Dudley's dungeon

Dudley's dungeon is a NetHack-themed webcomic about the adventures of a player character named Dudley.

History

The first run of Dudley's dungeon was launched on February 2, 2004, created by Dion Nicolaas and hosted at his personal website - it would finish on the last day of 2008, and the code used to create the comics would be made available to whoever mailed the author.

From there, two separate continuations appeared:

• The first, hosted at sadowl.com, began on January 12th, 2009, and uses the same code and title as the original version; unfortunately, it has not updated since January 2013, and the site is now defunct. An archive can be viewed here at the Wayback Machine.
• The second continuation, hosted at alt.org and created by paxed, has several differences, most notably colors and a graphical editor. The source code for this comic is available at github, and it is still active at the time of this writing (July 6th, 2021).

Description

This webcomic is set in NetHack. Our hero, Dudley, wants to obtain the Amulet of Yendor. The webcomic is in ASCII, like NetHack in tty mode, so you can read it even if your web browser does not load graphics. However, do not forget to set proper options when reading it from a text browser (such as w3m or lynx), since otherwise popup explanations will interfere with the text of the comic.

A screenshot of a fan-made comic made in the interface.

Anyone may design and submit, to either of the two new sites, their own version of a Dudley comic for it to be commented and voted upon when published.

Characters and locations from the webcomic

• Dudley
• GWTWOD
• Dudley's pets Fido and Dogley
• Cherry

Locations

• Dogley Dimension

Running gags

• Newts - the punchlines of earlier strips frequently involved Dudley dying at the hands of incredibly weak monsters, with newts being the most common by far. The joke was eventually criticized as overused, and most strips featuring newts killing Dudley are usually rated poorly and referred to as "newt jokes" or YANC ("Yet Another Newt Comic").
  • Newtbane was a long sword named by Dudley in the hopes that it would enable him to kill newts more easily, similar to Sting; he was then killed by a newt similarly named Dudleyrist.
• Yet another meta strip - a strip whose humor relies on commentary about the comic's jokes or other meta-comic tropes, Many of these strips also involve newts in some manner.

See also

• An archived Comixpedia page about the webcomic