventeen entries, five of them read aloud at particular places in the world. Entry 41 is the last. He stopped writing in the middle of the page, and the blank line beneath it is not an accident.

The theme is the curse of knowledge: once you understand something, you can no longer remember what it was like not to. Froberger saw the Void clearly and tried telling people. They could not hear it. So he stopped telling and started fixing, and became the only one who could do what needed doing — and that, not anything with teeth, is what destroyed him.

In New Game+, you write Entry 42. There are four endings; one names every person you helped, by name. One does not.

The editor ships with it

edit.html is a visual world builder — nodes, terrains, monsters, quests, NPCs and mission bits, the flags the game reads to know what has already happened. Point it at the local API and you can add a town, wire a road, write a quest chain and watch it appear in the running game.

A set of CI gates then checks the world for dead links, unreachable nodes, duplicate keys and quests that can never complete — because content that cannot be reached is the failure mode this project keeps finding.

Take it apart

Codex of Conquest is MIT licensed — not source-available, actually MIT. Copy it, change it, sell it, ship your own world on it.

Good first contributions

• Write a quest arc. The format is documented and the editor is visual — you never touch the engine.
• Add a region. Nodes, terrains and roads are data; the map solver lays them out.
• Balance something. Monster tiers, drop rates and the XP curve are all tables.
• Take a backlog row. Open work sits in six phase backlogs, each row written with its evidence and its grep-to-disprove.

Read CONTRIBUTING.md first — it carries the working rules, including the existing-work-first policy that has saved several rewrites of work already shipped.