Moria (roguelike)
Moria is one of the earliest roguelike computer game, created in 1983. Moria and its variants rival NetHack and its own in popularity - many classifications divide roguelike games between "hacklikes" and "*bands", with the latter being named after Angband, the most famous Moria variant.
Contents
History
Rogue started as a binary for BSD, which was then a variant of Unix running on VAX hardware. Because Rogue did not include its source code and originally ran only on one platform, several Rogue clones came into existence. Moria was the first of these many Rogue clones, or roguelikes, created for computers running VMS. Meanwhile, a free Rogue clone known as Hack was made for Unix, from which NetHack would come to be; Hack added features such as persistent levels, pets, and shops, while NetHack changed the game even more with additions like dungeon branches.
A port from VMS and Pascal to Unix was eventually created, known as Umoria - Angband is one of several Umoria variants - while another variant, called Imoria, was created based on the original Pascal version.
Development of the original Moria essentially ended in the late 1980s, while development of other non-Angband variants of Moria would continue until 1993; there was brief attempt to revive Imoria after this year, and development of Umoria would end in 1995. On the other hand, development of Angband and its derivatives continue to this day. The Moria community considers Umoria, VMS Moria, and in later eras Angband, to be "vanilla" versions of the game in contrast to variants like ZAngband, IMoria, or Pmoria - these would be analogous to NetHack Plus or SLASH.
Summary
Moria and most of its variants are set in Middle-earth, with the game taking its name from the underground city of Moria.
Moria deviates from the structure of Rogue in many significant ways, with the most notable being the addition of a town above the dungeon. Unlike NetHack, where the dungeon is a long trek away from civilization, Moria has a town set right near the dungeon entrance. Due to the non-persistent floors, Moria generates a new level with new monsters and items every time you leave a floor and return to it at a later point, making staircases one-way; Angband would change this during its own development so that staircases could be re-used. Therefore, Moria players seeking to make stashes generally leave them in the town, where they may still be disturbed by the town's other inhabitants.
Another significant change from the structure of Rogue was the shift of the main objective. Rather than retrieving the Amulet, the objective of the original Moria and variants that retain its name is to reach the bottom of the dungeon and defeat the Balrog.
Both these changes and others, combined with the vastness of the dungeon and the impermanence of its floors, genereally means that the average Moria playthrough is of a similar length to NetHack if not longer. It may take weeks and months to play a Moria character from the beginning to either triumph over the Balrog or an inglorious death.
The Town
In Moria, the town contains the bulk of the game's services and shops; central to Moria is the Scroll of Word of Recall, an item that warps you between town and the deepest visited dungeon level, reducing the time and danger of making a trip back to your stash. Some Moria variants expand on this feature: Angband and other *bands let you leave town to find other dungeons and towns, while Moria variant BOSS instead has you defeating one of the Boss's lieutenants, after which it automatically transports you to another town with a more difficult dungeon.
Shopping in Moria mostly consists of interacting with a menu at each shop entrance, meaning that you cannot attack or rob shopkeepers, and other citizens cannot enter shops or take items. Items in shops are bought and sold fully identified, shopkeepers pay a base price for unidentified items, and their wares do not include cursed items; this is a useful way to ID the wider number of different potions, scrolls, and other items that Moria has compared to NetHack.
Shops are reliable sources of food and basic items; beginners can supply themselves well if they have money, but the dungeon will still be the more viable source of better and higher-enchanted items. Food supply is limitless and thus largely a non-factor, unless one is playing an "ironman game" that forgoes access to the town.
The Dungeon
In Moria, there are two ways to label dungeon levels: by number (1, 2, 3, 4) as in NetHack, or by depth where the measure is fifty times the level number (50 feet, 100 feet, 150', 200').
Moria dungeon levels are much larger than those found in NetHack, which are designed to fit on 80x24 terminals, and thus are split into panels. The map jumps to another panel as you approach the edge, and offscreen monsters might surprise you with attacks as you approach the edge. There is an option to center the screen on your hero (@), as in Linley's Dungeon Crawl; the game typically disables this by default, so you may want to enable it prior to your first forays in. Larger levels mean larger rooms and longer corridors that take longer to explore, and it is not uncommon for some Moria players to take the first staircase they find instead of fully exploring a level.
Dungeons are also drawn differently. For example, a NetHack room and corridor might appear like this:
---------- # |........| ########+ + door |..{.....| # # - open door |..@.....| ### # @ hero |........-#### # - | wall |......d.| # d dog |.%......| # % food ration ---------- #
Now here is how it might appear in the dungeon of Moria:
########## #####+#### #........# #...'.'..+ + door #........# ###.###'#### ' open door #..@.....####...# #.# @ hero #........'....### #.# # wall #......j.###### #.# j jackal #.,......# #.# , food ration ########## #.#
Monsters
As you fight monsters in Moria, the game will gradually memorise their capabilities. Fight enough of a particular monster, and the game's monster memory will describe how many times you killed each type, how fast the monster moves, what attacks it has, and what level it normally appears on. Moria also has the odd feature that you retain your monster memory after death, when using the same save file to start a new character. These features were added in version 5 of Umoria; they were not present in earlier versions, or in variants based on them.
NetHack only gives a vague description of the monster, usually a quote from literature. When playing NetHack, you must remember those monsters yourself, or consult some bestiary of spoilers.
When using a ranged attack, Moria lets any nearby monster target you; NetHack restricts them to firing in eight directions. The Umoria variant Morgul granted this power to the player also, and it quickly spread to Angband and its variants. But Moria did not allow monsters to target around corners or pillars, so players with sufficiently high speed could exploit this to attack monsters while preventing them from seeing to target the player. This technique was known as "pillardancing."
Objects
NetHack has plenty of ways to make objects surprise the unspoiled player: blessed, cursed, and uncursed objects, erodeproof objects, greased objects, and objects with enchantment bonuses and charges.
Moria objects have some of these characteristics, however not in the same way. NetHack applies a B/U/C system to all items, and NetHack curses can have many undesirable effects, such as less healthy potions. However, a Moria curse is only a "tag on" property of the item that prevents you from taking it off, but does not normally degrade the item. (Like NetHack, Moria does generate cursed weapons and armor with negative enchantments.)
In lieu of artifacts, Moria has Ego items; these can appear in unlimited numbers, but have extra properties: a Scimitar might have a Frost brand, making it a Scimitar of Frost, which does extra cold damage and provides cold resistance.
The Scroll of Identify does not reveal all these advanced properties (it only gives the two-letter code for the ego-type), and one must read the manual to determine what the ego-types do.
Probabilities control the generation of items in both games. These probabilities remain uniform in NetHack across dungeon levels, though they differ between branches; this is why the Gnomish Mines has more tools. But in Moria, each item has an associated dungeon depth. In general, Moria items become progressively more powerful as the hero descends deeper into the dungeon. Down there, weapons and armor have better enchantments, and there are more and better artifacts. Likewise, the more powerful wands, scrolls, etc will appear more frequently at deeper levels.
Both NetHack and Moria players can wield weapons (Moria has both an active and a spare weapon slot, with a command to quickly swap the two), wear armor (in several armor slots), and put on rings and amulets. In Moria, wearing something frees an inventory slot, which is nice because Moria only has 22 slots (a to v). Even when counting equipment slots, Moria still has fewer slots than NetHack, which gives you 52 slots (a to z and A to Z). In addition, NetHack has containers like bags and chests to hold many screenfuls of items; Moria does not.
So how do Moria players save slots? They find spellbooks with multiple spells. They become so wealthy that they need not gather items to sell. Moria has no gems and fewer miscellaneous tools than NetHack, so that frees up many slots. The most important kinds of miscellaneous tools, light sources, have a dedicated slot, and the second most important, the digging implements, can be put in the "spare weapon" slot.
Moria references in NetHack
The hallucinatory monsters of NetHack include some monsters from Moria. When hallucinating, you may find:
In the source code, NetHack credits the dragon to Moria. Ents appear in some Moria variants, but NetHack credits the Ent to the original source, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Moria and NetHack also share some elements from Middle-earth. These include lembas wafers, mithril objects, and monsters such as the hobbit and the balrog.
In UnNetHack, there's the Ruins of Moria branch, whose third level is a tribute to Moria: the level is non-persistent.
License
NetHack is free and open source software under its NetHack General Public License. Moria and its variants originally used a license which prohibited selling copies of the game. The practical effect of this is that operating systems like Debian originally classified NetHack as "free" and Moria as "non-free", and refused to include Moria when selling discs of the system. The Angband OpenSource Initiative was a successful attempt to change this: on January 9, 2009,[1] Angband and Moria were completely dual licensed under the Moria license, and the GNU General Public License. (Moria had in fact been so dual licensed some time earlier, thanks to its lower number of contributors.)
The Moria license also did not contain explicit permission to modify the game, but modification is a strong tradition of the Moria community.
References
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