I played Armageddon once. It kicked my ass.
It's pretty damn hardcore... I'm usually up for a challenge, but it was a bit much. Anyway, just for posterity, here's how I recall it.
Chargen - long, but for the right reasons. You need all your descriptions and BG and that up front, and have to wait a while to get authenticated. It means you don't get any non-descript randoms wandering about asking for a spellup, but since char death is quick and oh so permanent it has the potential to get a bit long in the tooth for the less patient.
Newbdom - You get authed and chucked into the city without much to-do. The commands aren't particularly cryptic, so if you've played a mud before it shouldn't be too hard to get into. I wandered around a bit with my thief character, spent my meagre starting cash on a hooded cloak to go all incognito-like and tried out a few of my skills, mostly by means of failing to climb up walls and succeeding in hurting myself.
One point worth mentioning is that, on descriptions alone, it's nigh impossible to tell a PC from an NPC - another quirk that works both ways, in that you never know who's about, but also you never know if anyone's about at all. After trying to chat up a few mobs and getting the cold shoulder, I decided to try robbing one. I failed.
There was a fairly amusing chase scene as the mob shouted for the guards, the guards ran in, I ran off, the guards followed me, I tried to climb a wall to make my rooftop escape, failed, fell down, hurt myself and got arrested.
So there's me in jail. I light my torch and play with the cockroaches for a while, then my torch goes out and I sit by myself in pitch black for a while. This part wasn't so fun.
Eventually a religious official of some description comes in, flanked by a few guard mobs. He questions me a bit and some RP occurs. He found my banter amusing, so after knocking me about for a bit he forcibly escorts me to the gates, gets one of his guards to give me a sword and exiles me into the desert.
Then I wander down a path and get thoroughly killed by some beasty I can't quite remember. Some sort of giant beetle I think. And that was that. I think from submitting my sheet to feeding a monster took maybe 3 or 4 hours, though a fair amount of that spent waiting to be authed or sitting alone in a dark jail cell while surfing the web in another window.
I wanted to roll another char, but had stuff to do so I decided to put it off and never got around to it. Don't mud much any more, and if I ever got back into it I'd probably pick somewhere a little less intense. But I'd say it's definately worth checking out, at least once.
If that sounds good, but you're of a more sci-fi bent, I'd might also suggest Otherspace (
http://os.jointhesaga.com/). Same strict chargen process, intensive RP, bigass story arcs etc. I tried it briefly and found the command system infuriating beyond measure, so never got to the point where I could comment on whether it's actually fun or not, but it looked pretty good from the logs and whatnot.
