http://www.lotgd.net/home.php

HERE BE DRAGONS.

Legend of the Green Dragon is Improbable Island's precursor, and a re-imagining of an even older roleplaying game Legend of the Red Dragon.

bla bla bla article outline here

• Same overarching gameplay structure. Guy arrives in town, gets told theres a dragon they need to kill, trains against masters until they hit level 14 and then goes off to slay the dragon. kill the dragon, start over from level one. It has more of a fantasy flair than the island's science fiction, of course. As well as the Pilot's weird turn-based system instead of Stamina. But the beats are all there.
• Source of a good number of the island's mechanics and a couple of the NPCs. (e.g. the Forest became the Jungle, the Graveyard became the Failboat, Drive Kills are still referred to as Dragon Kills in the hall of fame, etc.)¹⁾
• Legend of the Green Dragon is an old game, originally being written in the original php script. (For comparison's sake: at the time of writing, the island runs on PHP8.) Originally created by Eric Stevens, but the code is now being maintained by the Dragonprime Development Team. The Dragonprime engine was released under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone is free to yoink the code and host their own version of the game.
• And so that's what CMJ did - after getting rid of all the dragons and rejiggering the hell out of the code.
• While there's not much left of the original LotGD code in the game, we wouldn't be here without the hard work of the devs of old. If you enjoy your time on the island, and have some cash to spare, you can find a link to donate to Eric's paypal on the Island's donation page. Just click the coin slot and scroll down a bit.

Not worth porting over, just half articles I'm using as “sources”
“why don't you just ask cmj” I like doing things the hard way, apparently.

• The history of the chat channels, circa 2018
• Season Two suggestion box. One way to date what was around before the reset.
• Nobody ever wrote a PVP guide. Hellfire.
• The monster list - retired monsters. also has “possible scavenge options” - not sure if that's the actual scavenging drop data, or just hypotheticals?
• Season one bugs, before it got replaced with the petition system.
• Season Two changelog. Only I could find this interesting.
• jesus. things you post on the internet really do stay forever. hello, person reading this.
• Trains! - Holy shit, the Improbable Trains Compendium pdf listed here has a full analysis of Train functionality. delicious historical preservation

• Improbable Island's codebase was, initially, built off a much older game called Legend of the Green Dragon. (Which in itself is apparently based off the single player game Legend of the Red Dragon, but that's a little too much backstory for this)
• Similarities - fight monsters to gain exp, fight your master to level up, at level fifteen you go off to kill the big bad and become the hero of the realm, four hour game days
• LotGD is open source, with its code being CC0. btw you can still donate to the devs so i'll have to shill that at some point
• I should probably play LotGD at some point so I can figure out how different it was to the Pilot
• Anyway link to the Old Masters article somewhere in this mess of a preamble

I'm actually not sure what features the Pilot had gameplay-wise, other than the Old Wiki's entry saying things were super unbalanced. It may have been largely the same as the pilot, but with janky initial stat numbers?

The things I know that did happen are largely community based:

• Occasional Watcher-run contests. (Such as awarding special boons to people who got the highest Glory score in a set timeframe)
• Newbie Tuesdays (days the game would be advertised, so existing players would prepare to welcome them)
• The Watcher apparently hung out on the Island in a place called Disgrace?

• No stamina system - there were separate points for travel, combat, PVP. Systems were in place to convert one type of point for another, such as Heidi's Place allowing you to trade PVP turns for more Jungle fights.
• PVP enabled. Contestants could kick each other's asses for fun and profit.
• Sheila's shack actually had limited stock, and players could salvage scrap from monster fights or the junkyard to craft more gear?? wild
• Speaking of, armor and weapons could be gifted (and stolen!).
• Dwellings instead of Places! i don't actually know anything about the bingo hall i just thought that was a funny headline to steal
• Something called the Strategy Hut - not sure if this was an outpost thing or a player run thing, honestly. Precursor to Basic Training?

• PVP removed, sheila's shack stocks endless stuff
• Dwellings obliterated, places added
• Brand new stamina system, which is currently set to be replaced with the even newer stamina system if the latest motd is anything to go off of
• I don't know when each outpost got its own Banter, but S2 is when Banter became Global.
• Breaches came and went
• Trains. Choo choo
• oo fancy new UI oooo