SinaiMUCK is an online role-playing environment maintained by
Conrad "Lynx" Wong. "MUCKs" are text-based
role-play environments, frequently allowing its "players" the freedom to create new areas
for other players to explore. Sinai is a bit different from the norm in that respect:
it's not so much a "build-and-explore" environment, as it is a sort of "virtual table-top"
for a small number of gamers to gather together and take part in various role-play
campaigns. Thanks to the innovations of Paul "Boingdragon" Osze, the original MUCK code has been expanded to better facilitate our
style of play - with recording and filtering programs known as "cambots" used to capture
logs of our sessions - and to make it easy to post them to the web site for later
reference.
The original setting on SinaiMUCK was the world of "Sinai", a world where magic and
technology both exist (the latter to a limited extent), and populated by a number of
intelligent species - including humans, aliens, and bioengineered (or magically constructed) beings. Many campaigns have run on "Sinai" for years, several of them focused on trying to
discover some of the mysteries behind Sinai's creation, and the fate of the lost
civilization whose ruins dot the planet.
For several years, I was active on Sinai as a GM ("gamemaster" or "referee") for many of
the plots, sometimes going so far as to have multiple "session windows" open so I could
run multiple sessions at once. (One of the neat tricks about online text-based role-play is
that, since all your players aren't gathered together at a table, you can easily handle
situations where you want to separate the players, so that there's a certain element of
mystery and perhaps even some rivalry that can be maintained.)
As of this writing, I'm not quite so active anymore. While some campaigns are still run in the original "Sinai" setting, many of the adventures there take place in other worlds entirely. We ran a "Mutant Chronicles" campaign for a while, had an abortive attempt at an online "Deadlands" campaign, and had a horror-mystery plot that would probably be best classified as "Twilight Zone Role-Play" for lack of any specific RPG system to put it in.
Activity varies, but most of the time it's a pretty quiet place insofar as MUCKs go. If you'd like to check out some of the logs (or some really old role-play-related art) of the Sinai campaigns - or perhaps check some of the other campaigns that have been run there - you just might find something interesting on Boingdragon's SinaiMUCK site.
