Usurper Reborn

Usurper Reborn is a turn-based, text-based dungeon crawler that you can play alone or in a shared persistent online world. You awaken without your memory in a medieval realm of monsters, magic and scheming NPCs. You can descend through a hundred dungeon floors, build alliances, start a family and investigate what happened to the old gods—or try to take their place. The game remakes Jakob Dangarden’s 1993 BBS door game, expanding it with narrative systems, autonomous NPCs and a persistent world.

Descend through the dungeon

The dungeon has eight visually and thematically distinct zones, with threats ranging from rats and bandits to the gods who made the world. Turn-based combat offers moves such as backstabbing, power attacks, taunting, disarming, hiding, poisoning your blade, raging and fleeing. You can learn a hundred spells across eight traditions, as well as class abilities 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 add to your descent. You can take up to four companions or hired NPCs into the dungeon, with a fifth party slot for a tamed combat beast.

Live in the world

More than 150 NPCs pursue their own lives whether you are online or not. They trade, fight, marry, have affairs, raise children, age and die. They can remember you, hold grudges, fall in love, betray one another and try to kill you in the street. Each NPC follows a goal-driven system, and many have painted portraits.

You can join one of three factions: the Crown, the Shadows or the Faith. Each has its own perks, rivalries and secrets. You can also become King, manage the treasury, hire guards and navigate court intrigue, or improve your home with better beds, herb gardens, a study and servants who collect a daily stipend. Plagues, festivals and wars affect the world, while founding a guild lets members pool resources and gain a passive XP bonus.

Explore the wilderness

Four wilderness regions each have their own creatures, atmosphere and shrine to one of the surviving Old Gods. A daily pilgrimage attunes you to a shrine and grants a passive benefit, such as regeneration, melee force, critical-hit and backstab bonuses, holy proc damage or NPC charisma. Each god has an alignment cost that stays with you.

You can tame eight kinds of beasts found across the regions, including forest hawks, storm eagles, bog wisps and cave spiders. Each provides a different passive bonus. Keep a roster of up to eight and rotate one into your active slot; combat-role pets fight in the dungeon as a fifth party member and cannot permanently die.

Face lasting consequences

Five recruitable allies have their own personalities, equipment and personal questlines. They talk between rooms, argue about your choices, can get sick and fall in love, and can be equipped and trained as they level up alongside you. If an ally dies, they cannot be resurrected; their loss follows you into later combat.

Your character also has a limited number of lives. If you run out, that character is gone for good. The Hall of the Fallen records their name, and your next character inherits what they earned.

Uncover the old gods

Seven ancient seals lie hidden in the depths, each tied to a memory the world has tried to forget. The seven Old Gods are bound to their own tragedies, and each can be fought but not necessarily killed. Your dialogue choices in these encounters matter, as do the artifacts you collect, which affect how the next god receives you. Some gods can be saved.

Five endings depend on your alignment, alliances and what you uncover. New Game Plus carries endings forward as unlocks and opens five prestige classes that change how you build your character.

Play online together

In the shared server, you can form groups with other players and explore dungeons cooperatively. Each player controls their own character during turn-based combat. World Bosses appear periodically and take multiple players to defeat; your share of the loot depends on your damage contribution.

The online world also includes a PvP Arena, Knight tournaments, Gauntlet champions and castle sieges. Players can chat in real time through private messages, shouts and guild channels, with a Discord bridge that keeps conversations going while you are logged out. You can watch other players in spectator mode, and take part in an economy where players and NPCs trade, employ one another and sometimes rob one another.

Shape your character

Choose from ten races and seventeen classes: twelve base classes and five prestige classes unlocked through endings. Stats affect play in specific ways: Charisma changes prices, Constitution resists poison, and Wisdom reveals secrets others may miss.

The game also has shops, banking, gambling, thievery, bounty contracts, weapon reforging and enchantment crafting. It includes nearly eighty achievements, character titles you can select after earning them, and ANSI art portraits during character creation.

Choose how to play

The full campaign can be played offline or as part of the shared online world. Four difficulty modes range from Easy to Nightmare, which features permadeath, no resurrection and no second chances. You can adjust combat speed for faster or slower reading, and the game supports screen readers.

You can play in the bundled desktop terminal, a web browser, through SSH, with a MUD client or as a BBS door. The game is open source under GPL v2.