I have created a DND story delivered through DNS – TXT record lookups.

The idea came to me when I was fiddling around with ZORK in an emulator. Today, the emulators are too fast for how the game really was meant to be played. You were supposed to have the giddy-ness of play, and await the response to your input as the command ran over the wire to the Phoenix mainframe on the other side of the American continent processed it and returned either a step forward or an error that it did not understand. It was meant to be a little challenging and you had to create the log of what you had on you and how the world looked and it’s obstacles. There was no mini map, inventory screen or quest tracker – it was only you.

The start of the game is simple. Start with running a txt DNS request to start.marcosoft.no. You can do this using nslookup on windows or dig on linux and mac. Below is a abbreviated view of how it looks:

dig start.marcosoft.no txt

---- snipped for brevity ---

start.marcosoft.no.	3600	IN	TXT	"In a realm where the sun kissed the earth with a golden hue, and the stars whispered secrets to those who would listen, there was a kingdom known as Eldoria, home of sir Cedric. It was a land of enchantment, where magic flowed as freely as the rivers an" "d where every creature, from the mightiest dragon to the smallest field mouse, lived in harmony"

From here there is a structural thing you need to know: The story is single word references <word>.marcosoft.no and if you want to know more about anything it is a subdomain <word>.<word>.marcosoft.no. This allows you to explore more information about each of the characters, the country and more! In total there are 89 references to find!

The game is not easy to scrape as it is locked to different sub-domains and sub-sub-domains, making it difficult for the DNS scrapers like dnsdumpster to scrape and present in a coherent way.

Hope you have enjoyed this fun little idea I had. Thanks!

Do not read if you don’t want the answers – STOP HERE

Not everybody wants to work for it and some just want to read the story. Especially if they have been playing with it for a while, and have given up. I understand. So below, you’ll find the PDF covering every single one of the subdomains. You will not however, find the letter here. The letter is linked in the bottom of this page.

The letter can be located at: letter