Do you miss gazing across the multi-colored map of Minaria through the wee hours of the morning? Do you relish making plans to get Schardenzar-led loyal forces to the tower of Zards for the final super-plunder? Do you lack the time, or the group, necessary to devote to a face-to-face game? Divine Right Online will provide your virtual game board.

Our goal is to provide a portal to the fantasy world of Minaria in the form of an online version of the game Divine Right, thus enabling anyone to play from their own home. We are part of a grass-roots effort to help rekindle the latent interest in and generate new interest in the great game of Divine Right. We are doing our part to leverage the Internet to expose more people from the reality of Earth to the fantasylands of Minaria. Our hope is that people will find such diversions a lot of FUN. Anything less than fun will be changed or removed.

Our intention is to build the game in such a way that it is not necessary for everyone to be online simultaneously. We are close to achieving this. The central game server is on 24/7 so players can log in and check the status or make their moves at their convenience. The server retains all of the game state information and all actions (e.g. die rolls, draws, moves) happen there. The server records all such game events enabling players to browse what happened since their last visit. Players may (of course) be on-line together in which case games events are broadcast so they will immediately "see" the card plays, die rolls, and counters move.

The Divine Right board game was originally published by Tactical Studies Rules in 1979. It is based on the fantasy world of Minaria created by the fantasy author Glenn Rahman. His Minarian Legends were the inspiration for the original game. These legends were originally published in the early Dragon magazines.

Scott Walters is the originator of the Divine Right Online project. He wrote a “hot seat” version of the game that runs on a single machine with players taking turns sitting and making their moves. He later decided to build a multi-site version of the game to play with his now dispersed gaming buddies. Joseph Sackett joined the development team in January 2001 and together we collaborated to build the game available today. In October 2001, Kevin Kokoszka joined our effort to web-enable more of the game.

This game will never be financially viable for the builders of Divine Right Online. Collectively, we have almost $3000 and over one thousand hours of work put into this project already. We will continue to do this as a labor of love because trying to profit on DRO will encroach on the FUN (our primary requirement). That being said, we owe a great debt to Glenn Rahman for his original conception of the game and for supporting us in our efforts. We plan on repaying him indirectly by publicizing his books and generally exposing more people to the lands of Minaria. Those will not be enough though, we need to pay for the rights to use his works. Although we have no specific prices or timeframes, eventually we will need to charge a fee for this gaming service.