About This Game

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.

Free and open source under the GPL. No microtransactions, no subscriptions, no catch.

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 more than a hundred and fifty 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

A hundred 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

More than a hundred and 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. Every one of them runs on a goal-driven brain, and many of them now have a painted portrait to put a face to the name.

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

Five 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.

Your own death works the same way. Run out of lives and the character is gone for good. But the Hall of the Fallen keeps their name where anyone can read it, and whoever you roll next inherits what they earned. Nothing here is undone. It is just carried forward.

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

Nearly eighty 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)

Playable in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian. Not a partial translation: the interface, the dialogue, the quests, and the combat all speak your language

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

Free forever, open source under GPL v2. The source, the issue tracker, and the roadmap are all public, and half of what ships began as a player report.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Language localizations (Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian) are AI translated
until a human translator can make edits. English is the original language and is
human written. Corrections from players and human translators are folded in as
they arrive.

AI coding tools such as Claude Code were used during development for code
specific tasks. All of it is ordinary game code, reviewed and compiled into the
shipped build.

Some of the achievement icons were generated with AI image tools.

All in-game ASCII and ANSI artwork is human made...sometimes poorly :)

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Sexual Content

The game includes consensual romance and intimacy between adults. Sexual encounters are described through text only—there are no images or animations. Scenes depict foreplay, sensuality, and implied sexual acts using suggestive but non-explicit language. A "Skip Intimate Scenes" option in game preferences replaces all detailed content with a brief "fade to black" summary.

There is no depiction of sexual assault, non-consensual sex, or sexual content involving minors. All romantic and intimate interactions are between consenting adult characters.

The game includes marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth as gameplay mechanics. Children in the game are never involved in any sexual or romantic content.

Violence

Combat is turn-based and described through text. Descriptions include blood, wounds, and death. Characters—including player companions—can die permanently. The game explores themes of grief, loss, and mourning when companions fall.

Players can attack and kill NPCs. Some NPCs may betray or attack the player. Violence is a core gameplay mechanic but is not glorified or gratuitous.

Other Mature Themes

Alcohol: The Inn serves drinks; characters can become intoxicated
Gambling: Casino-style gambling mechanics are present
Religion: The game features fictional gods, some of whom are portrayed as corrupted or morally ambiguous
Existential themes: The narrative explores identity crisis, cycles of suffering, and philosophical questions about reality
Moral ambiguity: Some choices present ethical dilemmas with no clear right answer
Permanent loss: Companion death is final and the game explores the emotional impact