what can I say I'm a packrat...er packPaladin. :) I think five is probably enough now though heh. Just picked up that Rod of Disarming in the Black Market. The Black Market really is your friend in this version-a lot of the stuff on my character came from there.

CHR and INT is basic for Paladin? I thought WIS was the key for a priest/paladin so hadn't worried about it. Has that changed in this version?

I might end up using the to hit scrolls on my Main Gauche, but for now just saw some in the store and thought I'd stock.

I'm really happy with how my sling and enchanted to damage iron shots go -- took out Grishnakh in three shots before he even got to me. Baby dragons go down easily at distance as well. Good point about the Frost shots.

Just got the telepathy cap and used some additional enchant armor scrolls on it. Telepathy rocks.

I am now starting to make my way towards 1000'. Would really like to get some poison resistance before I get there. Saw my first hounds just before shutting it down for the night.

couple more general help tips:

-for you spellcasters, start carrying multiple copies of your spellbooks starting where the dreaded Z's (hounds) begin to appear-1000' or so. Nothing is worse than going to cast a spell on those pesky Z's only to find they corroded/burned/frosted/etc your only copy of the spellbook with the spell you needed.

-monster memory. A handy thing to look at for newbies especially is the monster memory. Your character will begin to "remember" things about the various monsters he faces, and the more you fight the more you will learn about your foes. Two main ways of accessing your memory. When you want to look up something you might face on a level but don't have one in front of you to look at, hit the ~ key and look at current monster knowledge. You will also find many other handy "knowledges" with that key. The other way to access your memory is when you have a mob in front of you, or you can see through magic/telepathy/etc. hit the letter x, then hit the arrow keys till it gets over the mob you want. hit r to "recall" what you know about a creature.

-you might consider keeping doors closed once you've explored around them. Why? Well you will get a message if someone opens a door, but you will also see the door being opened so you can track where something might be coming your way. You get the open door message if there's a door nearby that you haven't run across yet, so you'll know if its a door you've found already or not. Can be a bit risky if you need to get away from something chasing you and have to stop and open the door though.

sorry for the confusion. CHR is a basic stat for Paladins, INT is just too low period. :) STR is a basic one, and WIS helps with spells. And yeah those elemental missiles can be good for uniques too. Another very very helpful thing for Paladins is the spell Protection From Evil, especially against uniques.

Yeah, Boris is wise but stupid. :)

If its deadly enough that you would get seriously damaged from running into a closed door, then its deadly enough to go MBF on my keyboard (teleport).

I arrived on a floor and there was Ibun, Son of Khim two rooms away. Instead of even bothering him, I MBFed, cleared out some baddies, healed up, and approached Ibun with care. You have to watch out for the disenchanters. Then I was able to MDC (Haste Self) and MCH (Acid Bolt) until he almost died, and I MAA (Magic Missile) him to death.

Special level at 1150'. Find my first *shudder* weapon of Morgul. These weapons are heavily cursed, drain experience, and aggravate nearby creatures amongst other abilities. You don't want anything to do with them.

And just lying on the floor guarded by a couple Mirkwood Spiders, I find the reason for the special message, The Spear of Barwe (+20, +15) +4 to CON and CHR, Sustains STR, and resistance to acid. The damage it does is acid based, and does extra damage (though not as much) against many of the same creatures my current weapon (Holy Avenger) does. Perhaps more importanly it gives me two attacks/round and does .5 more damage than my Avenger. I also lose see invis and resist fear with the switch in weapons, but have spells that cover both if need be so the swap may be worth it. And the CON bonus gives me about 30 more hp, while the Avenger had a nice wisdom bonus with it which means I lose spell points and increase spell failure chances.

I'm doing better against Hounds with the new weapon, sometimes taking them out in one round of attacks, so that's my gauge of which weapon I should stick with.

Decisions like these are part of the fun and challenge of roguelikes, but I wish I could wield them both heh.

Heh, just found a Mushroom of Emergency. New item. 200 HP, resist fire and cold when ingensted, and you start hallucinating madly.

Dual Wield RAR

Is there anything more annoying in this game where you forget to or just don't notice that you are out of direct trap range, and hit a trap door and fall through? Just had this happen twice-once on a level where I had a small vault waiting for me when I cleared the rest of the level. Thought I was being careful and making sure I had detected for traps, but took one step out of the detect trap range and hit the trap. :( Then did it again the next level, but was annoyed at that point so really didn't pay attention. :)

So I am playing through Zangband TK for fun. Delved to 26 feet down with a Beastman Mage, level 27. I've only found three artifacts, and that includes the Phial. I come across my first vault and find, laying the ground...RINGIL. Level 26? RINGIL!?!?!? We'll I think fucking won this game....

I've only found Ringil once before, so I looked it up just now, and it's normally at this depth, so that's crazy. It's a brokenly awesome sword. Good bye Holy Avenger, hello broken artifact.

Oh, and I find the Metal Cap of Thengel too. Same vault. That's crazy

Ha, aren't you a long-time *band player? This is usually the time I would find a unique way to die.

Kind of coincidental timing for a thread bump as I started up a game of Tome 2.3.5 about a week ago or so, first rougelike I've played in over a year. Nothing that serious really, just goofing around with a semi-clone of a character I had great success with in an old thread on here.

I've never even come close to winning any of the band variants, despite whatever awesome stuff I find. No artifacts can overcome my fractured focus, and leaden keyboard fingers!

Yup. I'm straying around here to get the + stat pots for a bit. I had all of the things needed with Holy Avenger, Boots of Free Action and Mail of Resist, so I had the basic stuff (See invis, free action, 4 base resists). Now I've got to recalibrate my stuff around Ringil. No sense wearing Amulet of Slow Digest, boots of Free Action, etc,

The good thing about Ringil is that I was at -2 speed for a long time to a mutation that made me fat, and gave me +2 con and =2 speed. Now I'm at +8,

woohoo for Ringil! My roguelike of choice right now is CRAWL, which just came out with a new version a couple days ago.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Wow neat thread. I used to play a ton of games like this. Rogue, Moria, LARN, hack...

I can't remember which is which really. I like the one that let's you choose class/race. I think that's hack.

It gives you a pet as well.

My favorite thing in those games: going into a shop, digging a hole in the wall, picking up everything and then leaving. Of course the shopowner chases after you but if you're high enough level you can kill him. Also the keystone cops ring an alarm and chase you.

I may be mixing up games again but there's also one where you can eat killed monsters. (As the whole game requires you to eat). And different monsters give you different abilities. Loved these games. :)

I'm still sad that I didn't find this site until like right after the Dungeon Werewolf game was over.

It is very bad that I found this site: Rogue Life - Rogue like games portal | Rogue like games, news, community :)

Awesome! I love crawl, since it fits my short attention span, and I wouldn'ta known there was a new version for another few months, without some help. Thx Thomkal!

Aren't you guys glad I necro'd this thread?

I always love the roguelike threads! As usual, the bump will likely inspire me to fire a couple up again, tonight.

ADOM (ancient domains of mystery), that's the other one I was trying to remember. Love the class/racees. Plenty to choose but limited too. YOu get a pet and it has the RP questions at the beginning which choose things about you just like Ultima IV did.

Damn you Abe!/Thank you Abe!
It's all the same.

Playing ADOM now...the best one for role-playing like story I've played.
Will check out zangband sometime though.

I played ADOM to death for literally a decade. Wonderful game. Only roguelike I could beat.

Well, since we are talking about it and all, who wants a Char Dump???

bleh....i poisoned myself eating a kobold. (BAD KOBOLD!)

went down to 9 hp but managed to get upstairs and healed by the healer...then two dungeon levels later I starved to death. Now I remember what I dislike about these. :)

Starving is lame...

Are you a Vampire?

heh no. A bard. I answered the questions and let the game choose for me.

The game lets you eat the corpses you kill if it drops a corpse. But since you can go from normal to starving just walking across the length of the dungeon you sometimes have to eat the monsters to survive. I even have a cooking kit but i couldn't use it cause I don't have cooking skill.

Glad I could help. :D

I just got THREE mutations on level 31 - all of them cool. Nurgle gave me two, and I got one as a Beastman. I now have an Electric Aura, +4 Con, and I am resistant to Magic.

Praise Nurgle! (till he (it?) gives you bad mutations)

I just started a character on the new version of CRAWL. I highly recommend playing through the tutorials, then playing in hints mode-you get to select from three characters that are highly optimized to do well in the early game-which will help newbies out tremendously-cause you die a lot in this game. I picked a Centaur Hunter, who starts with level 5 in Bow skill already and some +1 arrows.

Found some +3 arrows early on the first level and a spear of reaching-that allows me to attack anything that comes within 2 or 3 squares of me with it-with a normal spear or other hand to hand weapon-I could only attack when it was next to me. So now I can conserve arrows which can be hard to find at times. I've also found a bumch of food which is great as centaurs need to eat frequently due to their metabolism.

So things are looking great right now...which in CRAWL usually means an Ogre, Gnoll, or unique is going to show up soon and kill me.

Have reached Level 4 with my Hunter-successfully, though scarily fought off a couple orc packs-always dangerous because of their wizards and priests-and found a defended temple of one of the evil gods-had to fight iron imps, a monster I've never seen before to get to the altar.

Speaking of temples-I've reached the first place in the game where you can feel a sense of accomplishment-the Ecumenical Temple-its randomly placed on level 4 or after and usually contains several altars there-choosing a god is often a smart way to go but can change how you play depending on the god so might not be the best thing for a newbie. One of the three options when you play in hints mode is a character with a god to start out with, so I would use that character once you get your bearings with the basic game.

I chose to worship Okawaru, the god of combat. A pretty easy one to worship-not a lot of restrictions on what you can kill or do to piss him off. But more importantly, once you get your piety up, he starts granting god gifts-many of which will be much needed ammo. So hail Okawaru!

I got a -4 wisdom/intelligence one at level 33 - OUCH! I so hit the Chaos Tower to remove mutations and I had to lose the one that gave me a Chaos Patron before it was randomly selected. I still have a few negative mutations though, I randomly get afraid every so often, for example.

Sounds busy!

Which game is this??

Thommy's playing Crawl, and I'm playing the TK version of Zangband?

Trying out TOME now. A middle earth themed game. Pretty extensive character creation. Am trying an Ent. It has tutorial scrolls too. Big bonus there as I've mostly forgotten all the commands of these things. :)

TOME is the only one I've played so far that has scrolling. You can scroll off the screen and the map keep going and scrolls with you. There is also animation as you move. The water "shimmers" Each spot changes between ' and ~ in various colors of blue. Pretty nifty. :)

Correct on CRAWL Abe-I started another thread on it not too long ago. the older versions of TOME, I liked very much. This one starts out in Wilderness, and I never found anywhere else to go and then I died and haven't played since.

LOL same here. I'm not that exctied by the gameaplay and lack of stuff to immeditaely do. It really need to club you over the head with where to go.

I don't see CRAWL in the site i pointed to. Closest thing is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

There are lots that are centered on you and move the screen as you move, if that's what you mean?

that would be it-it was just called CRAWL to begin with-new people took over developing it and added the Stone Soup part. People just call it CRAWL anyway

Figured. And yeah Abe that's what I meant. Never seen it before as the handfull I've played don't do that. Their use of color and "animation" is neat too. Too bad their gameplay and content is lacking. :)

Heck, Zangband Tk from 8 years ago does that. I think it's an option you set.

Okay, CRAWL is DEFINITELY frickin cool! :)

Bleh died already. THat was fun . :P

But CRAWL is definitely intuitive! I barely had to look up anything to get into it. And when I did the help actually told me exactly what I needed to do. :) Helpful help! What a concept :)

heh another convert. Here's the other thread I started on it-some helpful advice for newbies as well as (many) embarassing misadventures on my part, where misadventure=death.

Anybody want to CRAWL? - Front Office Football Central

The first of many, many, and then some more many. Makes it worth it when you finally learn how to keep yourself alive early on.

Looky at all you Angband lovers checking out the thread. :)

I killed a cockroach, then got surrounded by rats. I cast a summon spell and summoned a bat. Then A goblin popped out, which I killed. ANother cockroach came out. Most of our kits did nothing, but the monsters had equal bad luck at doing any damage but finally the cockroach killed me. HOw embassessing.

Am trying zangband now. Draconian Piest of Life and Nature. :) Love the character crteation :)

Also love having tail swipe

I downloaded angbañd on my android and it has given the game a new life for me. I currently have a level 30 half elf ranger. The interface is a bit kloojey as expected but its workable. This is the farthest I've ever progressed in the game before. It gets a lot more play because I can always just whip out my phone and play it whenever im bored.

Okay Abe, how do I learn and cast spells in zangband. The help system rattles on about the theories of magic without actually telling me how to do anything? Trying to wade through the command list but haven't found what I need.

yeah cockroaches are actually on the upper end of monster difficulty on level 1-watch out for hobgoblins in particular, and if an orc or gnoll shows up, run. Running away is often your best strategy-and try to pull monsters into a corrridor if you can so you can only be hit by 2 at most (one behind and one in front of you.) If you are near death don't hesistate to read a scroll (you may get teleport) or drink a potion (you may get healing or heal wounds). Better to waste a few until you find a healing/teleport than die and not use them at all.

don't know which keyset you are using, I'm guessing original, but try m to cast spells, and Capital G to gain new ones. In the help menu somewhere there should be a list of commands.

Thom, in CRAWL, I went up a level. I hit m and it says i should choose skills to practice. I choose them and they go dark. But nothing happens. What do I do?

The window interface is really neat. LIke that I can select things and use them by clicking on them. I notice I can move to them too but I don't think i wanna do that. I like the old method. :)

Also how do I use my spells in books. I have to learn them? It's an ability perhaps. I'm a Stalker and have a book of Stalker. Not sure how to use those "spells".

Never mind...got surrounded by an ooze a snake and 3 goblins. That was it :(

CRAWL works a bit different with levelling. Hitting M brings you to your skills page-but you can't raise them-they go up naturally on their own if you are using the skill-so fighting will go when you fight in hand to hand combat. you start out normally with 1 spell level to learn, sometimes more depending on race and class. type Capital M (or if you have a book, r to read it, then the letter of the book on the menu that pops up, then the letter of the spell you want to memorize) to bring up your spells that you can memorize-the ones lit up are ones you can memorize-the spell levels you currently have show at the bottom of that screen-the spell levels you need to actually memorize the spell is at the end of each spell in the spell list, under Level.

Be careful with spells-they can make you hungry quickly-and you often don't have a lot of food to start with-you can cut up corpses (with the letter c) to cut up animal corpses to eat-be careful some can poison or sicken you-look at the chunks before eating to see. Humanoid corpses can also be cut up but almost all will poison/sicken you unless you are a race that can eat them. The strategy here is to safe the food you start with-bread rations most likely and save them as well as meat rations, fruit, vegetables, even a slice of pizza! that you find and eat corpses first when possible-you'll get hungry again fairly quickly when you do this-but you never want to be without food as starvation is a real danger in the early levels.

oof yeah that would do it. don't worry you'll learn how to manage a big mob like that as you play more. ooze are slower than you, so you should be able to run away from them if need be.

Type the % sign to get a screen that shows your stats and how many spell levels you have is also there.

Thanks! Are there any of these where you DON"T have to deal with food? So sick of that as a factor.

I never found food to be of any problem in most variants, it was actually almost like, "Why did you include this at all?" The only hassle from it, in my experience, is for mage-type characters early on when encumbrance is an issue. If you don't want to deal with it, play either Zangband or TOME (one of the older versions, not the TOME 4), be a class/race combo that gets decent strength, and then carry around a bunch of cheap food or scrolls of satisfy hunger once you start making a bit of cash.

I might fire up Zangband TK after my current run in TOME, partially for nostalgia's sake (first *band I ever played) and partially because I love dimension door. My best character in ZTK was a rogue with sorcery who used dimension door liberally.

Food is going to be a factor no matter which race you go with-some deal with better than others and there are items that will help too-like an amulet of gourmand that can show up pretty early. Spriggans need very little food because of their small size-so probably the best race if you want to play a spellcaster type. Kobolds can only eat meat but they can eat corpses of most types without trouble and without having to wait to be hungry to do so. Mummies can't eat or drink but are very difficult for newbies to play and since you can't drink-no potions. Vampires likewise will never starve because they drink blood, but they too are complicated to play. I've played Ghouls when I didn't want to worry about food so much because Ghouls can eat rotten or tainted food and even get a benefit for doiung so. They still get hungry and you have to eat to keep your body together-but there's usually no problem finding corpses to fill up on. a Ghoul Monk can be pretty easy to play-no food worries, no armor/weapons decisions to make. Don't play spellcasters, berserkers, or the bigger races as a general rule if you want food to be less of a factor.

Woot! After several failed games of TOME, zangband and CRAWL, I went back to ADOM. Randomly got a hurthling priest with healing potions, cooking, food preservation, concentration, first aid and healing.
AND two rooms away from starting position I find a ZOO! WOOT!

Killed everything in it and shot up to level 6. :)

Finally looking good and cooking up some nice orc.

Holy Crap, I ran into a Dragon Monster Pit - I didn't even know they had those. There are great wyrms, ancients, etc. That is nasty. I was wondering why I had to kill four Etheral Dragons. I'm getting off this level.

Coward! :) I've seen dragon pits of the lowest level dragon-all the same color in Zangband, and had heard there were pits like yours too, but have never seen one-likely because I seldom get down that far. :)

Those dragons can drop some great items, and who knows there may be a couple artifacts on the floor in there... ;)

Damnit, I ran from the dragon pit into a demon pit complete with many Balrogs. I'm on Dungeon level 40, how about a little break?

Crimson Fox's Bits of Wisdom #455:

"A closed door is a happy door."

Crimson Fox's Bits of Wisdom #942:

"A Powerful Level 9 firebolt is no substitute for a basic swimming skill on a water level one square away from the shore."

Dude that sucks - and its funny too.

Yup :) I used to cheat in these games (I think it was adom) by making a copy of the character file while I was playing. It gets deleted once you die, so it's just a matter of (if that ever happens) copying it back to its original name. Just got tired of deaths like this. I searched and searched and searched for a secret door in that upper room and found none. Eventually had to take the plunge.

Really dumb question, can't seem to Zangband TK to run. I get the following error:

Error sourcing I:\Backup E\Zangband\ZangbandTK\OmnibandTk-1.4\tk\boot.tcl
wrong # args: should be "source fileName"

I also tried putting the directory on my system drive and that didn't work either.

Any help on getting this thing running?

What OS are you running? (not that it will likely help me troubleshoot for you, but hopefully it will for someone else).

Still running XP

I like the new cat race in Tome.

Maybe this thread will help? there's 18 pages so I didn't go through it all, but about 4 or 5 posts down they mention a similar problem and how they fixed it:

Zangbandtk - Reloaded Forum

maybe try redownloading it, or downloading it from another site?

Problem solved posting here just for reference.

You need to have the ZangbandTK directory in C:\Roguelikes and the ZangbandTK needs to have no spaces.

Thanks Thomkal for pointing me to the fix.

Cool, glad it helped, have fun with the game.

so what's different about Zangband TK? Is it different from Zangband?
Check the link I posted earlier that has lots of these. Is that Zangband the same or not?

It's zangband basically with a lot of graphical bells and whistles. Here's a review with a link for a bunch of screenshots:

ZangbandTK @ Reloaded.org

Crimson Fox's Bits of Wisdom #785:

Eventually "one" blink dog and large bat will win.

It's also an olde,r stable version of Z too.

I think someone is dyin gtoo much :)))

where's the source of your version of zang

TK? Same place that was linked to above. The Reloaded page.

that death was just cruel CF. Shame on ADOM! :)

This is what happens when you run out of light...you end up in a room surrounded by spiders and a mage.

which one, Thomkal? :) The swimming one or the blink dogs? I presonally disliked the blinkdog one more, because I couldn't make any progress. It took 2-3 hits before they would die and I was trapped in the corridor while they all just kept summoning others. I didn't think bats could summon others but maybe the blink dogs taught them how. Notice how many of the buggers I killed in my totals and STILL the screen was covered in em. :)

What we really need is a good old fashioned RPG game done in forum.

You guys interested?

the blink dogs one because it was overkill :)

We've tried and/or discussed this at least once in the past here, but if I remember correctly, nothing much happened with it.

Ironhead, did you not buy any torches in town?

Nope - I started off with three and didn't buy anymore. It was my first time through the game so I didn't know how many I needed. I was actually heading up to the surface to buy more torches when my last one went out.

Crimson Fox's Bits of Wisdom #245:
WAHHHHH! Trolls can't read!!!!!

Attachment 2890

I am very happy that I just came across:

Ring of Lordly Protection
+17 AC
Nether Resist
Hold Life
Disenchant Resist
Poison Resist
Nexus Resist
Free Action


That's nasty. They are normally found way deep in the dungeon. I know in some Bands they are the best non-artifact ring you can find and they are at level 100. I'm on 44 and got it as a drop from a minor demon.

Crimson Fox's Bits of Wisdom #625:

Fight Green Slime at a distance unless you want to upchuck your hit points.

Wow, what a ring. Nice one.