Well, MUD means Multi-User Dimension - and that means that when you enter a MUD you create your digital image of a character that represents your beliefes and basicly you do what you want with your characteristics. For example, let's take my favorite MUD - ROM (Rivers Of Mud). If you meet me there, you can recognize me. I'm Solaris the Elf, Mage in proffesion. Those detailes in addition to my level (or rank) anyone can see easily by typing "who". I also can tell tou I worship Gandorian, the god of all that is good, and my hometown is New Thalos. My objective is getting to higher levels, thus gaining power and abilities. ALong the way I interact with others, go through MUD School to better my abilities and gain new ones. In combat, my victory depends on my abilities and the monster's strength and characteristics. If I win, I take whatever was the monster's and make it a part of my equipment list or inventory and then, if I'm hungry i'll eat the severed parts of the corpse, if there are any, and if not i'll sacrifice the corpse to my god right away (i get silver rewards). If I lose the battle, i lose experience points and all my belongings stay with my corpse. I wake up in The Temple Of Mota in Midgaard, where i regain my strength and go back to my place of death to collect my stuff back. Besides all that, I can roam around Midgaard and beyond, searching for adventures. All kinds of quests can be found easily by reading the notes left by IMMs (IMMortals) or Mortals, and they offer rewards to get things done.

 You can play MUDs on the simple interface of Telnet (don't worry, you already have it by default), or by a MUD client. Oh! One last thing! don't forget to read the RULES, and the notes, changes, articles and news are important too! Now that that's over, let's go to choose a MUD client. This is the best MUD client i've ever seen. It's intuitively designed, feature packed and very efficient. GMud packs tons of options - a list of worlds which you create connects you quickly to your desired world, and this is especially important for people who live in quite a few worlds. You don't have to remeber any address or port name - everything is preset by you. Most MUDs are in color, which you can't see on Telnet. Most of the MUDs have text pictures and tables created for Telnet's fixed width font, and the effect get lost in ordinary variable width font, the text pictures get scrambled and the tables become a mess. In the font option of GMud, choose "fixedsys" with 9 points' size - this will solve the problem.
For you lazy people out there, there's the ability to create Aliases, Macros and Triggers that will take care of your poor tired fingers and shorten the time it takes to type the commands. Line wrapping options are really better than Telnet's: On Telnet and others, the wrapping is by character and by a fixed number of columns, which means that not all your screen space is used and words get cut in the middle if they're at the end of a line. On GMud, you can let it stay this way if that's what you want, but if cut words and space misusing aren't your cup of tea, you can easily change the situation.
Other options are command stacking (you can send multiple commands all at once) and speedwalk (lets you specify directionals all at once) which make living in MUDs  just a bit easier. The menus and tool bars are floating/dockable, which makes them wonderful to use. I just put the main toolbar on the top and the others on the left. It just feels great.
 
 

Get GMud now! You can download a '95 version of GMud, or check out its FTP homepage.

My favorite MUD is ROM (Rivers Of Mud) and it exists on rom.cmc.net at port 9000. Get there and start your quest for higher levels! After you download GMud you can input this data and get on your way. For other MUDs you can try Yahoo (search fo "mud") - you get very good results. You might get to Drasan: The Other Side Of The Mirror (drasan.mudservices.com at port 4242) which is cool too but less friendly. BTW, you'd wanna go to the ROM Resource Page, created by Stardeo. It has many things to offer.