Angband is a roguelike computer game in a style somewhat different from NetHack. Angband and its variants are popular enough to rival NetHack; some classifications divide roguelike games between "hacklikes" and "bands". Among the variants of Angband is a game called ToME for "Tales of Middle-earth".
Angband is named for the fortress Angband, a location in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Angband and most of its variants have a Middle-earth theme; the usual goal is to go to the bottom of the dungeon and fight Morgoth.
Angband references in NetHack[]
The hallucinatory monsters of NetHack include some monsters from Angband. When hallucinating, you may find:
In the source code (at do_name.c#line888), NetHack credits Morgoth to Angband. NetHack credits the dragon to Angband's ancestral game Moria, but the dragon still appears in Angband. Ents appear in some Angband variants, but NetHack credits the Ent to the original source, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Middle-earth is also the original source for Morgoth.
Angband and NetHack also share some elements from Middle-earth. These include lembas wafers, mithril objects, and monsters such as the hobbit and the balrog.
Origins[]
- Rogue was the first roguelike game. Rogue started as a binary for BSD, 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.
- For computers running VMS, the first Rogue clone was Moria, started in 1983. The port from VMS and Pascal to Unix and C was Umoria, of which Angband is a variant.
- Meanwhile, on Unix appeared a free Rogue clone, Hack, of which NetHack is a variant.
In Rogue, the goal was to obtain an Amulet of Yendor. Moria deviated from Rogue by featuring a town above the dungeon and by not featuring the Amulet; the goal was to kill a balrog. Angband lengthened the game and featured the goals of killing Sauron and then Morgoth.
Hack, though retaining the Amulet, added features like persistent levels, pets, and shops. NetHack changed the game even more with additions like dungeon branches.
Development of Angband and NetHack continues today; both games have 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.
License[]
NetHack is free and open source software under its NetHack General Public License. Angband and its variants use a license inherited from Moria which prohibits selling copies of the game. The practical effect of this is that operating systems like Debian originally classified NetHack as "free" and Angband as "non-free", and refused to include Angband when selling discs of the system. The Angband OpenSource Initiative was a successful attempt to change this: on January 9, 2009[1], Angband was completely dual licensed under the Moria license, and the GNU General Public License.
The Moria license also does not contain explicit permission to modify the game, but modification is a strong tradition of the Angband community. Meanwhile, UMoria has been licensed under the GNU General Public License too.
Gameplay[]
Know firstly that Angband is a much longer game than NetHack. This is a consequence of the vastness of Angband's dungeon. It may take weeks and months to play an Angband character from the beginning to the triumph over Morgoth (or to a late but permanent death).
The town[]
Moria added a town just outside the dungeon entrance. While NetHack players cannot leave the dungeon until they find the Amulet of Yendor, Moria and Angband players can repeatedly visit the town, using the services and shops. Central to the Angband is the Scroll of Word of Recall, an item that warps you between town and the deepest visited dungeon level. Some Angband variants even let you leave town to find other dungeons and towns.
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"
Angband shops are somewhat less fun than the ones in NetHack; the game has a menu at each shop entrance. Pets or monsters cannot enter shops or take items. Forget about grabbing some items and reading a scroll of teleportation to escape; all items are "behind the counter" and commands like reading do not work in shops. There also is no way to attack and kill a shopkeeper.
Items in shops are identified, so shopkeepers will not bother selling cursed items or useless stuff (like the potion of blindness). You can also identify things by selling them; this is great for unknown scrolls, potions, and magical devices from the dungeon; this helps, because the number of different potions, scrolls etc. is several times greater than in Nethack. There is no "price identification" because shopkeepers never identify items until after they buy them. Instead, shopkeepers pay a base price for unidentified items.
Shops are reliable sources of food and basic items; beginners can supply themselves well if they have money, however the dungeon is the only source of better and more enchanted items. Food supply is limitless and thus largely a non-factor unless one is playing an ironman game.
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.
- (There is an option to center the screen on the @, as in Linley's Dungeon Crawl, but the game typically disables this by default. Instead, the map jumps to another panel as you approach the edge. You might also experience surprise attacks from offscreen monsters as you approach the edge. So you may want to enable that center_player option.)
Larger levels make room for larger rooms and longer corridors. Each level takes longer to explore; in fact some Angband players will take the first staircase 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 Angband:
########## #####+#### #........# #...'.'..+ + door #........# ###.###'#### ' open door #..@.....####...# #.# @ hero #........'....### #.# # wall #......C.###### #.# C canine #.,......# #.# , food ration ########## #.#
Angband does not have persistent levels. If you return to the same depth, Angband generates a new level with new monsters and items. A consequence of this is scumming; the process of repeatedly going up and down a staircase until Angband generates a good level (made known to the player by level feelings). Because you cannot revisit a level, Angband players do not leave stashes of items like NetHack players would. Instead, the Angband town provides a home where players can stash extra items to free their inventory slots.
Monsters[]
As you fight monsters in Angband, 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. Angband also has the odd feature that you retain your monster memory after death, when using the same save file to start a new character.
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, Angband lets you target any nearby monster; NetHack restricts you to firing in eight directions. But Angband does not have symmetric field of view, especially around corners, so players exploit this to target monsters who cannot see to target the player. (For examples of this, see the "line of sight" explanation in Lord Dimwit's Advanced Strategy Guide for ToME, section 3.3 "Fighting Monsters that Summon Stuff".)
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.
Angband 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, an Angband 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, Angband does generate cursed weapons and armor with negative enchantments.)
In some ways, Angband objects can be even more complex than NetHack objects. It becomes even more complex in Angband variants. For example ToME has:
- Artifacts. Unique items with extra powers, taken from a fixed list, similar to NetHack artifacts.
- Randarts. Randomly-generated items that have artifact-like properties.
- Ego items. Extra properties; that Scimitar might be a Scimitar of Frost, which does extra cold damage and provides cold resistance.
- Junkarts. Does nothing except when you "activate" (invoke) it.
Sometimes, the Scroll of Identify does not reveal all these advanced properties, and one must use a Scroll of *Identify* instead.
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 Angband, each item has an associated dungeon depth. In general, Angband 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. In ToME, even wands will feature higher base levels. A winning player often wields and wears several artifacts simultaneously!
Both NetHack and Angband players can wield weapons, wear armor (in several armor slots), and put on rings and amulets. In Angband, wearing something frees an inventory slot, which is nice because Angband only has 23 slots (a to w). Even when counting equipment slots, Angband 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; Angband does not.
So how do Angband players save slots? They find spellbooks with multiple spells. They destroy items with the "destroy" command. They become so wealthy that they need not gather items to sell. Angband has no gems and fewer miscellaneous tools than NetHack, so that frees up many slots.
References[]
External links[]
- rephial.org, official Angband site
- angband.oook.cz, Angband community site
- Thangorodrim, old official Angband site (no longer updated)
Variants:
- Official ToME site
- Official ZAngband site (no longer updated)
- oook's variant list