Welcome to the ancient land, where adventurers can live out their most incredible fantasies. Journey through a world where dreams are reality and the supernatural is natural. Enter a world of high fantasy, where dragons are real and adventure is everywhere you look.
Materia Magica contains a fantasy world, an alternate reality set apart from our own. It is a text-based, interactive multiplayer adventure game through which people from this world can escape the pressures of reality and live out their wildest fantasies. Alyria offers the amenities of the Earth you always wished for, a place where the sword and magic rule, a place of good and evil, of valiant deeds and dark sorceries. For an extensive list of features, see the Features section of this web site.
To get started playing the game, make sure you have read and comprehended the Adventurer's Guide before you go any further. It will greatly increase your knowledge of the basics of Materia Magica, and make the game a lot more fun. Ignorance may be bliss in some situations, but in the world of Alyria, the more you know about your surroundings, the better off you are.
Do you have a client to play the game? If you're not sure what a client is - it's a program that runs on your computer that allows you to connect to the game server over the Internet. Materia Magica is proud to provide the Moongate Client, a Java-based, cross-platform applet that can be run from any browser that supports Java 1.5 or greater. The Moongate Client is designed specifically for Materia Magica and has lots of great features. However, if you have a particular MUD client you enjoy using more, feel free! There's a list of recommended clients for your particular operating system or platform on the Client Links page.
Any questions so far? You should read the Frequently-Asked Questions section of this web site. The FAQ contains most of the commonly-asked questions by beginning adventurers. Reading it will increase your knowledge of some general computing terms and ideas, as well as making it easier to understand how everything works, so you've got nothing to lose.
If you're using a client that supports MSP and/or MXP (such as Portal or ZMUD), Materia Magica offers in-game sound effects - hear a fireball roar, or a shield deflect an attack. To hear sounds, you will need to download and uncompress the following "sound packs", which contain the sounds that the game will reference during play. More information on sound effects, including how to download and install them, can be found in the Portal or ZMUD FAQs found in the Technical Support section of this website.
So now you have your client (or plan on using the Moongate Client), you've read over the rest of the site, and gotten a general feel for the game. If you aren't using the Moongate Client, you will need to enter (at the very least) the hostname (or IP address for the hostname) and port number. The hostname is, of course, materiamagica.com, and the IP address for that is 66.219.44.166. You'll probably need to enter one or the other, not both. The port number for Materia Magica is 4000. If you're using a telnet client, the default port is usually 23 - you'll want to change this to 4000. For those of you behind firewalls (you will probably know if you are or not) you can connect to port 23 (the standard telnet port). Materia Magica also accepts connections on ports 6666, 8000, and 9000.
If you are ready to play right now and want to use the Moongate Client, click here (or the Play Now! link on the left navigation bar) to proceed.
For the rest of you, you should now have enough information to play Materia Magica. Happy adventuring!
