It will also be extremely boring to watch a game where I play a warrior. Warriors have high strength, dexterity and constitution, but suck at anything to do with magic. Warrior: Your standard which exists mostly to run into letters (and other special symbols, so it can pick them up). Picking a class is the easy part, and will affect what kind of races we can play anyway. Women and men are equally beefy and able to carry tens of pounds of equipment in Angband. And now you get to pick what kind of character I'll be running for at least the first few games, and after that, I'll try and showcase as much variety as I can.įirst: Our character is going to need a gender and a name! I'll trust you guys to pick one, and let you know that gender has no affect on gameplay. We're not starting quite yet: First everyone needs a chance to catch up on the (excellent) Nethack LP - it's not required reading, but I'm not going to be able to avoid comparing the two games in several regards and it'll be more fun for you, the viewer, if you're at least a little familiar with the world of roguelikes. As a result unlike most LPs this one won't be about 'winning' the game: My goal is to play as far as I can to teach everyone the basic mechanics, spoilers, and strategies that you need to get started and then turn you loose. My best record for a run was an elf mage to floor 30 of the dungeon - with a hilarious and inappropriate death which I'll explain the dangers of as soon as we get started. I haven't mastered some of the weirder, more aggressive, and apparently more useful strategies, but damned if I'm not going to try them this game. I'm going to admit upfront that I am not a very good Angband player - average at best.

There's an additional objective as well, but I really doubt we're going to get far enough to even attempt it.

Needless to say this isn't exactly an easy thing to do.

Unlike Nethack, where success is almost absolutely assured after a certain point, even veteran Angband players can - and will - die from not having the right item on hand, knowing the right spell, or stepping somewhere without thinking about it.įor those of you who really like reading fantasy novels about elves and dragons, you probably recognize Angband as the dungeon built to imprison Morgoth from the Silmarillion, of all things - and that's the objective of our game, to get to the 100th floor of the dungeon (or 5000' feet below the surface) and slay Morgoth. Some of its interesting features that diverge from vanilla Rogue will come up from time to time, but I'm going to try and keep the LP from getting too front-loaded - the mechanics of Angband are easy to learn, hard to master, and violating any one of its basic principles will get you killed no matter how good a player you are. It's based on Moria, which is a roguelike created by a student in the early 1980s when Rogue was removed from the campus mainframe and he wanted to keep playing games. Wait, what's Angband? For those of you who don't know, Angband is sort of the bastard stepchild of roguelikes, although it's the closest in lineage to the original Rogue - and in fact isn't even based off Rogue itself. Even the excellent column at GameSetWatch give it short shrift in the roguelike world, which is kind of a shame, because Angband is recognized as a direct influence on pretty much every tactical (and semi-tactical) hack-and-slash game that's come out since the early 90s. Back when Netbrian ran his excellent Nethack LP, I decided that it was high time that Angband got a little love.

Angband tiles