TL;DR : I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this MUD to anyone. What I can say is that the code is solid, a good amount of the players are generally agreeable - if not outright great - and the idea of the theme of the game is mildly interesting. If you absolutely have to give this MUD a try, my advice is this : stay the holy hell away from the imms and literally anyone who banters with them on the OOC channels or the Discord. Additionally, stay far, far away from any of the game's coded guilds, and the OOC channels within. You will save yourself a LOT of the grief that comes with this MUD.

Theme : The basic theme of TI:L is that of Order versus Mages. The Holy Order of Dav is placed on-grid and generally comprised of players that attempt to justify the decisions of the Holy Order in it's eternal fight against the forces of evil that are comprised of the Ruebus Manus, the Mages on-grid. The secondary theme of the MUD is that the Reeves of Lithmore are locked in a constant struggle against the Brotherhood of Common Goods, basically playing cops and robbers with one another until one takes a momentary victory and sits upon their laurels. All of this sounds really good. And it is - the theme of the MUD is great! There's even hidden and esoteric literature scattered around the game that will give you a deeper, darker understanding of the theme that others dance around and play with, and exploring these hidden tomes is absolutely worth it. The people that set up the theme to TI wrote an incredibly dark and compelling story, and it really does show when you examine it. Of course, you'll never examine it, you'll be berated for examining it, and the theme has largely been killed off by the GM's of the game. And by “largely killed off,” I mean “practically mutilated beyond repair.” Now, I've seen a lot of the past reviews get dismissed for 'trolling' for pointing this out, so let me explain. I listed what I viewed as the core gameplay of the MUD above. Order v Manus, Reeves v Thieves. The problem – right off the bat - is that the Manus has been shut down as a guild. No problem, just have it Order v Mages, right? No, that's mostly discouraged as well. As some of the other reviews have pointed out in detail, player-killing is met with a pretty enormous amount of suspicion, especially when it's done by the Holy Order. In fact, as previous reviews have pointed out, people have been thrown out of the Holy Order for doing this. I can very clearly recall two very recent cases, one that happened realistically not even a few months ago, as of this review. So, certainly, the other core gameplay of the game must be alive and well? Absolutely not. The Reeves have long been regarded as a joke with basically zero numbers, and the Thieves are basically in the same boat. Every now and again, for the last few years, there would be flashes of interesting RP between the two, but it's mostly just dead. I think that in the last two years, the best Reeve numbers I've seen has been four active ones, and the best Thief (Brotherhood) numbers I've seen were three or four. Now that you can't dual-guild (joining two guilds in order to infiltrate one for the other, or have a legitimate cover for being in places), the numbers are laughably low. To the point where I'm very surprised they haven't shut down every guild but the Merchants and the Order to give a modicum of story to stand behind, and just let everything be player-driven cliques. So, what do the players mostly do on TI? Honestly? They sit around in bars and talk about this and that. Sometimes the bar-sitting is broken up by some RP about business deals with the Merchants, sometimes they do training sessions – a few players have taken it upon themselves to actually provide RP to that note, and it's really great. But, realistically, what you'll be mostly doing on TI is just listening to people talk and sitting in bars. Unfortunately, the theme of the game is mostly dead, and it's pretty well-known among the playerbase that pointing this out is a one-way ticket to the social poopy list. I say it's unfortunate with a heavy heart, because I had the opportunity to talk to some older players, who willy-nilly explained the grit of the game to me, and the plot that happened before 2016-ish sounded absolutely incredible and deeply rewarding.

Players : By and large, the playerbase of TI is mid-range to excellent. Mostly what you'll wind up getting is players whom you generally enjoy interacting with, with their personal quirks that you end up getting to know very well, and eventually settle down with and RP with for hundreds of hours in your TI career. A (very) small portion of these players will inevitably leave a very positive out-of-character impression on you, and will go well above and beyond the call of duty for any MUD player to accommodate your RP style and help you out – even OOC'ly – with any problems you may come across. In the defense of TI, I've actually met some of the nicest and friendliest people that I know in real life on this game, and I've made some very real friends out of character. Of course, no good thing is without it's thorns, and TI absolutely has thorns when it comes to the playerbase. The “bad” of TI's playerbase is... I mean, it's bad. It's really bad. Bad to the point where there's a series of characters who single-handedly made a trope about luring young women into the public park, abducting them, and killing them in order to gain in-character power. It's exactly how it sounds. Or, in the case of players who were actually banned by the imms, going around with about zero in-character reasoning and just seeing how much out-of-character griefing you could get away with, such as killing player pets, randomly locking people in public rooms, or basically just going around and murder-hobo'ing people with little to no in-character reasoning. The best part of this situation is when you know it's them that's done it, and yet you have to sit and watch them at the weekly OOC meeting getting treated with a great deal of respect and out-of-character clout because they're promoting “antagonist RP,” and whining about how no one wants to RP with them. Often, these are the types of people who will often walk away from the keyboard and whine to the GM's once they're put into a situation where they're being griefed. What I will say is that on TI, you'll meet some of the best and the worst people that you've ever had the chance to MUD with. You only need to look at the official forums for a day to see clear evidence of that. But, with all good things must come bad things. My personal advice would be to stay the heck out of any and all out-of-character interaction until you're absolutely certain that the person on the other side of the screen isn't some raging narcissist who is attempting to lure you into their cult of personality so they can have more numbers to go around the MUD murdering people.

Upper Management : Other reviews have stated this in-depth, and I don't think that I really want to beat a dead horse horribly. What I will say is that there are four visible imms : Kinaed, Temi, Niamh, and Azarial. The only one I've even remotely gotten along with is Azarial, and they only handle coding. For all the rest, you need only go over the official forums to get a view of what's happening behind the scenes. I try not to interact with them at all, but from everything that I've been told that has been backed up with logs, they're absolutely god-awful. I'll try not to go on about it. So many other reviews have that you should absolutely get the point. In the group that I'm getting help from, however, the favorite quote from staff is this, “Theme is fluid.” A meme that, evidently, is pulled out so often one of them has something to say at the OOC meeting about how a plot/character/whatever makes absolutely no sense in the canon of the game that they've since been beaten down into giving up making any sense of the new lore of the game that the imms are building. I believe my personal “I'm uncomfortable with where this is going,” was the Monarch plot, which was posted about with a great deal of pride from the head admin. All the flavor text had the same bit : “To place the decision in player hands, The Inquisition: Legacy is running a plot event in which characters will take actions to sway the minds of the player and NPC nobility over the next several weeks. “ From everything that I've seen – and you can see, too! They've actually got a great mechanic where in-character event posts are posted to the forums. Every guildleader or important character has wholeheartedly supported the Queen. I've been informed by many people, though, that the Queen is getting absolutely decimated in the polls by NPC nobility which are – you guessed it – run by the staff. Every shred of evidence that I've seen has indicated that this is just a railroaded campaign with more steps, and yet the staff are shilling it, and shilling it hard across TMC, Reddit, etc as one of the best (and only?) staff-run plots they've done in an eternity. I don't know, I honestly don't. I try not to bother anyone with my RP, because, you know, it's mine. From every review I've read, though, and nearly every OOC source I've spoken to, people abhor these admins. Stay away and stick to the game itself, I suppose.