Usurper Reborn

Rise from nothing. Become everything. Or lose yourself trying.

Usurper Reborn is a text-based dungeon crawler you can play alone or in a shared persistent online world. You wake with no memory in a medieval realm of monsters, magic, and scheming NPCs. From there it's up to you. Descend a hundred floors. Build alliances. Start a family. Uncover what really happened to the old gods, or take their place.

A faithful remake of the cult classic 1993 BBS door game by Jakob Dangarden, expanded with deep narrative systems, a fully simulated town of autonomous NPCs, and a persistent online world. Play in the bundled desktop terminal, your web browser, any MUD client, or dial in from a BBS the way you used to.

What is this game?

A turn-based RPG that runs entirely in text. No graphics, just choices and your imagination. Play it solo as a single-player campaign, or join the shared online server where dozens of NPCs and other players already live. If you grew up on classic roguelikes, MUDs, or BBS doors, you'll recognize the shape of it immediately.

A Hundred Floors Down

• Eight visually and thematically distinct dungeon zones, scaling from rats and bandits to the gods that made the world

• Combat that actually wants you to think: backstab, power attack, taunt, disarm, hide, coat your blade with poison, rage out, run away

• Hundreds of spells across eight casting traditions, from sun-priest exorcisms to abyssal voidstrikes

• Class abilities for every build, including healing auras, blade chains, totem-summoning, and reality-bending prestige techniques

• Secret rooms, lore fragments, riddle gates, lever puzzles, and bosses who remember you between encounters

• Bring up to four companions or hired NPCs into the dungeon, with a fifth slot for tamed combat beasts

The World Lives Without You

Over fifty NPCs go about their own lives whether you're online or not. They trade, fight, marry, have affairs, raise children, age, and eventually die. They remember who you are, hold grudges, fall in love, betray each other, and occasionally try to kill you in the street.

• Three factions to join. The Crown, the Shadows, and the Faith each have their own perks, rivalries, and grimy secrets

• Become King. Run the treasury, hire guards, navigate court intrigue, and try not to get knifed in your sleep

• Upgrade your home with better beds, herb gardens, a study, and servants who collect a daily stipend

• World events that affect everyone: plagues drive NPCs indoors, festivals draw them out, wars rally them to your side or against it

• Found a guild, pool resources, and reap a passive XP bonus while you're at it

The Wilderness Reborn

Outside the dungeon, four wilderness regions wait to be explored. Each has its own creatures, its own atmosphere, and its own shrine to one of the surviving Old Gods.

• Make a daily pilgrimage to attune yourself to a shrine. Each god grants a different passive: regeneration, melee force, crit and backstab bonuses, holy proc damage, NPC charisma. Pick your patron carefully, since their alignment cost will follow you

• Tame wild beasts. Eight unique creatures distributed across the regions, from forest hawks and storm eagles to bog wisps and cave spiders. Each one offers a different passive bonus

• Build a roster of up to eight tamed beasts and rotate one into your active slot. Combat-role pets fight beside you in the dungeon as a full fifth party member, and they can't permadie

Companions Who Can Die

Four recruitable allies, each with their own personality, equipment, and personal questline. They speak between rooms, argue about your choices, get sick, fall in love. You equip them, train them, and they level up with you.

And when they fall, that's it. There is no resurrection, no respec, no quietly forgetting they existed. Grief follows you into combat afterward, and the game knows.

A Story Worth Uncovering

Seven ancient seals hidden in the depths, each one a piece of a memory the world has tried to forget. Seven Old Gods bound to their own tragedies, each one fightable but not necessarily killable. The dialogue choices you make in those fights matter. The artifacts you collect change how the next god receives you. Some of them can be saved.

Five endings shaped by your alignment, your alliances, and what you understood along the way. New Game Plus carries forward your endings as unlocks, and opens five prestige classes that twist your character build into something strange.

There's a question underneath all of it. I won't spoil what.

The Online Server

Connect to the shared server (or run your own) and the game becomes something else.

• Form groups with other players and run dungeons cooperatively, with everyone controlling their own character in turn-based combat

• World Bosses spawn periodically and need multiple players to defeat. Damage contribution determines your share of the loot

• PvP Arena. Knight tournaments. Gauntlet champions. Castle sieges

• Real-time chat with private messages, shouts, guild channels, and a Discord bridge so the conversation keeps going when you log off

• Spectator mode if you want to watch someone else play

• A living economy where both players and NPCs trade, employ each other, and occasionally rob each other blind

Build Your Legend

• Ten races and seventeen classes (twelve base, five prestige unlocked through endings)

• Stats that mean something. Charisma actually affects prices. Constitution actually resists poison. Wisdom finds secrets nobody else can see

• A full economy: shops, banking, gambling, thievery, bounty contracts, weapon reforging, enchantment crafting

• Dozens of achievements, character titles you can pick from after earning them, and ANSI art portraits during character creation

Play Your Way

• Full single-player campaign that runs entirely offline

• Four difficulty modes from Easy to Nightmare (permadeath, no resurrection, no second chances)

• Adjustable combat speed for fast or slow readers

• Screen reader friendly. I'm constantly working to make accessibility better, and I take feedback seriously

• Autosave and manual save slots

• Connect to the online world whenever you're ready, with the same character you've been playing offline

• Also playable from your web browser, over SSH, through any MUD client (Mudlet, TinTin++, MUSHclient), or as a classic BBS door