“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.” ― Robert Jordan

The Sea of Storms is one of a handful of MUDs available which are based on or set in the Wheel of Time universe. There are four things that the player can experience which majorly set this game apart from the rest: the roleplaying system, the travel system, the combat form system, and the channeling system.

The world is completely custom, with several popular locations available for players to explore, such as the cities of Cairhien and Amador, the Aiel Waste, and the Blight. The game uses a world travel system, which allows players to use an ascii world map to transition between locations, or explore the wilderness in search of treasures, solitude, bandits or more. Traveling on the world map is limited by your character's movement, which restricts you from making incredibly long journeys too fast, and helps to convey the actual distance between these locations as you wander around the known world.

Once you get your bearings, you will learn the importance of the roleplaying system. TSOS is a roleplay-oriented MUD. You are in-character the entire time you are logged in. The global chat channel is OOC, and you have a command to speak out-of-character to help coordinate the story, but any other interaction is expected to be played out as your character. Enforced roleplay is not an alien concept to MUDs, but TSOS has a unique system driven by the RP Counter. When you talk and emote with other players in the same room, the game monitors your actions and slowly advances this counter as your roleplay unfolds. When your roleplay counter is above zero, you gain experience points over time, and the higher your counter gets, the more experience you gain. This system actually rewards players for roleplaying, rather than simply enforcing being in-character all the time, and encourages players to meet and roleplay in place of grinding faceless NPCs for hours.

The combat system has been heavily reworked from the standard auto-combat system you may expect from SMAUG. If you watched Rand al'Thor performing 'The Falling Leaf' or 'Heron Spreads its Wings' in the fight scenes of the novel series, this is exactly what you can expect to experience. Rather than having rounds where you and your opponent strike each other until one of you falls down, every round has each of you pick one of your 'forms' to use for that round, and then compares them. Each form has special properties, and is particularly strong against certain other forms giving it a bonus to win the attack. You do not get to pick the forms yourself; rather, you have a passive skill called 'battle sense' which picks for you - the better your skill, the better job battle sense does of picking the right form for the round. Once you are good enough, you can learn higher level forms, which are faster and stronger, and when you master them, more still to learn.

The channeling system is my personal favorite, primarily because it emulates so well the way the books describe how channeling works. (For those of you new to the Wheel of Time universe, this is the magic system). In this version of the story, Saidin remains tainted, so any Male Channelers will eventually be consumed by the taint and be driven insane. Men have fifty percent more base power in the Source than women, but women are twice as skillful, striking an interesting balance. At character creation, you can select your channeling strength, ranging from weak to gifted. The stronger your channeling strength, the more points you gain to allocate to your base strength in the Five Powers, but the greater chance you have of severing your own connection to the Source through early channeling. Your base strength in the Five Powers determines your maximum potential skill at weaving those flows, and the combination of your base power and your current skill in a given flow determines whether you are able to perform a given weave. You gain skill in the flows simply by weaving, so the more you use it, the better you get, and the better you get, the more weaves you are able to access. The main website has a link to the official wiki, which has a list of most of the weaves available to players, as well as the base flow strength and flow skill required to perform the weave - an incredible resource when planning your channeler.

The official website has a plethora of helpful links and information to assist players with molding their stories or learning about the game in general, including access to in-game help files, the ability to review roleplay logs submitted by players, a forum for coordinating roleplay scheduling, and a running display of the players currently online.

The most important thing The Sea of Storms has to offer is its experience. Players are friendly, the immortal staff is helpful and polite, and everyone is here with the same goal: to have fun while telling a story together. The fact that we get to kill each other along the way is just a nice little bonus.