Riders

They were to have met in the garden of the Chapelle Expiatoire at five o'clock in the afternoon, but Julio Desnoyers with the impatience of a lover who hopes to advance the moment of meeting by presenting himself before the appointed time, arrived a half hour earlier.

So opens The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibanez, as translated from Spanish to English by Charlotte Brewster Jordan. The book is in the public domain; you can read it at Google Books.

The plan for this page is to trace the references to the four horsemen, starting with this book, then with its motion film versions, then with NetHack monsters Death, Famine and Pestilence, and finally at the end of the world as predicted by the Bible.

The Riders in NetHack

The four horsemen in NetHack are colloquially referred to as The Riders, even though they are merely major demons who are not riding anything.

There are only three of the four horsemen named in NetHack. However, the fourth horseman, War, is considered to be the player themself. You are explicitly named as such in a message given when chatting to Death, and although the punctuation of this sentence ("Who do you think you are, War?") is ambiguous, the comment in monst.c is not:

/* Riders -- the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ("War" == player)
*/

Strategy

Of the three riders, Pestilence is widely considered to be the most dangerous. Hence a common Astral plane strategy is to identify which altar is guarded by Pestilence using telepathy, and then explore that altar last.

Teleportation has a special effect on riders: if they are zapped with a wand of teleportation, they are teleported to a square adjacent to you. This is a very bad idea.

All riders come back to life after a while (TODO: how long?); the only way to permanently banish them is to kill them, then fill every square on the level with monsters so that when they revive, there is nowhere for them to go. You know a Rider has disappeared when you get the message "You feel less hassled".

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