Angband

Angband is a roguelike computer game; one of the Angband variants is ToME for "Troubles of Middle-earth". This page describes Angband for NetHack players.

Angband is named for the fortress Angband, a location in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.

Origins

The first roguelike game, of course, was "Rogue", in which a thief retrieves the Amulet of Yendor from the dungeon. Today Rogue is one of the roles for NetHack players. Rogue was a binary for BSD, then a variant of Unix running on VAX hardware. Because Rogue did not include its source code and only ran on one platform, several Rogue clones came into existence.

On VMS, the first Rogue clone was Moria, started in 1983, programmed for VMS as that platform's first roguelike game. Moria deviated from Rogue by taking elements from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien; the goal of the game was not to obtain some Amulet, but to kill a balrog. This made the game attractive enough for a Unix port, UMoria. Angband is a modified UMoria that adds more features and in which the goal is to kill Morgoth.

Back on Unix, the free Rogue clone Hack was started in 1985. Compared to Rogue, Hack added features like persistent dungeon levels, pets, and shops. After its author stopped work, a Usenet group called rec.games.hack (and now rec.games.roguelike.nethack) started modifying Hack to create NetHack.

Angband and NetHack have since spawned many modified versions and patches; thus their respective communities consider Angband and NetHack to be vanilla versions, in contrast to variants like ToME and Slash'EM.

Licensing

NetHack is free software under its NetHack General Public License; in contrast, Angband and its variants use a license inherited from Moria which restricts commercial redistribution.

→ Angband OpenSource Initiative is an effort to relicense Angband under a free license; read that page for a discussion of the different licenses.

The town

This page is a stub. Should you wish to do so, you can contribute by expanding this page.

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:

"From this point, this page mostly compares ToME and NetHack; it needs players of vanilla Angband and any Angband variant other than ToME to contribute."

While NetHack players cannot leave the dungeon until they find that Amulet of Yendor, ToME players start outside of the dungeon in the town of Bree.

The NetHack Guidebook makes clear that the entrance to the dungeon is nowhere near town; thus one can guess that this is why leaving the dungeon without the Amulet ends your game:

"You spend one last night fortifying yourself at the local inn, becoming more and more depressed as you watch the odds of your success being posted on the inn's walls getting lower and lower.

"In the morning you awake, collect your belongings, and set off for the dungeon. After several days of uneventful travel, you see the ancient ruins that mark the entrance to the Mazes of Menace." – NetHack Guidebook, Chapter 1 "Introduction"

If playing ToME, read the parchment that starts in your inventory. You will learn that the entrance to the Barrow-Downs is a short walk west from Bree. You can travel repeatedly between that dungeon and Bree. To help when you are deep in the dungeon, there is even a special item, the "Scroll of Word of Recall", to warp you between your current dungeon level and Bree.

Bree contains shops that restock periodically. Everything in the shopkeeper's inventory is identified; you can also identify an item by selling it. This is unlike NetHack where the shopkeeper is limited to whatever is on the floor and never tells you the function of each item. Further, unlike in NetHack, ToME shopkeepers never stock cursed items or junk (such as potions that harm you when you quaff them).

The consequence of this is that ToME players can be well-supplied as long as they have money. It is well possible to buy a few Scrolls of Teleportation and Potions of Cure Serious Wounds (rougly equivalent to NetHack's potion of extra healing, but they will not raise your maximum HP) before entering the dungeon for the first time.

The dungeon

In Angband, there are two ways to label dungeon levels: by number (1, 2, 3, 4) as in NetHack, or by depth (50 feet, 100 feet, 150', 200') where the depth is fifty times the level number.

Dungeon levels are much larger in Angband than in NetHack. Each NetHack level fits on a screen, unless your screen is smaller than the common 80-by-24 hardware terminals. Most Angband levels are much larger and must be split into panels.

Dungeons are also drawn differently. NetHack appears much like Rogue originally did, here is an example of how two NetHack rooms and a corridor might appear:

----------         #
|....i...|     ########+
|..{.....|     #   # 
|..@.....|   ###   #
|........-####     #
|......d.|         # 
|........|         #
----------         #

On the left, the player @ stands near a fountain {. There is a canine monster d and some imp (or manes or tengu or other such small creature) i nearby. The corridor # starts at an open door -, crosses another corridor, and leads to a closed door +.

Now hear is how it might appear in the Barrow-Downs of ToME:

##########    #^^^^^^^^^
#....i...#    ^...+.'..+
#.._...;.#  ^^^.###'^^^^
#..@.....###^...^ #.^
#....;...'....##^ ^.^
#;.....C.#^^^^#   ^.^
#...,....#        #.^
##########        ^.^

Rooms are surrounded by walls #. Corridors appear the same way rooms do (as floor .). There are also some flowers ; (not eels and sharks) for additional decoration. The player @ stands near a fountain _. There is a canine monster C and an icky thing i nearby. The corridor passes between impassible terrain ^ and trees #; the T intersection is guarded by both closed + and open ' doors.

Persistent levels

Most games of Angband do not use persistent dungeon levels, though it is an experimental option in ToME.

An innovation in Hack and NetHack (when compared to Rogue) is that when you leave a level, the game saves the level to disk, so that when you return, you will see the same level, with the same rooms, and remember anything you already knew about the map of that level.

Angband does not provide persistent levels, but it does provide upward staircases. So when you go upward, you arrive at a new dungeon level, though it be the same depth as one which you already explored. A consequence of this is scumming; the process of repeatedly walking up and down the stairs until you find a level that feels good. (Angband characters recieve a feeling when they enter a level.) There is even an "auto-scum" option to automate this; the RNG repeatedly generates levels until the result feels good.

Monsters

As you fight monsters in Angband, you will gradually memorise their capabilities. Fight enough of a particular monster, and your "monster memory" will describe how many times you killed each type, how fast the monster moves, and what attacks it is capable of, including their hit dice. For any monster, you can get the number of the level on which the monster normally appears.

NetHack only gives a vague description of the monster, usually a quote from literature. For a NetHacker, the best way to know a monster is to let it attack a few times.

Players of both games can simply decide to consult the spoilers to gain complete information each monster.

This page is a stub. Should you wish to do so, you can contribute by expanding this page.

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:

"Objects, artifacts, ..."