grenzland.club is a hobbyist project to run a shared UNIX-like computer for role playing games enthusiasts. It’s related, and currently also still connected to the Grenzland Discord Instance. It’s an old school thing for sure. If you remember how computers worked in the 1990s using grenzland.club should feel eerily familiar. It’s also a community thing. If you’ve ever heard of the tildeverse you’ll have an idea how grenzland.club works. It’s kind of a tilde system, too. We dig being excellent to each other. If you think all of this sounds awesome you’re welcome to sign up.
grenzland.club is open for new users. If we don’t know you, please send us some kind of reference about who you are, a homepage maybe, your handle on the Fediverse, something like that. Also, once you’re here, set up a tilde homepage. That’s part of the fun. Most importantly, join our games!
If this sounds good to you, the signing up procedure goes like this: generate a public ssh key and send it to ˜lkh, along with your preferred user handle.
˜lkh will get back to you with a password and notify you, when your key has been installed. From then on you should be able to log in. For a longer explanation, especially on how to generate that "ssh key" see below.
We use Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for public chat. That’s where discussion and sign-up to the games happens, mostly.
We have a Jabber/XMPP server with rooms bridged to our IRC server. Depending on your smartphone, that might be more convenient to use.
There is a Fediverse instance (snac2) for anybody who does not yet have an account on the fediverse. Or for anybody who needs a gaming alt.
We use net news for our forum. This includes a selection of gaming-related news groups from Usenet, the campaignwiki.* hierarchy and our own grenzland.club and grenzland.taverne newsgroups
There are mailing lists, gated to the newsgroups. Some people might not have a net news client and email clients are on every smartphone.
We also have a variety of rogue-like games and nethack in particular. Type "nethack -s all" for high scores!
Every user gets their own web space. Check out the list of user homepages online.
We also have a wiki for documentation. You need an account to edit it.
Every user has an email address in the @grenzland.club domain.
We mostly play classic D&D-like adventure games in short two hour slots on weekday nights (CET). Have a look at the Montag in Zürich Homepage to get an idea. We use Galène or Jitsi voice (and sometimes video) chat for the actual gaming.
Games are scheduled with norn the bot. It publishes a calendar. The same information is also available on IRC. Go to our IRC #welcome channel and type:
norn: games
to get a list of upcoming games. The entries given will usually indicate another IRC channel on which the game will be discussed. To join a game go to that channel and type:
norn: register
This will sign you up for the next upcoming game on that channel. If you have questions, just ask on one of the channels.
To generate your key you need access to a UNIX or Linux command line. Use the following command to generate a pair of keys:
ssh-keygen -f $HOME/.ssh/grenzland
It’s o.k. to just type enter when prompted for a password. As long as you trust the machine you’re using to connect to grenzland.club you don’t necessarily need a password.
When this is done you should find the following two files in your $HOME/.ssh: grenzland and grenzland.pub. The first is your private key. Don’t show it to anyone! The second is your public key. That’s the one you’ll want to mail to ˜lkh, for example like so:
cat .ssh/grenzland.pub | mail -s "my public key" lkh@grenzland.club
As I already mentioned in the introduction, this is a hobbyist project. Neither I (˜lkh) nor anyone in the staff group can be held accountable for whether the offered systems work for you or not. Proceed at your own risk and have a backup of your data.
While the basic system does not ask for any personal data, the services on this machine do collect connectivity data, times when you logged in and out and the IP from which you connected to grenzland.club. This is needed for security reasons, spam control and for the system to basically function as it should. Logging data is deleted at irregular intervals (i.e. whenever I remember to do it and I find the time ...).
We do not collect any data for commercial reasons. And anyone caught doing so using our services has no reason to be part of our community and will be banned for good and without a warning.
Generally, don’t piss in the beer, be decent humans, be nice to each other. If you find any reason to raise complaints about anything related to grenzland.club, please write to lkh@grenzland.club
start(1), oneliner(1), intro(1), wiki(1)
Have fun!
lkh