The video I’d like to point out today is this one on the dungeon generation in the first Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game (19 minutes), which basically lays bare the entire scheme by which nearly all Mystery Dungeons construct their procedural death labyrinths.

I’ve played quite a few Mystery Dungeon games, including nearly all of the many versions of Shiren the Wanderer (Rainbow Labyrinth is the only one I’m missing), and these dungeon level types keep coming up again and again. I’d be very surprised if essentially the same code, or close to it, wasn’t used in all of them. The beginning of the dungeon generation explainer is at 5:03.

One interesting thing is that the dungeons generated by the various routines often create maps that can be seen as variations upon the dungeons from the original roguelike, Rogue itself. Rogue used a distinctive 3×3 grid of rooms. Sometimes a “room” might be a winding corridor, a dead-end or a dark maze, but it doesn’t take much playing to see the patterns used, and the Mystery Dungeon games obviously use a similar system for most of its floors, using differently-sized grids. Sometimes extra dead-ends are generated, and there are a few extra styles, but in its overall plan it’s Rogue-standard. It’s what the video calls the “standard generator.”

This isn’t all that the video explains, for just one example it goes over the details of how the game’s random number generators work, and also how they can be abused (the dungeon RNG is seeded to 1 at boot, which can be used to ensure dungeons generate the same way). I think it’s essential viewing for any Mystery Dungeon enthusiast.

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For most of the episode we try to treat the game as if all that skeevy stuff doesn’t exist, but don’t close it when it seems like it’s over….

As for the skeeve, the game’s official website has a section marked OPPAI, which I do not link to directly from here, in case it gets Set Side B on some kind of list.

I don’t make many @Play posts these days, and I’m sad that I have to drag out the tag for something like this. I am working on a lot of discussion about Caves of Qud (if I can link to Omega Labyrinth Life here I can certainly call out Qud), but the game is so blasted huge! Hopefully I can bring you something on that front soon.

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This year it’s happening between Saturday and Sunday, October 25-26. That’s the day after tomorrow! There’s an unusually good roster this year, and I don’t just say that because I helped find speakers for it this year.

We’ve already had a preview event with a couple of great talks, including a real star, Jon Perry, who created two of the best games in UFO 50, Mini & Max and Party House. While I spent a lot of time with Mini & Max uncovering its many secrets, it’s but a small fraction of the time I’ve played Party House. (If you want to hear Jon Perry’s talk, from September, you can find it here, as well as Ezra Stanton’s talk on Synergy Networks in roguelikes, and Alexei Pepers’ Designing for System Suspense.)

I’ve already gushed voluminously about Party House here. Let’s move on to this year’s talk schedule. Times given here are Eastern/Pacific/GMT. (The later times in GMT are pushed into the following day.)

Saturday, October 25th

Sunday, October 26th

If some of these talks seem like they’re spaced closely together, some of them are “lightning talks,” very short. Those have their titles in italics in the above list.

If you follow indie gaming circles, there are a fair number of exciting speakers among the talks! Jeff Lait (homepage) has made twenty highly interesting roguelikes, many as 7DRLs. Nifflas of course is the creator of Within a Deep Forest, the Knytt games, Affordable Space Adventures and others. Dan DiIorio is the creator of the oft-mentioned (at least in my hearing) Luck be a Landlord, and Zeno Rogue makes the long-lived, and brain-bending, HyperRogue.

And make sure to have a look at the Redbubble and Steam links too! In this year’s Steam selection, MidBoss and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are already on sale.

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We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Writing about Nintendo fangames is fraught. Not that something might happen to me, the insidious grasp of their legal team doesn’t stretch that far yet, but for the games being written about. Remember AM2R, a fan remake of Metroid II that many believe was superior to Nintendo’s own revision? Then some big sites mentioned it, Nintendo heard about it, and they sent the creator a nastygram demanding they take it down. Set aside the fact that the game can still be readily obtained from numerous other sources; it still dumped a big bucket of freezing cold water on the hard work of its maker, which is hardly a way to treat fans, especially since the company’s prosperity depends on their good will. Nintendo must be really certain those enthusiasts won’t reject them.

About our own blog, I don’t think anyone at Nintendo personally reads Set Side B. I’m sure their well-paid legal staff has plenty better things to do than read an obscure little daily retro/niche/indie blog, even if it’s one that posts articles on their products really often. But it does seem possible that someone at Nintendo might run a spider, an automated program that scans the internet for derivative works related to their products.

Not romhacks, mind you. For some reason Nintendo doesn’t take a lot of interest in romhacks of their work in most cases. But fanwork that uses their IP in one way or other has been known to attract the attention of the legal Warios. That is why AM2R got stomped upon by the Kuribo’s Shoe of Civil Law, and it’s why Zelda Online had to retitle to Graal Online (a project that continues to this day under that name).

I tell you this so you’ll know why I don’t give the full name of the project I’m going to refer solely by the second half of its title: Dungeons of Infinity. Any person looking at the screenshots will be able to easily tell what game it’s referring to, and uses assets from, but web crawlers won’t, or at least I won’t make it any easier for them than the Youtube videos that contain footage of its play. If you figure you want to try it, which I hope you will, if you search for it you’ll probably find it. I’ll help you out by telling you it’s not the board game Dungeons of Infinity, which had a Kickstarter in 2024. Many of the top hits for that phrase will be about that, but not all of them. I trust you’ll be able to tell them apart.

Most of the things I like about (mumble mumble): Dungeons of Infinity are not related to the game from which it borrows. If they could find some helpful people to make similar graphics in the same style, and changed the name, they might be able to escape danger entirely, but that might require time and effort the creator doesn’t have. Whatever be its trappings, it’s a pretty cool random dungeon exploration game in its own right. It has a pretty active Discord. Its creator mentions there that they’ve recently lost interest in working on the game so its current version, 1.2.1, will probably be its last. It’s still pretty cool as it stands.

So the idea is, like in the other games in the series of, um, The Saga of Fitzgerald’s Wife, is to pilot a green-suited elf kid through dangerous and tricky dungeons and caverns full of monsters and traps, collecting items and uncovering secrets. What’s different is that the game is much more linear than those other games (much like the Four Swords Adventures titles), and the rooms and their arrangements are randomly determined. So… also like the Four Swords Adventures games, although this one is purely for solo play.

If you explore throughly enough you’ll always find a way forward, the game isn’t designed to give you unsolvable situations. But what can change, and quite a lot at that, is the items that you find. Weapons like the Bow, the Hookshot or the Boomerang have to be found, or sometimes bought, if you want to use them. None of these items are required to win, but without certain items, like Sword and Tunic upgrades, or extra Heart Containers, you’ll find the going much more difficult.

In fact, probably the game’s biggest drawback is that it falls prey, a bit, to fangame difficuly malaise. Bosses that in the original game aren’t hugely difficult here are tenacious damage sponges. Everything in the game has been tuned to be that little bit more difficult: you have less health, sources of healing are less common, and enemies take more damage. Due to the nature of difficulty, all of these individual sources of peril multiply together and become much harder than the sum of its parts. And (mumble mumble): Dungeons of Infinity is a permadeath game: if you take too much damage and run out of hearts, the adventure ends, so to keep going you have to start over from the beginning, fighting all the early enemies once again, and building a whole new collection of random items. If you’re not up for a challenge, well, you probably shouldn’t bother downloading it.

Here’s some details that it might be useful to know:

• You have a very limited inventory space. You can only hold five items by default. The bow & its arrows count as separate items too, as do your bombs and any healing items you find. You can find, or (more likely) buy inventory expansions, and there are items that help keep other items from taking up inventory spaces, but you’ll frequently have to make difficult choices for what to keep.
• On the other hand, items you drop, or don’t have room to collect, don’t disappear. They’ll remain on the ground in the room they were dropped or found in until you come back for them, or else take the downstairs (you don’t get to backtrack to previous floors). If you hold off on collecting hearts when you’re at full health, then when you do take damage, you can come back to pick them up later.
• Aiding in this, enemies that you defeat never return. It’s possible to clear whole dungeon floors of monsters, making them much safer to explore.
• In the bottom-right corner of the HUD, there’s a vertical map of all the dungeon levels, which gives you the low-down on where the bosses are. It also marks the location of save points. In the true spirit of permadeath these points are only for taking breaks, not for continually restoring from, but seeing as how the game is fairly long it’s good to take advantage of them, and refresh the mental batteries for a bit before tackling the next leg of the quest.
• It’s a shame that it’s pretty far into the game, but in the rebel village area on the 6th floor there’s an arcade with a pretty decent remake of arcade classic Berzerk in it, as well as an endless runner version of Pitfall with a recreation of the music from Pitfall II: Lost Caverns! If you get a few rooms into the Berzerk remake, you’ll find another mini-game, within that mini-game. I don’t know how deep this recursive ouroboros of gaming goes, but it’s a very nice touch.

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While RC got its start as an in-person conference, when the pandemic hit they switched over to being entirely virtual, presented through video feed. All of their talks end up posted online, so anyone can see them for years after. But if you can attend during the conference you can participate in chat, ask questions of the speakers, and explore a very clever MUD-like chat interface!

I’ve tried to spread the word about Roguelike Celebration where I can, through social media and this very blog here. Every year they have several very interesting talks that, if you read Set Side B, I know you’d be interested in seeing. They’ve hosted Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress, the creators of the original Rogue, and many other thoughtful speakers.

This year Roguelike Celebration takes place October 25-26. They sell tickets, but they also let people who are strapped for cash apply for a free ticket. (If you can pay for admission though, please do, as it takes money to run an event like this.)

And if you have a roguelike, or even vaguely-related project, please please please answer their Call For Proposals, to apply to present your work to their devoted audience of extremely thoughtful attendees! The CFP site is here, and their deadline has been extended to July 20th, so you have about three weeks to get in your proposal!

Give it a shot, it’s a great way to spread the word about roguelike work, or about a procedurally-generated game you’re interested in, or just something you think the world should know about.

By volume most game players, let’s be frank, are interested in the big AAA productions. But there are lots of people out there who are willing to give indies a chance, which roguelike games often are, and we have to stick together. Not only to talk with each other and build those connections, but to do it in public, non-corporate venues. Reddit largely is a sham these days, more interested in monetizing their userbase, and Discord isn’t web-searchable, and requires navigating a maze of requests that you upgrade to “Nitro.”

I do not lie: little volunteer-run organizations like Roguelike Celebration are a lot closer to the true spirit of the internet, and the World Wide Web, than those are. So please keep them in your thoughts, if you can buy a ticket, and if you have something to present, answer their CFP! You won’t regret any of those things.

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It got by me this year, but the now 20-year-old 7 Day Roguelike Challenge, a gamejam where people try to construct a complete roguelike within a week’s time, finished up Saturday.

Not only has it been around a long time, but a number of games have come out of it that went on to greater things. Jupiter Hell got its start as a 7DRL project called DoomRL. The amazing Jeff Lait has made a ton of 7DRLs, and many of them have some awesome twist, like a game where you can make portals, but where the portals result in the world through them being rotated and possibly allowing you to get mixed up!

There’s regular several very interesting games in the challenge each year! Its itch.io page is here. This year’s theme was, simply, “roguelike,” and 819 people have joined it so far! I can’t wait to see what they’ve made!

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Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.

To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)

In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.

WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)

was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending)
missed a Jump Kick and wiped out.
missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out.
fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath)
fainted, covered in sludge.
fainted from a move’s recoil damage.
fainted from damage it took bouncing.
was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy.
fainted from stepping on spikes.
fainted from a bad burn.
fainted, unable to bear constriction.
fainted after the poison spread.
fainted while still being wrapped.
was felled by a curse.
was drained to nothing by Leech Seed.
fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath)
fainted while in a nightmare.
was felled by a thrown rock.
fainted from hunger.
disappeared in an explosion.
tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted.
fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted.
was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage.
was transformed into an item. (instadeath)
fainted from being knocked flying.
was felled by a Pokemon sent flying.
gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose)
was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron)
returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically)
fainted due to the weather.
failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED)
fainted from a Wonder Orb.
fainted from an item.

Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):

was transformed into a friend. (what?)
left without being befriended. (hwat?)
was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage)
was felled by a thrown item.
was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then)
went away. (so long)
was possessed. (spooky)

Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:

fainted from a debug attack.
was defeated by a powerful move.
fainted due to a trap’s damage.

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In terms of depth, this post is rated 4 out of 5: highly detailed information for obsessed fans and game designers.

The first (28m):

And, the second (44m), it goes further into the weeds and is longer:

So, here’s a tl;dw overview of the first video. Despite the length, this is really only a brief summary! Some Body got their information by reverse engineering the games’ code, so it should be considered authoritative.

PMD has three times of actions, moving, attacking and using items. First they try to use an item–if there is no item to use, or the situation isn’t appropriate, or there’s a random component and they choose not to, they fall through to attacking. If there’s no one appropriate to attack, they fall through to moving or wandering. If they’re not pursuing a target and aren’t wandering, they wait in place.

Awake Pokemon try to reach a target: team members try to reach the leader (you)*, enemies try to reach a party member of yours. If they are following someone, they try to reach the target by default moving diagonally before moving orthogonally. This is good to know, and an effective strategy, since it’s harder to escape a cardinal-adjacent Pokemon than a diagonal-adjacent one. If a Pokemon has a target in sight but can’t move towards towards it, it doesn’t move.

(* Note: for teammates, this assumes the “Let’s Go Together” tactic is in effect. Generally, tactics settings are covered in the second video.)

No Pokemon can move towards a target they can’t see. Sight in Blue & Red Rescue Team is two spaces around them, or throughout a lit room they are in plus one space into corridors. Of course, invisible targets can’t be seen, even if they’re nearby. Note, a quirk of the Mystery Dungeon series generally: when standing in the first space of a corridor, you can only see slightly into the room, but everyone in the room can see you. While your default sight range in darkness is two spaces in the PMD1 games, instead of MD’s standard 1 space, you’re still a bit blind when moving into rooms. Notably, that two space distance around you is a square, so in corridors with bends in them you get a bit extra sight distance.

Now comes the interesting part (to people who are as obsessed with roguelikes as I am): what happens if a Pokemon loses sight of its target? In PMD1, it considers the last four locations the Pokemon was in, and tries to go to the one it was visible in most recently. Note in bent corridors, it becomes harder for a character to lose its target.

If the target is four turns outside of the follower’s sight, it has lost track of it, and the follower begins wandering randomly. This can happen if the Pokemon has never had a target (none has come into sight), or the target or follower teleports, the target moves over terrain the follower cannot cross, or the target moves away when the follower is occupied, or, due to the variety of events that can happen in the Mystery Dungeons, other ways.

Followers without targets wander randomly. When they spot a target, they cease moving randomly and pursue it. But if still wandering, in rooms, they pick a random exit, go to it and go down the corridor. In a corridor, they follow it until they reach a room (then entering it), or they reach an intersection. At an intersection, we see an interesting behavior: PMD1 occured before Chunsoft switched over to making wanderering monsters pick random directions at corridor intersections! In later Mystery Dungeon games, including later Pokemon Mystery Dungeons, wandering monsters go straight in intersections if they can. This is behavior that can be relied upon, but not in PMD1.

Outmatched Pokemon can decide to flee, essentially, moving away from their targets instead of towards. In rooms, they pick the exit furthermost from their pursuer, unless they moves them towards that pursuer; then they just try to get away as best they can, likely remaining in the room. A quirk of this: sometimes a fleeing monster breaks for an an exit that is more distant from the target, but not away from at attacker, giving it a free hit. The circumstances around this are complicated: the explanation begins at 7:16 in the first video.

For attacking, Pokemon have up to four moves, and a normal “attack.” This generic attack is not part of the main Pokemon game series. It was present in the first two PMD games, but after that became less effective. In the fourth and fifth PMD games, the normal attack only does five points of damage, and in the Switch remake of Rescue Team, it does no damage at all; it’s only a tool for passing time. But we’re still in the realm of PMD1, where “normal attacks” are not only useful but frequently used, because they don’t consume any PP.

Attacks are chosen based on a weighted average of all the usable moves. Each move has its own weight value; the normal attack weight’s varies according to the number of other moves available.

Ranged attacks are an interesting case. If a Pokemon has a ranged attack, and an enemy that can be attacked at a distance, it triggers the attack routine, where it picks a move from those available, but then only actually performs the move if the attack can reach its target. This can result in an attacker passing up opportunities to attack while an opponent approaches it. Out of fairness, room-range attack moves are only used by the AI when adjacent to an enemy.

Items have a bunch of minutiae associated with their use by the AI, but a lot of it is pretty ordinary. A few highlights: teammates can throw held negative status equipment at enemies, wild Pokemon start using items at Level 16, and there is only one Orb that wild Pokemon can use, and teammates can’t use it: the Rollcall Orb, for them, summons a number of other wild Pokemon into adjacency with them.

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Honestly, the roguelike scene is so large now that no one person could reasonably be expected to keep track of all of it. But there is no need to; others hold aloft that particular torch. Here’s a couple of videos, then, on getting started in Caves of Qud.

Publisher Kitfox Games (who also publish the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress) sponsored a video with “Getting Started” right in its title. Here it is (18 minutes):

It contains information on the different modes, the best starting location for beginners (Joppa), basic controls, navigating around the starting town, how to get around the world map (reminiscent of Alphaman!), how to spend kill points, how to read things, how to examine Artifacts, how to experiment with things (even if it gets you killed sometimes), how to steal things, performing the water ritual, and some combat tips.

Another, slightly longer at 24 minutes, intro video is by Rogue Rat:

It covers ranged weapons, the town of Joppa, Truekin, what to do when you get lost, some different skills to learn, gaining levels from giving books to a specific NPC, using its Crawl-type Autoexplore feature and other topics. Rogue Rat did a longer, more basic, intro video (34m) last year that went over many of the same topics as the first video here.

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It’s being held entirely online again this year, and offers a fun social space to explore that’s kind of like a MUD! Roguelike Celebration’s schedule is here, and you can get tickets for $30 for the whole event here. They usually set aside some free tickets for people who can’t afford the fee, although you might have to check around to find them.

Roguelike Celebration is nominally about roguelikes and procedural generation, but I think it’s interesting from a wide variety of gaming perspectives, and every year I find several talks that are incredibly interesting. Past years have offered presentations from people who worked on games as diverse as Kingdom of Loathing and Blaseball. Here are the talks being offered this year:

Saturday

• Harry Solomons: Trampling on Ghosts: Hauntology and Permadeath
• Cezar Capacle: Enhancing Narrative Through Randomness and Complications
• Max Bottega: Keeping Art Direction interesting in a procedurally generated world
• Stanley W. Baxton: Bringing Real-World Occultism into Your Games Without Accidentally Being Racist
• Jeff Emtman and Martin Austwick: Neutrinowatch – the podcast that plays itself
• Nic: Braided Narratives: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linear Stories
• Pandamander: “Out of Book,” The Psychology of Why Roguelikes Keep Us Playing
• ?: Inverse Terrain Solver
• Adrian: Probably Impossible – NecroDancer’s network code
• John Harris: A Trip Through The Mystery Dungeons (psst: this is mine)
• Marlowe Dobbe: A Swarm of Monsters is Hard To Build: Generating Visual Concepts for Enemies in Roguelikes
• John Bond: Doors or no Doors: How Roguelike games take you places
• Dan Norder: Chase, The BASIC Language Proto-Roguelike

Sunday

• Yong Zhen Zhou: Who Controls the Controller? Thinking about physical player interactions outside a digital game
• Tabea Iseli: Animal Crossing meets Roguelite Dungeon Crawler – The surprising genre mixture behind Grimoire Groves
• Philomena Schwab: 100,000 wishlists in 3 months – Weird roguelikes are taking over the world
• Kaysa Konopljak: Going legit with DotA: How to transform a thousand authors into four
• Alexander Birke: Practical procedural world and story generation in Sea Of Rifts, a naval roguelike RPG
• Robin Mendoza: The Use of Knowledge in the Labyrinth: The price mechanism as a storytelling device
• Ollie: The Right Variety – Understanding and Visualising the Output Diversity of Your Generators
• Eiríkr: Uxn – Permacomputing & Roguelikes
• Brian Cronin: Black Box Sim for Roguelikes
• Isaac Io Schankler: Orb Pondering Simulator LIVE!
• ?: 7 Layer Dip, Multi-Layered Narratives For Roguelikes
• Emily Halina: New Levels from a Single Example via Tree-based Reconstructive Partitioning (TRP)
• Courtney: Cheating the System (By Design!) for Epic Combos
• Joe: Magic in Game Design: (Mis)Directing the Player’s Attention
• Tyler Coleman: Finding your 80/20 Rule with Proc-Gen
• Nat: Procedurality and the Primes

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They keep using terms from Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon games, especially Torneko no Daibouken from the Super Famicom, but seem to have a good sense of how those items connect to and were inspired by Rogue.

They also die a lot. Because Rogue doesn’t want you to win. It was made for a community of players who would play it over and over, and were competing on shared scoreboards on university machines, and indefinite play makes for a poor measure of player skill. Standing and trading blows with every monster is a bad strategy in Rogue in the long run. Instead, it helps to run from strong enemies, to build up more hit points so as to defeat them, and sometimes in order to escape them to the next floor. Rogue’s monsters grow in strength as you descend fairly quickly, and the player is usually not far ahead of them in the power curve. Then around the time Trolls show up they’re roughly an even match, and they keep getting tougher. The point where the monsters become stronger than the player is different every game, and depends a lot on which items the player has found and has identified, but it always comes eventually. They eventually get pretty far, dying on their fifth attempt to a Griffin on Level 18.

*
“Water supply texture: Say goodbye to the smell of raw oysters.”
“The Dora doll’s twisty honey positive is getting warmer.”
“I miss the days when I used to go Hee Hee in Centauros.”
“Let’s quickly wash and throw away the rotten plastic bottles we drank from.”
Tell me more, auto translate bot!

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Here is the title screen (which is a spoiler for after finishing the main dungeon, although that is really only a short way into the game):

After you finish every other task in the game, including finishing the final 99 Floor “megadungeon” where most items are unidentified, the title screen changes to add a nice rainbow:

I forgot to get a picture with the title in place. I can’t go back and get it now because of what followed….

There is one more thing to do at that point though. That is to play through the megadungeon again, but finding 12 “Celestial Stones” that severely restrict your inventory by the end.

Well, I’m not sure if they really counted on anyone doing that? There doesn’t seem to be much reward for it. It doesn’t go remarked upon by anyone in the game. But it does change one thing: the title screen. Here it is:

I like the red “IN SPACE” stamp! Sadly, all the graphics in the actual game still show an island floating in the atmosphere, and not in orbit. I wonder if they plan on doing something with this in an update? That seems like a lot of extra work for the benefit of not a lot of people.

Looking through my screenshots, I found this illustration that can be unlocked for behind the main menu, showing Shiren stumbling upon a Monster House:

There’s a lot more to say about Shiren 6, after I gather up my thoughts about it….

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‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

It’s the shortest @Play column ever!

What is happening here? This is the newest Mystery Dungeon game, Shiren the Wander: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. It’s actually a great deal of fun, a sharply-designed entry in the long-running classic roguelike series.

This isn’t “roguelike” like half the games on Steam. This is a true roguelike, even if it doesn’t have ASCII graphics: a turn-based RPG with substantial randomized elements, that demands that you live (or not) by your tactics, strategy and wits. I don’t begrudge others appropriation of the term, but it does mean I have to now use the qualifier classic when I want to discuss the old style. Really, it’s better to call games not in the original style roguelite.

The dungeon depicted is Heart of Serpentcoil Island, the traditional end megadungeon that most Mystery Dungeon games have. After finishing the “main” dungeon, and playing a lot of extra bonus dungeons that each show off a specific element of the game’s engine, there’s the megadungeon: a 99-level gauntlet of terror where you enter at level 1. None of the items you’ve collected throughout the rest of the game will help you here. You must start from scratch with just a riceball. You don’t even have a weapon or a shield to begin with: everything you have, you must find along the way.

The game doesn’t pull many punches in this dungeon, as you can see. At experience level 1, every space in a room (other than the entrances: that’s a secret tip for you!) could contain a game-ending trap. The only consolation is that they’re really quite rare! I was exceptionally unlucky in this run.

Additionally, the uses of many of the items, the scrolls, grasses, pots, bracelets and incense found in the dungeon, are unknown: their effects must be discovered, through means both blatant and subtle, for yourself. Some of them will be essential to your survival, let alone success; others, like the Ill-fated Seed, you really want to avoid using.

It’s a ludicrous test of knowledge and skill, and a fitting capstone to the game. If the experience shown in the video seems like it might put you off, at least it shows conclusively that the game isn’t taking it easy on you. If you win, and it can be won, it’s a great accomplishment. I’m still working on this one myself; I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Ah, it crept up on me, so let me remind everyone that Roguelike Celebration begins today, although until tomorrow it just means they’re opening their social space for awhile. Nicole Carpenter at Polygon wrote a short piece about this year’s conference.

There is an admittance fee, but if you can’t afford it you can also get a free pass! Please consider paying them if you are able though, they do a lot of work every year in putting it together.

Here is the official schedule (linked), below is it presented just as a list of talks, with sparkle emojis around the things that personally enthuse me. Just because!

Times given are US Pacific/Eastern. If you think the short times between starts are indicative of short talks, most of them aren’t that short, they have two tracks going on beside each other:

SATURDAY

9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Arron A. Reed, Klingons, Hobbits, and the Oregon Trail: Procedural Generation in the First Decade of Text Games

10:00 AM/ 1 PM: Nic Tringali, Abstract Space Exploration in The Banished Vault

10:30 AM/ 1:30 PM: Linas Gabrielaitis, Fictions of Infinity in Geological Finitudes

10:45 AM/1:45 PM: Ludipe, Exploring Pacifist Roguelikes

11:30 AM/2:30 PM: Florence Smith Nicholls, Another Stupid Date: Love Island as a Roguelike

11:45 AM/2:45 PM Kes, Hunting the Asphynx: Roguelikes, Provenance, and You

Noon/3 PM: Mike Cook, Generating Procedures: Rule and System Generation for Roguelikes

1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Scott Burger, The Data Science of Roguelikes

2 PM/5 PM: Nat Alison, In Defense of Hand-Crafted Sudoku

3 PM/6 PM: Eric Billingsley, Scoped-down design: Making a Tiny Roguelike

3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Elliot Trinidad, Touching Grass & Taking Names: Tuning the Blaseball Name Generator

4:30 PM/7:30 PM: Paul Hembree, Audible Geometry: Coordinate Systems as a Resource for Music Generation

5 PM/8 PM: Jurie Horneman, Why Dynamic Content Selection Is Hard

SUNDAY

9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Mark Johnson, Generating Riddles for a Generated World

10 AM/1 PM: Jesse Collet & Keni, Fireside Chat About the Development of NetHack

10:30 AM/1:30 PM: Leigh Alexander, McMansions of Hell: Roguelikes and Reality TV

1 PM/4 PM: Ray, Remixing the Layer Cake: Facilitating Fan Reinterpretation Through Caves of Qud’s Modular Data Files

1:15 PM/4:15 PM: Crashtroid, Preventing Ear Fatigue with Roguelike Music

1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Everest Pipkin, The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and the Games That Are Played There

2 PM/5 PM: Jeff Olson, Alphaman: Developing and Releasing a Post-Apocalyptic Roguelike Game in the DOS Days When Computers Were Slow, Memory Was Scarce, and No One Had Ever Heard of Object-Oriented Code

3 PM/6 PM: Dustin Freeman, Live Action Roguelike

3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Jonathan Lessard, A Simulation with a View

3:45 PM/6:45 PM: Tom Francis, Generating Boring Levels for Fresh Experiences in Heat Signature

4 PM/7 PM: Patrick Kemp, Design Tooling at Spry Fox

5 PM/8 PM: Stav Hinenzon, A Messy Approach to Dynamic Narrative in Sunshine Shuffle

5:15 PM/8:15 PM: Josh Galecki, Procedurally Generating Puzzles

5:30 PM/8:30 PM: Jasper Cole, Backpack Hero – Player Upgrades and Progression

6 PM/9 PM: Brianna McHorse & Chris Foster, Fusing AI with Game Design: Let the Chaos In

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Nethack uses the system time-of-day clock to affect the game in modest ways. It figures out the phase of the moon, and if it’s a full moon the player’s “base luck,” the number at which it starts and tends to trend towards, is +1. Luck affects the game in many minor ways, most notably affecting the to-hit chances of striking monsters. Full moons also affect werecreatures and the chances to tame dogs, but those effects are highly situational.

Playing on a new moon has one effect, but it’s a big one. If you’re fighting a cockatrice and you hear its hissing, and are not carrying a lizard corpse, then you always begin turning to stone, instead of there only being a one-in-ten chance. This is what is called a “delayed instadeath”: you don’t die immediately, but if you don’t take immediate action it’ll happen in the next few turns. That’s the next few turns from the game’s perspective: various events may conspire to prevent you from getting that action at all. (The Nethack Wiki’s page on petrification is instructive.)

If you do get the turn, one of the things you can do is eat a lizard corpse, or that of another acidic monster. (Eating dead monsters raw is something you just end up doing often in Nethack.) If those aren’t at hand, what usually works is prayer, provided that you haven’t prayed too recently, your patron god is not angry with you and you’re not in Gehennom. Ordinarily, if you haven’t been playing badly, your god isn’t mad at you. If you’re in Gehennom you’re in the late game anyway, and probably have had ample opportunity to obtain one of the several ways of halting impending calcification.

Prayer is nearly a universal panacea, if it’s available. But there is one other thing that can block prayer: if your luck is negative. Even if it’s by just one point, prayer will never work.

That’s where the only other date effect in Nethack comes into play: on Friday the 13th, your luck defaults to -1, the opposite of the full moon effect. So, unless you’ve increased your luck by one of a number of means, prayer will never work on Friday the 13th. And today is both a new moon night and Friday the 13th. Other uses for prayer won’t work either: if you’re weak from hunger? Too bad. Low on hit points? Sorry. Punished with a ball and chain? Not going to work. Wearing cursed levitation boots? LOL.

Days that both have a new moon and are a Friday the 13th are rare. The last one was in July of 2018, before that November of 2015, and the one before that was in 1999. So, um, if you’ve been thinking about trying out this weird old roguelike game you’ve heard about, you might want to wait a bit. Until tomorrow, anyway.

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Nic Junius: Play as in Stage Play (38 minutes):

David Brevik on the Making of Diablo (30 minutes):

And, Aron Pietroń, Michał Ogłoziński on Against the Storm (35 minutes):

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I’ve been thinking about doing more @Play lately, but in the meantime, please read this mostly nice, lengthy article from The Digital Antiquarian on Rogue and its legacy. I say mostly because there are a few minor points I disagree with. Maybe I’ve played too much of it, but experienced players tend to view vanilla Nethack as maybe a bit too easy. There’s a ton to learn, but once you’ve internalized it all, you come to realize that most situations have counters, and it comes down to knowing what they are, and not pushing your luck too far. Ah! I’ve not said much on Nethack for years now! I should get back to doing that….

The Digital Antiquarian: Going Rogue

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Broken Connections is a little game by prolific roguelike creator Slashie, Santaigo Zapata (Facebook), that puts you in the shoes of Rogue co-creator Glenn Wichman (also on Facebook) in 1980. His then-roommate Michael Toy (yep, also on Facebook) worked on Rogue over a dialup connection to the mainframe at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The game poses a (probably fictional) situation that the connection is lost, and you are tasked with traveling to campus and finding out what is wrong with the connection and reestablishing it before the system reboots and a weekend’s work is lost.

There’s no enemies or anything like that. It’s a turn-limited quest that only requires that you find your way to the machine in time and plug in a cable, but along the way you encounter a number of people who have minor problems, or recognize you and want to tell you about something, or are just about on their day. Glenn is a very nice person, but it’s up to you if you want to engage with them or continue along on the task you’re there to do. If you feel up to it, you can go back after plugging the cable in, when there isn’t a pressing time limit.

The stakes are pretty minor. If you don’t make it, a weekend’s work is lost. I’m sure Michael Toy can recreate his work, but it’d still be very nice to be able to save it. There is no big win condition, or reward for being nice to people, other the just being a good person. In that way it’s like real life.

If you want to know more about Glenn, Michael and the game, Slashie discusses it on his blog.

Broken Connections (itch.io, $0, playable in browser)

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It’s a silly NetHack-themed game about exploring a dungeon, presented through a bunch of characters sitting around passing a blunt between them. It’s not really that hard, but there is a bit of strategy to it.

You and your pet sit around a campfire with other characters from that dungeon level and talk about things. Your character and your pet can say things like, they want to be less or more aggressive on the next level, or they want to invoke Elbereth, or they want to use an item; other characters may say things like telling you where fewer or more fights will be, or where treasure is. Or they may have nothing of importance to say.

Every time a character says something, they must pass the blunt, which when it’s depleted signals it’s time to go to the next level. (C’mon, you know all the characters in this dungeon have to be potheads.) All of the fighting and stuff happens in simulation between conversations. Your character or their pet may be wounded (observe their hit points when their conversation turn comes up), or even die at this phase. It’s possible for your pet to die but your character go on to win. It’s also possible for your character die and your pet go on to win the game, which is not something that can occur in NetHack.

It’s a very simple game, and as stated, not really that difficult. But it’s fun, and might give a chuckle to NetHack fanatics. It’s free and completely playable in browser!

Blunt Quaternion (itch.io, $0)

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Public enthusiasm for it has ebbed and flowed over that time, but even last year 65 people are recorded as having completed the challenge. And every time there are a few games that are hugely interesting! A rating system helps to reveal those games that might be particularly interesting.

If you’d like to participate this year, well, you just can, they’re clear that you don’t need their permission and there is no real prize for doing it. But if you want to participate during the official period of the challenge, this year it’ll start on March 3rd. We have a reminder post here on Set Side B ready to roll out the day before it begins, so keep watching our pages for it!

Here is a brief look at the highest-reated 7DRL games that made it last time:

First: Mercury Salvage is a graphical roguelike about cleaning out derelict spaceships.

Second: The Mage’s Student is a deck-building roguelike centered around magic, and has to do with fighting off ” the many creatures guarding the Newt-Core and the Transformative Cricket…”

Third: Death Stranding RL is, as should be obvious, based on Hideo Kojima’s game. It has an interesting look for a console-based game.

Fo(u)rth: Torshavn: The Fae Forest is a console roguelike written in the eclectic language Forth.

Fifth: In Orcish Fury, you’re an orc berzerker out for revenge. It’s playable in-browser.

Sixth: Greedy Rogue is also playable in browser, in it you’re a rogue rading a dragon’s lair while the dragon is out.

Seventh: Depths of Greed has you trying to get a cure for your daughter’s illness, akin to Larn. You’re a shopkeeper who goes to the nearby dungeon to try to find a cure, bargaining with the monsters.

Eighth: Grove Climbers has an interesting look to it, it’s team based and has (collective) you climbing a huge tree.

Ninth: Join Me In Dystopia, Pirate! is a randomly-generated top-down shooter.

Tenth: In Maneuver Ability, you don’t directly damage enemies, but can push them, which stuns them for one turn.

Eleventh: Running Around Dressless (in a Nascent Territory Full of R[something] Monsters) is vaguely NSFW (in a very tiny pixel art way), and it playable in browser. The R-word in the title changes randomly. I’m not quite sure how to play it honestly, it’s not a typical trading-blows game definitely.

And twelvth, SpelunkyRL, we posted about last year!

There’s many more than that, limiting it at 12 is rather arbitrary. If you have the time and interest to spare you should have a look!

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Yet the PMD games are still Mystery Dungeon titles, and they play very similarly. They’re graphical roguelike dungeon-crawl games, just, you, your teammates, and your opponents are not generic fantasy creatures, but Pokemon. That is, specific fantasy creatures. Trademarked ones, in fact.

Because PMD’s fairly popular, you’re more likely to find investigations into its internals than the Shiren or other Mystery Dungeon games, just from the number of people who exist in its audience with both the will and skill to investigate. Yet, those internals are close enough to the MD standard that they even provide insight into how classic Mystery Dungeon operates.

YouPotato TheZZAZGlitch’s usualy video stomping grounds in Pokemon, but they have a fondness for PMD, so they’ve made a video on how the first generation (Red/Blue Rescue Team) generates its dungeons, and what do you know, many of these floor types are also very familiar to me from my time exploring the Shiren games, and it doesn’t seem a stretch at all to presume they’re run by the same, or at least a very similar, algorithm.

And YouTuber Some Body (who has a low number of subscribers, maybe folk should send them some love?) has two videos explaining how the AI in those games works. The first is of more general (well, less niche) interest (the one above), while the second is more about covering exceptions and edge cases.

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‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

Back in the GameSetWatch era, I focused more on a general kind of audience for @Play. No, really! I notice that I’ve gotten a fair bit more detailed so far in the Set Side B era. That’s especially the case this time, which is a dive into the history of Angband. But there’s a purpose to this: after knowing where Angband’s been, it’ll help us when, next time, we finally look at its huge number of variants. That should be a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to it. I hope it’ll make up for all the time I had to spend building this one.

Angband has a long and somewhat convoluted history. There aren’t many open source games with its longevity. It’s managed to keep going by changing ownership somewhat regularly, with each maintainer adding their own stamp to its play.

The Release section of the current Angband homepage rephial.org goes into exacting detail over what was introduced when, but it’s a lot to sift through, and in terms of volume most changes are just bugfixes.

I have gone through all the pages and tried to render down the essence of each change, and what effect it had upon Angband. In this article, we follow along with the various changes that have been made since its origin, and in the end try to note the best version to play, for people interested (or not) in its various aspects.

Our previous articles on Angband are this general introduction, and this description of its features and early going.

AnteAngband

Some of this will be familiar to people who have been reading @Play on Angband so far, so I’ll keep it brief. MORIA was created by Robert Koeneke in 1983, and may be the first true “roguelike” that wasn’t Rogue itself.

Moria was written in Pascal, a fine language that, sadly, isn’t nearly as popular as C. UMORIA (5/3/1987) is a reimplementation of Moria in C. It was updated until July 7, 1994, with one last gasp on 10/13/2008 by a different developer.

ANGBAND was based on UMoria 5.2.1, and is where our story really begins.

Other variants of Moria include Morgul (1993), PC Moria (unknown years), and VMS Moria (1983-1985).

Early History

Angband 1.0 (1990): The first version of Angband was derived from UMoria by Alex Cutler and Andy Astrand. My indications are that Angband was largely a bigger version of Moria back then: 100 levels instead of 50, beat up Sauron and Morgoth at the end instead of a balrog. This version probably doesn’t survive, and doesn’t seem to have been widely distributed outside the University of Warwick.

What The Frog?

Angband 2.4.frogknows (April 11, 1993): This version was called (right on its title screen) “2.4.frogknows,” was produced by Steve Marsh and Geoff Hill after Angband’s creators graduated, and was the first version with a wide release. This version put a definite stamp on the game, and founded aspects of what many consider iconic about Angband. Amazingly, binary and source versions of frogknows are available from the current-day Angband Home Site.

How does it differ from UMoria?

• Added more Tolkien, D&D and Rolemaster monsters
• More object types, including rods, which don’t have limited charges, but instead have a timeout between uses
• More races
• Special dungeon rooms
• Monsters can be generated in groups
• Monsters have more spells and abilities
• Special monsters based on defeated players (“ghosts”) can appear in the dungeon and attack you
• Treasure pits, a predecessor of vaults, appear. These are large rooms with lots of treasure but also out-of-depth monsters
• Artifacts and level feelings are added

frogknows got ported to classic Macintosh, Atari ST, and Amiga. The CRPG Addict played this version of Angband and reported on the experience on his blog.

It helps, when giving dates, to give some idea of what else was going on in the world at the time. In the same year as frogknows, Bill Clinton was inaugurated as U.S. President, and child sexual abuse allegations were made against Michael Jackson. It was the 16-bit era in console video gaming. Secret of Mana came out for the SNES. Arcades saw the release of Mortal Kombat II and Super Street Fighter II. Among roguelikes, the NetHack DevTeam would release 3.1.0, the beginning of modern NetHack, but they hadn’t yet gotten to the venerable 3.1.3 version.

If you’re only used to 4.2.4, there are some specific things to be aware of. Mages are much more fragile starting out in older versions, with very slow spell point regeneration, while warriors can be played in a much more direct, hacky-smacky style. It you get stuck on a dungeon level, there’s probably a secret door you didn’t find; use the ‘s’ key in corridors and along walls to search for them. You must remember to wield torches to use them, you don’t start with anything equipped. Artifacts and ego items look just like normal items until identified. You don’t find stacks of useful potions and scrolls at once, but have to find across them one at a time.

PC Angband

Seemingly on the same day as the release of frogknows, Charles Teague (who helped with frogknows) released PC Angband 1.0.

PC Angband went on its own for awhile. In the year 1993: April 20: 1.1; May 20: 1.2. August 18: 1.3; August 28: 1.3.1; it switched hands to Charges Teague. Then, March 7 1994: 1.4; and then, by Phil Yellott, on February 18 1995: 1.4.1b. After that, the line seems to have been merged back into mainline Angband.

Most versions of Angband before 2.8.0 are lost, and those that survive are usually only available in source form, but 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 of the the PC Angband line survive and are playable in DOSbox. 1.0 and 1.1 also survive, but their closeness to frogknows means that the Angband site links them from its page.

PC Angband 1.2 (5/20/1993): Players could look at monsters to determine how wounded they are, and a stat autoroller was added.

PC Angband 1.3, 1.3.1 (8/28/1993): Targeting was added, allowing players to launch missiles and magic in arbitrary directions, not just in the orthogonal and diagonal ones. (You still can’t do this in NetHack, since it would materially affect other aspects of the game.) And players could gain more than one level at a time.

1.3.1 is an auspicious release, as the base of Angband’s first variants. One of these is Angband–, which seems to be lost, but would serve as the foundation of ZAngband, a mega-variant that itself saw a lot of iteration. It would inspire CthAngband, ToME, and Hengband, all variants that continue to see a lot of interest even now. Hengband is a Japanese variant with several notable children itself, and ToME has been rewritten several times, and now is basically its own separate, full-fledged game. You can even get it on Steam. We’ll talk more about variants, a huge topic, next time.

Mainline Angband, 2.X

Angband 2.5.0 (12/8/1993): Charles Swiger took over as maintainer. Versions from this to 2.5.9 were released with many technical and miscellaneous changes that I won’t bore you with. Targeting was ported into mainline Angband with 2.5.6.

2.5.8 is the only of these versions that is available on the Angband home site, and even that only in the form of source code.

PC Angband 1.4 (3/7/1994): The last version of PC Angband, and Charles Teague’s last contribution to the game. Many of its changes were merged with the core game. It added a new speed system, and other miscellaneous adjustments.

Angband 2.6.0 (9/4/1994): More miscellaneous changes over three versions, and the end of Charles Swiger’s tenure. 2.6.1 and 2.6.2 are available as source code.

The Macintosh port of 2.6.1 marked a notable addition to the roster of people who have worked on Angband….

Angband 2.7.0 (1/14/1995): Ah! With this version, Angband legend Ben Harrison began his work. The current Angband homesite calls it the beginning of the Second Age of Angband.

Ben Harrison cleaned up the code greatly, almost rewriting it, and fixed lots of bugs, resulting in the 2.8 line being the foundation for many variants. A lot of Angband’s reputation for spawning variants is due to this version, both directly and by its successors. Ben Harrison also founded a notable Angband Home Page on the World Wide Web, that survives today. (The successor to it, thangorodrim.net, has not been so lucky.) And, Ben Harrison invented the Angband Borg, in which one’s computer plays Angband itself, learning about the game as it goes.

2.7.2 added the Scroll of *Identify* to the game, which offers complete information on an artifact’s properties. (Angband loves emphasizing words with asterisks.)

2.7.4 is notable because it’s one of the few versions of Angband from back then that’s still available in compiled form, and downloadable from the Angband site. Its Windows version doesn’t work well for me, producing a garbled display on Windows 10. The DOS version appears to be salvaged from someone’s playfield; it has a valid save file for a character named Whopper, a Human Paladin, who is in the middle of exploring the dungeon, and carries the artifact “Sting.”

2.7.5 rewrote dungeon generation. 2.7.6 added a health bar for monsters. And 2.7.7. removed player ghosts “temporarily,” but they have yet to return even today. This is the version that rephial.org says added Angband’s famed monster memory, a set of spoilers that the game creates and maintains as you play, collecting all the information that your characters have learned on their adventures. However, some form of this extends back as far as PC Angband 1.0.

2.8.0 (10/12/1996): 2.8.1 expanded dungeon spaces so more than one item can fit in a space. Up until then, any dungeon space could only hold one object on the ground. This sometimes caused enemies to leave less treasure than they would otherwise have if they were being fought in a corridor, since there simply wouldn’t be enough room for it all. (The Mystery Dungeon games abide by this restriction, where it adds some unexpected wrinkles to its gameplay.) It also made it so any player race can try to play as any class, although some are probably not good ideas with the stats the game assigns to them.

The 2.8 series on Windows contains rudimentary graphics, but several of its releases don’t like to work on current Windows.

2.8.2 removed the prompt for the number of items to drop, sell, or destroy at once. Instead, players could specify a count before the command, similar to Rogue and NetHack’s repeat systems. After vocal outcry from some players, 2.8.3 added it right back again.

2.8.3 was Harrison’s last official version, although he’d release a version of a prospective 2.8.5 for testing. This version seems to be the first version with support for Allegro tile-based graphics on Windows, but it’s not enabled in the supplied binary. It contains the font-based graphics of the other 2.8 versions, but they have to be enabled in ANGBAND.INI, by setting the variable Graphics therein to 1. Although the tiles are tiny and hard to make out, it’s recommended to play this way, as the terminal graphics are messed up on current Windows. You can somewhat get around this by use the Look command (‘l’) to identify characters in sight. This version does not have compiled DOS binaries on the Angband home site. This (the garbled terminal graphics and Graphics=1 in ANGBAND.INI) is also true of several of its successors.

2.9.0 (4/11/2000): A new Angband for the year 2000. Robert Ruhlman took over the reins of Angband with this version and created the thangorodrim.net website (Wayback link). 2.9 added birth options (see the previous article for more on those), one of them being a way to enforce the “ironman” playstyle, where characters are disallowed from ever using upstairs. Other birth options remove shops or artifacts from the game, or else replace the built-in set of artifacts with randomly-generated replacements. Font graphics can be enabled in ANGBAND.INI on Windows, but are on by default on DOS.

Angband 3.X

3.0.0 (3/30/2002): A notable change with this version was the addition of Lua scripting to the game. You might think that sounds like it’d be a great idea, after all lots of other games have used Lua, but it actually didn’t see much use, and would be removed from the code with 3.0.8.

It’s minor from a play standpoint, but 3.0.2 removed the term “Genocide” from the game, in order to disassociate a mere computer pastime from real-life horrors. The effect was renamed to Banishment, although this meant that the pre-existing Priest spell Banishment had to itself be renamed to Banish Evil to avoid nominal confusion.

3.0.4 marked two significant changes. With this version junk items, which were included as dungeon flavor but served no real game purpose, were no longer generated in the dungeon. And this was the version to, finally, remove haggling over prices to buy or sell from shops, which I have to say, after experiencing Moria, is probably my own personal favorite change. (Up until this point, the game had already been shortening haggling a lot.)

Robert Ruhlmann stopped maintaining Angband with 3.0.6 (6/8/2005). It’s also the last version supplied with DOS support.

3.0.8p1 (prerelease, 6/24/2007): Anna Sidwell takes the fiery spikéd torch from Robert Ruhlmann, and removes Lua support. This is the first version to have item “squelching,” allowing the player to set the game to automatically ignore items they aren’t interested in. Mouse support is added, and the code cleaned up again.

3.1.0 (beta, 1/24/2009): This version marked fairly large changes to gameplay. Monsters here ceased to drop so many items, potions began tending to appear in stacks, and healing became proportional to wounds taken. (I’m not quite sure what that means.) A “bad” class of items from previous versions, that reduce a stat and provide no upside, was replaced with alternate items that lower one stat but raise another. Gold generation was toned down in the later dungeon, and traps start out only generating relative safe types, with the worse ones saved for getting progressively deeper in the dungeon.

Graphics here, by default, are TTY-based, but can be switch to tiled graphics from the Options menu fairly easily. If the window is too small for you (easily possible), the size of the screen can be adjusted in steps from the Window menu.

3.1.1 (beta, 7/29/2009): Another auspicious moment for the game of Angband. For many years Angband had suffered, after being worked on for so long and by so many hands, of not having a clear line of copyright for all its code, which prevented it from going full GPL. While everyone generally agreed that the game should have fully open source and no one was really against it, the community’s inability to contact everyone who contributed to the source code meant they couldn’t fully relicense it. With this version, the last of these rights issues was finally cleared up, and Angband became available under a dual license, both GPL and its own Angband source license.

3.1.2v2 is credited to the Angband Development Team, I think signalling them taking over from Anna Sidwell.

3.2.0 (12/24/2010): Armor Class, the game statistic indicating how protected a character is from harm, was changed to make heavy armor more worth it relative to their weight. The speed system was changed again. Element resistances was extended to cover carried items. With this version, all artifacts became immediately recognizable: items with names are instantly known, although your character still won’t know what their abilities are until discovered in play. Until that point, you would eventually get a good feeling about a specific item if it was an unrecognized artifact that had been carried for awhile.

Starting in this version, I notice, you can resize the window to get more of a view of the world.

3.3.0 (7/31/2011): Dungeon generation got another long-overdue overhaul. New cavern and labyrinth special level types were introduced. Level feelings, a part of the game going back to frogknows, were redesigned, separating the danger level of a level from the treasures on it. Resistances were revamped. This version made the spiking of doors, in order to slow down pursuing monsters, a feature that had long been in the game and derived from tactics in classic D&D, more effective.

3.4.0 (9/14/2012): Development pace slowed for a bit here. Various changes over the years had resulted in Angband becoming easier, and this version attempt to restore some of its classic difficulty.

3.5.0 (12/24/2013): Changed the game a fair bit. Charisma, often the dump stat in D&D-derived games, was removed entirely. Item generation was rebalanced, ego items redistributed by level, and shops by default no longer buy items from the player; you can instead donate an item to a shop to be identified or recharged. Money in dungeons was made more plentiful to compensate. (Shops will buy items again, and less money will be generated, if enabled with a birth option.) Random monster generation was toned down, and continuing the trend towards removing bad items, Scrolls of Curse Armor and Curse Weapon were removed. And with this version, door spiking was removed entirely, along with jammed doors and bashing them down. I guess people didn’t like it as much as it was thought they would.

By this point Angband on Windows had come to default to offering the multi-headed display. (One of the Ben Harrison released versions also turned it on by default, I forget which one.) It also offers current-day Angband’s choices for tile size. At a glance, it looks a lot like the 4.0 series.

Modern Angband (4.X)

4.0.0 (6/29/2015): Nick McConnell takes over maintaining Angband. A new rewriting of the code begins, with the intent of not making game changes until it is finished.

4.1.0 (6/25/2017): Big changes are made to the game after extensive forum discussion. I described many of these aspects in more detail last time. Active searching (with the ‘s’ key) is removed entirely after 24 years; stepping next to a secret door now always reveals it immediately. Identification of equipment properties and curses takes on its current rune-based form, and classic roguelike “sticky” curses are removed entirely. All potions, scrolls, and mushrooms are immediately identified on first use, and wands, staves, and rods usually identify when used, unless they only work by affecting monsters and none are present when tried. Conversely however, Scrolls of Identify and *Identify* are now gone, replaced with Scrolls of Identify Rune. More level generation types are added, including a “Moria level” in homage to the original game. Status ailments that could be inflicted by monsters were made more interesting.

4.1.1 added a birth option to make dungeon levels persistent, not being regenerated when left and returned to. It’s still in as an experimental feature today.

4.2.0 (8/17/2019): As of this writing, it’s the current major release of Angband. (The newest minor version. 4.2.4, was released 2/22/2022.) This version revamped the magic system, adding two more types to make for four major varieties, and added druids and necromancers that specialize in them. The number of spellbooks was reduced so players don’t have to lug as many around. Shapechanging is added for players and monsters. Many new mechanics are added to the game with this version.

What Flavor Of Doom Is Right For You?

Some of these versions of Angband are still available to download, so you can play the one that’s in the most accord with your personal preferences. Over the years, some features have been toned down or removed entirely, and others introduced and given prominence. Generally speaking, later versions of Angband are easier than earlier ones, and also put more of the focus on combat than dungeon exploration, but this not a universal trend.

• If you want an experience as close to Moria, and Rogue, as possible, you’ll want to seek out 2.4.frogknows. You’ll get an authentic, but sometimes annoying, game.
• 2.7.5 removed player ghosts. It also added, or at least improved, the monster memory. Memory is a great help, over many games, towards recognizing which monsters are the most dangerous and why. (The full history of the monster ability recall function will probably have to wait for another time.) 2.7.6 is the first version after this point that survives.
• For graphics, 2.7.6 and successive versions have tile graphics if you change Graphics=0 to Graphics=1 in ANGBAND.INI, which will also ungarble the console on modern Windows. For Windows tile graphics, version 2.8.3 is likely the earliest version with Allegro support, but you’ll have to build it yourself.
• 2.9.0 added birth options, letting you customize the game more to your liking.
• 3.0.0 added Lua scripting, which might be interesting to modders.
• 3.0.2 added item squelching, helping streamline the exploration of the dungeon.
• 3.0.4 is when haggling with shopkeepers, a long-standing feature going back to Moria, was finally removed.
• 3.0.8 removed the problematic “genocide” terminology, and Lua scripting.
• 3.1.1 is when Angband’s rights issues were worked out.
• With 3.2.0, artifacts became known on sight, greatly reducing the possibility of missing out on something great, and dungeon generation was overhauled.
• Like the idea of spiking doors to delay pursuers? That was in the game from all the way back in frogknows, but was made more effective in 3.3.0.
• Hate that idea? It was excised from the play entirely in 3.5.0.
• 3.5.0 is also when shopkeepers stopped buying items from players without enabling that as a birth option.
• Hate tapping the ‘s’ key to find doors? That was removed in 4.1.0. Up until then, if you didn’t have a magic aid to searching, you could get stuck in parts of the dungeon where all the doors out were hidden. With this version, stepping next to a hidden door is enough to reveal it.
• Hate cursed items that make it hard to stop using them? Like the rune-based ID system? Both aspects also changed in 4.1.0. That’s also when identification was changed: identify scrolls were removed, but it became less dangerous to ID things from use, and dungeon generation was overhauled again.
• If you like magic other than just Arcane and Divine, you’ll have to play the most recent line, and thus probably should go with the current version, 4.2.4. If you have no other preferences you should also go with this version to get the latest features and play niceties.

Well that was certainly a long and dry description, but it’s definitely shorter than what I had to read through to get it here. I think it’s still interesting for a look back at a twenty-nine year old game that has been through many different hands. After all that, while it’s changed a lot, Angband still feels a lot like it did in 1993: it’s a tactics-heavy dungeon exploration and combat game, with a lot of area to explore, but with occasional heart-stopping moments of terror.

Next time will be the end of our Angband discussion for now, where we embark on the long-promised exploration into the world of its variants. Angband variants are based on different versions throughout its long history, so having this version key to refer to will be very useful. See you then!

EDIT: Explained frogknows a bit better. Made a few other clarifications. This was a hard article to write.

Sources:
http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Angband_version_history
https://rephial.org/release
Use of the various versions available from rephial.

rodneylives

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

Last time we re-introduced Angband. This time, we go more into what it’s like to play its current versions. Our aim here is, as with one of the the Omega articles, to get you to a point where you can play enough of the game to tell if you’ll enjoy it more long-term. Angband is nowhere near as obscure as Omega is, but despite its influence on gaming, it’s still well off the radar of most players. My hope is that this article will serve as an introductory blip at the edge of the screen.

Window Mania

When you begin a game of modern Angband on Windows, you might be slighty overwhelmed. The screen fills up with terminals! This “multi-headed” approach seeks to keep more useful game information available at once. There are keystrokes that make that other information available on the main screen, so at first everything but the main game window can be ignored. As you get into the dungeon, you’ll find the other windows more useful.

If you’ve come back to Angband after a long absence, you might be dismayed by this appearance. All of these windows can be individually closed by clicking the close-window button in the corner. If you want them back, go under the Window menu and select Reset Layout.

All of the windows are fully configurable; to decide what each does, you can go under Term Options in the Window menu, but this stuff is for players who want to customize everything.

If you were used to, or prefer, the old ASCII display, it can be activated by going under Options | Graphics | None. There are other tile options there, and you can also choose tile scaling under “Tile Multiplier,” although explaining too much about that is getting into the weeds.

Changing the graphics settings will cause the game to try to set them back up as you had them on later plays, which you might not appreciate if you were trying to get the game back to how it was before you played around with the settings! If you really want to return to the old system, then close all the other windows and set the graphics to None, and then close the other windows. To get it back use the Reset Layout option, although you should know that you must actually be in a game to do it, it won’t work from the title screen.

Piecing By Parts Your Pretend Person

Starting a new game in Angband puts you into character creation. You can spend a lot of time picking a race and class, spending points or rerolling stats, all in order to have all that effort wiped away by a drunk mercenary in town before you even enter the dungeon. My advice is, just pick something fun and get started, because your first game will probably end pretty quickly. Classes that the developers judge doesn’t play well with your chosen race will be printed in a darker color, so just try to steer away from those. When the game asks if you want to do stats with point buy or with a roller, I suggest you go with point buy and stick with the defaults. Customizing these things is more for players who already know the game well and know the consequences of high (and low) stats.

There are two major “types” of character in Angband: those who fight in melee and with missiles, and those who cast spells. All characters but Warriors can do at least a bit of both. Magic users can do some hand-to-hand fighting when needed, but conversely Warriors won’t be able to use magic at all.

If you’re used to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, It should be said that, unlike as in that game, your class determines some essential and unchangeable aspects of your character. These are listed for you when you press, by default, Shift-S. Each character that can use magic only avail themselves of one type. In previous versions that was either Arcane Magic, which you might think of as magic magic, and Divine Magic, or what the game calls “Prayers.” Each was the domain of either wizards and allied classes, or priests and their relatives. Recent versions have also added Nature Magic, for Druids, and Necromancy, for Necromancers. In the game, this means you can buy and find spellbooks that your character cannot use.

Initial Interests

When you actually begin playing, you’ll be dumped into a Town that, for some reason, has sprung up above this deadly deadly dungeon. You might not expect this on your first game, but the Town Level has is own dangers: at Level 1, you can be easily killed by its more disorderly residents, and in fact you will probably find the first level of the dungeon to be safer. The monsters in Town disappear when you go downstairs, so you could lose all your assailants at once by just dipping downstairs then back up again.

You start out with some gold for buying basic supplies. If you’re playing modern Angband, by default the game will start you out with okay equipment with which you can jump right into the first level of the dungeon.

Following this paragraph is a chart of the most-used keys. You can use the ? key, then ‘a’, to get a list of all the keypresses. Angband is extremely adjustable and all of these keys can be changed, and in fact there is a “roguelike” keyset that uses more traditional keys. You can switch to the roguelike set by going into game options (by pressing the equal key, ‘=’), pressing ‘a’ to go into User Interface options, then ‘a’ again. There are a ton of things you can change in these menus, including defining all the other keys. This chart assumes that they are unmodified:

Stabby-Stabby vs. Whoosy-Sparkly

When getting started, it’s useful to keep in mind the difference between fighting and magic-using characters. There are nine classes in modern Angband. The first on the list, Warrior, is the only class with no magic at all, other than the magic devices and artifacts they may find. The next four in the list are the “pure” spellcasters, and the last four are the hybrid classes, with fighting and magic.

To attack with a melee weapon, well, this is a classic-style roguelike. Just make sure it’s equipped using the ‘w’ key, which stands both for (W)ear and (W)ield, then walk into a monster you want to attack. To use missile weapons it’s a little more complicated. Equip the right kind of launcher (a bow if you have arrows, a crossbow if you have bolts) then use the ‘f’ key, for Fire, to launch it. You can rapidly switch between weapons you’re carrying with the x key. In previous versions you would have both a primary and a secondary weapon and ‘x’ would switch between them, and you might still end up playing a variant that does things that way. In Angband though the x key just switches weapons. Missiles automatically go into a special section of your inventory called the quiver.

Using magic is a completely different process. For your main spells, you buy a magic book in the Temple in town. Each book contains a number of spells, of various difficulty levels. To see what’s in a book, you [b]rowse it, with the ‘b’ key; to learn a spell out of a book, you [g]ain it, with the ‘g’ key. Depending on your level you’ll have a different chance of learning or casting it, and you can only know so many spells. To cast a known spell, use the ‘m’ key, for [m]agic. Unlike as in NetHack, even when you know a spell from a book, you still need a copy of the book to cast it! Casting a spell both has a chance to fail and costs spell points, but at least spell points regenerate over time, unlike in Omega.

Exploring the Pits

Recent versions of Angband begin you with everything you need to jump right into the dungeon if you so choose. While you may want to use your starting funds to buy a few healing potions or Scrolls of Phase Door to use in emergencies, many players choose to begin by diving right in. The first few levels are pretty boring; the quality of stuff you find increases rapidly over the first few levels, although some care should be taken with the tougher monsters. It is an exciting way to play.

So you’re in the dungeon, what now? You need a light source; the game defaults to giving you a few torches, one of them equipped, which don’t provide great light but it’s something. You light a torch just by equipping it; using it other than that is unnecessary. You might consider upgrading to a lantern later; those are reusable by refueling them with oil. A prominent early artifact, the Phial of Galadrial, if you can find it, provides light that never runs out.

On top of depleting light, you also need to eat periodically; this can be done by either eating food (you start with a little) or reading a scroll of “Remove Hunger.” The scroll is more effective, but only gets you up to 50% fullness, and is vulnerable to fire attacks.

Aside from such basic outfitting, what you’re mainly here for is to kill monsters, lots of monsters. Once you’re in the dungeon it won’t be long before you find them. Some monsters shouldn’t be engaged with, at least in melee. This is often the case for molds and jellies, which sometimes have things they can do to you or your equipment. If a stat gets drained, it’ll be restored when you gain an experience level, so try to hold on that long. If your equipment gets damaged, there’s not much you can do other than switch to something else.

Your inventory in Angband is your life. Not literally, but very much so figuratively. Nearly all situations can be escaped if you carry the right items with you. Particularly useful is things of “Teleport Other,” that let you send a monster away from you, as in the current version of the game (4.2.4) no monster resists this.

It’s a balance, writing an introduction like this; a lot of the experiencing of playing a new game is in discovering things for yourself. There’s a lot of things I feel like I shouldn’t spoil, and it’s not like I’m an expert on playing Angband myself, but I think it’ll help to tell you that the basic play loop is: explore down into the dungeon until either your resources run low, things get too toasty for your, or your inventory fills up, then read a Scroll of Word of Recall to return to town and dispose of/utilize your acquisitions in a safer setting and replenish your supplies in the stores. Shops in the town always contain a lot of certain basic items, especially those Recall scrolls. Word of Recall always takes some turns to activate, so you can’t rely on it to get you out of immediate danger. Also, scrolls are not fireproof, and having multiples can really help you out should something happen to one of them.

As if they somehow know the details of your efforts, shops stock better and better items depending on the deepest level of the dungeon you’ve been to. It’s a good idea to keep checking in with the shops whenever you return to Town. Money serves no game purpose other than to spend in Town shops, so you might as well use it.

You’ll find the usual basic types of roguelike magic items: potions, scrolls, rings, and amulets. It’s worth keeping in mind the limits of each type of item. Magic and scrolls can’t be used while you’re confused; scrolls additionally can’t be used while you’re blind; potions are heavier but can be drunk whenever you have a spare turn. So if you’re confused a Scroll of Phase Door can’t help you, unless you cure the confusion by drinking a healing potion first.

There are three kinds of “charged” items: wands, staves, and rods. Confusingly, using default keys, wands are used with the ‘a’ key (Apply), staves with the ‘u’ key (Use), and rods with the z key (Zap). Each tends to have their own uses. Wands and staves have limited number of charges, times they can be used; some magic can recharge them, but also risks destroying the item. Rods are the odd item out; instead of limited charges, they have a timeout between times they can be used.

On top of this, some items you find in the dungeon can also be used, with Shift-A. Particularly keep this in mind if you find dragon scale armor, as their breath weapons can be quite powerful! The strongest items in the game, called artifacts, tend to have these kinds of abilities. Artifacts are the items that have names, usually in quotation marks.

Many of the strong items have functions that must be identified. Old versions of Angband used an identification system not unlike that of Rogue and Hack, but more recent iterations have overhauled this entirely. Now, equipment items bear runes that you identify independently. While it may take several identifications to find out all of an item’s runes, once you know a rune you’ll recognize it on other items for the rest of the game. Known runes can be seen with the Inspect command, Shift-I. If there are any unknown runes, there will be a couple of question marks after the item’s name: (??). Runes can be identified with one of the spells, or by reading a Scroll of Identify Rune, but if something in play causes a rune’s effect to function, like if it’s a rune of Resist Fire and you get hit by a fire attack, the game will immediately identify the rune for you.

Another thing that got overhauled in recent versions is the game’s curses. No longer are there the traditional “sticky” curses, which prevent you from equipping the item until the curse is removed. Now, you can freely remove a cursed item if you like.

Your character has an inventory limit, and can only carry a maximum of 23 items on them. Multiple items of the same type “stack together,” occupying a single inventory space, but item stacks are limited to 40 items before further items will spill over into another space. There are some weird nuances to this: arrows in your quiver, even of different types, appear to take up one stack unless you have more than 40. The game also keeps track of the weight of items you’re carrying. There is no limit to how much weight you can bear, but depending on your Strength you’ll get slowed by carrying excess weight.

Don’t forget to keep checking the contents of the shops in town. They change periodically while you’re exploring the dungeon, and tend to improve in what they carry the deeper you’ve been (although with commensurately higher prices). Money is good for nothing else in the game than buying things from these shops, so go ahead and spend it. In addition to identification, charged items you sell to shops get recharged, so if you have the money you can then buy it back with its improved capacity.

You’ll notice that some items tend to get printed with dark gray text. These items tend to have some negative effect for your character, or are possibly useless. Magic using characters will see a lot of the heavier armor is printed in gray, to indicate that they will suffer from reduced Mana when wearing it. However, wearing armor might be worth it for the protection it offers. It is a tradeoff kind of thing, don’t you see.

Speed deserves special mention. Your character’s speed is rated using a score that’s displayed in the sidebar. In general, every ten points of speed above 0 is an extra turn relative to the average monster, and every ten points below is an extra turn they get relative to you. This measure breaks down beyond +/-20, but it’s difficult to get that far.

When you fight monsters, you’ll notice the window that is by default in the lower-right fills in with information about them. This window is your view into Angband’s vaunted “monster memory.” As you play, not just your current game but many games, the game keeps records of all the statistics of the monsters you fight that your characters have deduced. This information is saved to a file as you play and isn’t reset when you start over.

At first experience levels come quickly. Angband lets you progress through the dungeon at your own pace. When you enter a level, most of the time, you’ll get a message indicating the game’s opinion of how dangerous the monsters are on it relative to how deep that level is. This message is called the level feeling. Much of the time you’ll see messages like the level seems safe or tame, but once in a while you’ll get a more dangerous-seeming message. In particular look out for the message “Omens of death haunt this place,” that’s the worst possible message and means bad news lurks about. There is also a second message, called the object feeling, that gives a sense of the quality of treasure on the level, but it only shows up after you’ve been on the level for a bit.

Your character has the ability to ‘t’unnel (Shift-T) through walls with the right implement. There’s sometimes money embedded in walls, which can be detected with Detect Treasure magic or just spotted in a corridor wall. Weapons generally are used to do this, although most weapons really suck at it. There exist in the game special weapons, shovels and picks, that are made specifically for digging. They’re awful at combat, but good for striking the earth, although it still takes a long time to do it in terms of turns. Current-day Angband automatically uses your best digging item when you try to tunnel, so you don’t have to bother changing your equipped weapon.

Recent Revisions

Angband has changed a lot since then. Like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, its developers have worked on it, removed some other elements, added others, and what was left has sometimes been modified greatly. Current-day Angband is not really the same game as the old version, so it’s worth throwing out any old assumptions. Of special note, I’ve seen players mention the game seems to be easier than it used to be.

Some of the specific things that have changed:

• The magic system has been reworked, to need fewer books. Angband magic requires you keep a spell’s book in your inventory to cast it, so this opens up inventory slots for other items.
• People who played Moria will remember how you had to go through a rigamarole of haggling with merchants whenever buying or selling something. It may have been interesting once in a while, but it really could wear on your patience over the course of a long game. Thank the Valar it is no more.
• As stated earlier, the magic equipment system has been changed. Instead of identifying wearable items individually, you effectively identify them in parts now. Each item bears a number of runes that determine what its properties are, and you identify those individually. Once you’ve identified all the runes, you know the item.
• Curses are runes too now, there are many types of them, and items can have more than one. The traditional roguelike “sticky” curses, that prevented you from taking items off, are gone. Instead, many curses are subtle and not obvious in what they’re doing until the curse rune has been identified, and other items offer tradeoffs between good properties with curses. Some curses may even be of situational use. The removal of sticky curses (of which I’ll have more to say some time) removes most of the danger, but also much of the frustration, of using the equipment you find lying around.
• There are still individual magic items, potions, scrolls, wands, staves, and rods, that must be identified individually. Now you can give up an example of each item to a shop that deals in it and in exchange it’ll be identified for you. Because of this, the old Scrolls of Identify and *Identify* are gone, although there are now scrolls that identify a rune.
• To do away with the loop of lugging items back to town to sell, most of which are otherwise useless to you, now shops don’t buy items from players. If the item is useless, you can just leave it in the dungeon, as there is no monetary benefit to having it. To make up for the loss of funds, money found in the dungeon tends to be greater in value. (But see below, on “birth options.”)
• What was once known as “preserve mode,” in which artifacts you never find on a level before you leave it are put back into the item generation pool and can be found at a later time, is now the default.

Some previous features have been changed to “birth options.” These are options that can only be changed at the start of the game, by entering Options (again, by pressing the Equal key, “=”) during character creation. One of these birth options reverts shops to once again buying items from players, in exchange for finding less cash in the dungeon. “Preserve mode” can be disabled, which improves level feelings to compensate. And an option in older versions called “Ironman mode,” which prevented you from returning to dungeon depths you’ve been to before, always forcing you to explore deeper and deeper, has become a pair of birth options. And there’s even a birth option now that will cause Angband’s levels to persist once you leave them. There’s other interesting birth options too, including one that replaces all the built-in artifacts with randomized alternatives!

There’s much more to say about Angband, especially about its history, and perhaps its greatest legacy: it has a vast number of variants. People modifying the source code have made more than 100 alternate versions of Angband over the years! This seems to be in large part thanks to the efforts of previous maintainer Ben Harrison, who cleaned up the code greatly, making it relatively simple, by roguelike standards, to make meaningful changes. But let’s save those matters for next time.

rodneylives

An Angle on Angband

If you’ve played a Hack-like, Angband (home page) will probably look fairly similar at first. It, too, is a grid-based dungeon exploration game where you fight lots of monsters and find objects with unknown properties that you must discover as you play. Both games have randomized maps, dangerous monsters with fearsome abilities, powerful magic items to use against them, spells you can learn and cast, and traps you must look out for. Both standard-bearer for the Hack series, NetHack, and Angband now feature graphical tiles by default, although they can also be played in the old ASCII-based format.

Where the games differ is in their general philosophy of what dungeon exploration means. While NetHack has lots of strong monsters, it seems to take the view that the dungeon itself is your greatest opponent. The puzzle of figuring out item identities is a larger part of the game, and NetHack offers both more uncertainty in identification and more ways to identify. NetHack has more set locations that offer specific puzzles players must overcome, like finding the Luckstone at the bottom of the Gnomish Mines, or getting past Medusa, or crossing the moat around the Castle; Angband has only one set location, its Town, although there are lots of special areas that can be randomly found within its dungeon levels.

NetHack’s dungeon cannot be exited without giving up the game, for even once you get the Amulet and escape, you’re thrown into an End Game that functions as a coda to your adventure; in Angband, you’ll probably leave the dungeon many times in order to avail yourself of the Town’s useful services. In Angband, this Town offers shops where you can buy and identify items, but the shops are all menus. NetHack’s shops have a physicality, in that they’re rooms in the dungeons, overseen by a Shopkeeper character, which allows players to steal from shops if they can survive the shopkeeper’s eyes and wrath. And, of course, NetHack has its iconic pets that can help you explore the dungeon and provide other services, while in Angband you fight alone.

NetHack’s has a stronger sense of place than Angband, where dungeon levels are much larger but also less distinctive, and anyway are forgotten once you leave a level. If you go downstairs then right back upstairs in Angband, you’ll find a completely different map waiting for you, with new monsters and items. NetHack’s dungeons persist so long as your character survives, and you can go back to a level after a long time and find it’s largely as you left it.

It’s possible to see a kind of rivalry between NetHack and Angband, but I think this is largely an illusion. Both games know what they’re about and are content to pursue it in their own way.

While NetHack has more name recognition, lots of people like Angband! It’s spawned several popular variants all its own. One of them, ZAngband, is basically its own game by now, with a ton of variants and other notable branch-offs.

The Legacy of Moria

While Beneath Apple Manor has many aspects of a roguelike, Rogue is still at the center of the roguelike genre. Rogue inspired Hack, and then, NetHack.

But also, Rogue inspired Moria, and in fact Moria predates Hack by several years. Moria may be the first “roguelike” game, in that it’s not Rogue itself but was clearly inspired by and derived from Rogue. Even the “direct” descendants of Rogue, like URogue and SuperRogue, came along after Moria. If there is another character-based game played on university computing terminals between Rogue’s release and Moria’s, word of it has not come down to me.

Moria was created by (the recently deceased) Richard Koeneke. First written in a dialect of BASIC, then converted to one of Pascal, he left university and, like many other roguelike authors who exited academia, appears never to have worked on their game again. But he opened the game’s source, and some other people ported it to C, and called the new version UMoria. UMoria still exists, and can be downloaded to play locally or via a web browser.

The significance of Moria and UMoria on the history of computer gaming cannot be overstated. Rogue was popular yes, and has inspired a legion of games taking one or more of its aspects and running with them. But there is something fundamental to the core of Moria that has seeped even more deeply into CRPGs. Diablo’s credits mention UMoria as a direct inspiration, but more than that, the basic sense of Moria has become pervasive.

It is easy to forget now that there used to be all freaking kinds of RPGs, and early on games in the genre looked very different from how they look today. dnd and Oublette on PLATO systems have a slightly familiar kind of overhead view, with the walls of the dungeon around you drawn in lines, but monsters don’t exist outside of your immediate interactions with them. Wizardry, what is now weirdly called a “blobber,” has a grid-based world that is experienced in first-person, and this became a very common means of presentation, inspiring… well, all of these are purely from memory: The Bard’s Tale series, the Might & Magic series, Dragon Wars, Dungeon Magic, Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Hack, Swords & Serpents on the NES, the dungeons of Phantasty Star on the SMS, Arcana over on the SNES, a funky 3D version of the original Bomberman on MSX, and countless other games that presented the mazes without the monsters. Even Strong Bad has wrestled against one of the blobber ilk with his begloved hands. (“Who’s Strong Bad,” asks half of my audience. I know, I’m old.)

In particular, it should be remembered that Dungeons & Dragons, which inspired this whole category, was not a solo game. Despite promises of solitaire play in the 1st Edition AD&D DM’s Guide, you really needed at least two people, a player and a referee, or “DM,” to play; most groups had multiple players, each playing one or more characters. This is still how D&D is most commonly played today. Rogue was one of the games that, by attempting to offer a solo version of the experience, put the emphasis on the solo.

But Rogue has other things going on in it. Its identification game is a work of genius by itself, and the way its systems work together make it special in ways other than just being a D&D simulation. Its descendant Moria, on the other hand, offers a more generalized RPG framework, and that is what has come to suffuse and infect nearly the entire rest of video gaming. What Moria did was generalize the solo fantasy RPG experience. Moria has multiple attack types, like fire, cold, and electricity, and resistances to them, has equipment items with add-on special properties, and has a bunch of generally plain monsters but with colors that identify their properties like they were palette-swapped.

In fact, I do not think I am being hyperbolic when I say that, due to Moria’s influence on Diablo, nearly every game now that features what they call a “loot system,” is actually offering a Moria-style loot system. It is that pervasive. And Angband, as UMoria’s direct descendant, has kept up that system and elaborated upon it for over 30 years now.

J.R.R. Tokens

Angband started out as mostly a themed version of UMoria. If the name Moria sounds familiar, like you might have heard it in a movie once, that’s because it comes right out of Tolkien. The Mines of Moria* are the dungeons of the game, and that’s why at level 50 the player fights a Balrog, trying to do a better job of it than Gandalf did.

* Off the subject. A fun game to play if you’re of a frame of mind is, when watching the relevant scenes in the movie of The Fellowship of the Ring, to refer to random things as “the Something… of Moria!” You can start from outside with “The Gates of Moria!” Say it like Gimli, with a gruff voice, and it helps if you can rouse yourself to try a Scottish accent. It’s more entertaining if it’s a bad one. Then: The Halls… of Moria! The Goblins… of Moria! The Hasty Retreat… of Moria! The Panicked Screaming… of Moria! I find that one can amuse themselves for quite some time this way.

Well you might have heard that there are other Middle Earth books than The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. One of these, cobbled together by John Ronald Reuel’s son Christopher Tolkien, is The Silmarillion. It’s a big collection of backstories and myths and legends of questionable canonicity.

You might remember that the Mines of Moria were not the final destination of the LotR books, but merely a stop along the way. If you read The Silmarillion, you’ll know that there were once even worse places in Middle Earth than that. One of them was a stronghold of Morgoth, called the pits of Angband.

That’s why you fight Morgoth in the game of Angband, on level 100, and his lieutenant Sauron, the same entity that was the big baddie in The Lord of the Rings, on Level 99. And what’s more, all of Angband is deeply drenched in token Tolkienness. It’s got a bunch of Tolkien monsters, both unique types, from the afore-mentioned end bosses down to Farmer Maggot and his dogs, to representatives of species like goblins, orcs, Ainur, and Maiar. A lot of the items have add-on properties like being a weapon “of Westernesse,” which in game terms means it’s quite good.

Despite how deeply it plumbs the pits, If you approach it as a full adventure in Middle Earth where you can visit the Shire, smoke a pipe with Frodo and hang out with Strider, Angband will disappoint you. It takes the wonder and beauty of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings series, and the Silmarillion, and uses them as basically a list of monsters and items. Some of the variants that I’ll get to later try to restore a bit of that, but for the most part Angband is a game of tactical combat, map exploration, and loot collection, and anything from the literature that doesn’t fit that purpose is left out. There’s no Land of Mordor, Where the Shadows Lie; no Gondor with its rich history, except where it involves special monsters and items; and no sad departure of the Elves to the West. (Writing about Tolkien involves capitalizing a lot of seemingly random terms.)

It’s not that Angband seeks to balderize Tolkien, but that it just has no place to use those aspects of his work. These are generic fantasy exploration and tactics games that have been given a coat of Tolkien Paint, probably by Tom Bombadil, who has had difficulty finding work lately.

What Angband gets from the Lord of the Rings and its subsidiary books is a rich lore that it can just do with as it pleases. It lends weight to the games. Instead of just making up a bunch of monsters, which often falls flat, it puts on an Elven Cloak and seems richer for it. It’s not just Angband itself; there’s a whole family of Angband variants that work by replacing (or sometimes, just supplementing) the Tolkien stuff with material from some other author, from Roger Zelazny to Anne McCaffery to H.P.Lovecraft to Terry Pratchett.

That makes a good enough introduction! Next time, in a week, we’ll offer some early playing advice, then maybe a timeline of Angband and its versions, and after that will come the Herculean task of looking at some of those many variants. See you soon-adillo!

rodneylives

TotR identifies Moria as the first follow-up game to Rogue. My notes have it popping up three years after the original, which seems like an impossibly long time now for no one to have made a copy, but even Advanced Rogue, which was built off of Rogue code, didn’t see the world until 1984. Moria, by contrast was written from scratch. Moria’s Wikipedia page notes that Koeneke originally wrote it in a form of BASIC, but rewrote it in Pascal, and I think that’s probably the version that first saw distribution.

(A good place to look for the relative appearance times of roguelike games is this page on the Tangaria website. There is also BALROG, which no longer exists on the living web but is preserved on the Wayback Machine, although a link to it currently eludes me.)

Moria was converted to the C language to produce UMoria, which the credits to Blizzard’s Diablo cite as a direct inspiration. A prototype of Diablo was found some time back that was turn-based, and was even closer to the Moria play style. There’s also GMoria, another variant of UMoria.

A browser-playable version of Moria is reputed to reside here, but currently seems broken. Moria itself wasn’t ported beyond Pascal, but UMoria was written in C and so managed to proliferate. User polluks at GitHib has preserved and cleaned up the source to UMoria and released a version 5.7 that remains true to early versions, and runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. Previous versions ran on VMS, DOS and Amiga. Their account also maintains several other versions of Moria, including the Pascal source of the VMS version.

The object of Moria is to descend into the titular mines and defeat the Balrog that gave Gandalf so much trouble. Some of its many improvements over Rogue include a town level where players can purchase and sell items, more types of equipment including helmets and boots, the need to carry a light source in the dungeon, and levels that could be much larger than one screen in size.

Angband players will find most of this familiar; while it has a much longer dungeon, in structure its apple doesn’t fall far from Moria’s tree. Both Moria and Angband place the game emphasis more on fighting and tactics than Rogue.

Rogue was popular in the culture of university computing, but its source was closed, and what variants it got were built off of leaked code. Moria was the first open source roguelike, which allowed for its conversion to C. This C version was renamed to UMoria. UMoria is the ancestor of mighty Angband, which is one of the most-permuted games ever made, with well over 100 variants, with even more appearing once in a while.

I can’t resist turning this into a parable about the virtues of cooperation and sharing. Because of Rogue’s closed source, its immediate variants are very hard to find now, with only the versions preserved by the Roguelike Preservation Project surviving, and Rogue itself has largely been overshadowed by NetHack and its variants.

For more on UMoria, back in 2015 Roguelike Radio did an episode on it. There is also a good Moria resource page.

rodneylives

April 15th through the 17th, a group of 24 streamers will be playing classic roguelike NetHack for 48 straight hours on Twitch! Their site is at nethackathon.org, and they’re on Twitter. Last year’s marathon can be found archived on YouTube.

They did a similar stream last year in the month of September, but this year they’ve moved it to April in order to space themselves better around the two major NetHack tournaments in June and November.

What is that? You don’t know anything about NetHack? Oh boy, I get to explain it again-it’s a venerable roguelike game that’s been in existence for 34 years! The first version of NetHack is older than the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It began during the presidency of Ronald Reagan! While there have been lulls in its development, and at least one major member of its dev team, Izchak Miller, passed away years ago, it’s still going, and it’s still being worked on. It’s notable for its high difficulty, the large amount of information a player must assimilate to be successful, and for its high degree of fairness (although sometimes it doesn’t seem fair)

NetHack comes across as like a solo adventure in an old school first-edition AD&D megadungeon. It’s full of monsters with weird properties, you have to figure out what your items do, and every game is randomly generated.

rodneylives