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Hello and welcome to Ancient Domains of Mystery! I will be your guide through the exciting and dangerous realm of Ancardia.

Why ADoM?
Well, while I played Rogue on my 8-bit Atari as a kid, I never grasped what roguelikes were until I stumbled upon ADoM on a CD filled with shareware/free stuff. The sheer depth and number of options available grasped my attention strongly enough to overcome the interface/learning curve.

So what are roguelikes, anyway?
What the fuck, this is the roguelike thread, go read the OP but I’ll be restating the basics as far as they apply to ADoM. For now, you should know that it features:
- partially randomized content: overland map, quests, towns, special locations are the same, but most dungeon levels will be different for every new character.
- permadeath. You get one save per character and the game deletes it after you die.
- ASCII-based interface. Not entirely true anymore! ADoM has tiles and they actually look good! But it still shows that the game started as ASCII.

You were saying something about the interface?
Heh. Heheh. Heheheheh. You'll see. Oh yes, you'll all see, and regret starting the game

One more thing: For me, a big part of ADoM's appeal was its mystery - it's one of the few closed-source classic roguelikes, so even though there are extensive spoiler databases, some things are only speculated, not certain.

If you're starting the game as a fresh player, I strongly urge you to avoid any and all spoilers - the in-game help explains what you need quite extensively, and you'll preserve the sense of exploring the unknown.

I won't be meta-gaming the mechanics in this LP. I'll be using my previous experience to some extent and spoiling some minor things we come across for better understanding though.

So, without further ado, Let's Play ADoM!





We can immediately see the first differences, the new version has graphic backgrounds, mouse interface (options are clickable), and even music! The @ is a reference to what our character looked like in the classic version.

For now, let's start with the tutorial to keep things simple.



This is our biography. The new mechanically-relevant stuff from here is: the month, your age, and any special events related to our birth (we have none). Normally we should've seen most of that at character generation, but since it's a tutorial the game skips all that and gives us a human fighter.

Months are like zodiac signs, they give different bonuses. Normally it'll tell you what it does. Wand is a mage-month, but we'll roll with it.

Age matters because some effects can age you magically, and as a human we don't have elvish lifespan to spare.



Let's name him.



Now our level 1 fighter Edmund, fresh-faced and eager to die horribly find adventure, arrives to Ancardia. Whoa, how things have changed. For comparison, have a screenshot of an older version.

(the red text is a random special starting event. ADoM has events for certain dates as well. Here it just means that we're starting with slightly less than maximum HP.)



I'm sure the new stuff can be turned off in some config file (alternatively, there's a pure-ASCII version for download), but I'll get to those later.

Everything's clickable, you have mouse movement, pannable minimap, the most basic options displayed underneath, basically the classic game was made as newbie-friendly as it could be.

Oh, and there's a tutorial message!

*tut message and my comment; summarize*

Yes, the basic controls are mapped to the numpad. If you're playing this on a laptop, go buy a cheap USB numpad, it'll help a lot. If you're playing on a tablet, you're thoroughly fucked, because...

This game uses an absolute shitload of keybindings. It's definitely not necessary to remember more than like 5% of them, many are QoL improvements/shortcuts, many others are such obscure and specific options that it's faster to just look them up every time you need to use them. For now remember that there are:
shift-keys: A is not a but shift+a
w-keys: w a means "press w, then press a"
:-keys: : a means "press :, then press a"
ctrl-keys

You now know how to read the manual, press ? then k to look up the controls.



And coming back to the game, there's already a location I don't remember! Surely nothing terrible will befall our hero!



Oh. It's a tutorial dungeon. ( my game's been casualized waah waah smile:



OK, so we're inside a location, that's how it looks for most of the game (except more underground :v. Time to explain what the fuck we're looking at.

Top of the screen - messages. You'll want to pay attention to that, here's where the combat log goes as well as anything special that happens to your character or in the general area. You can bring up past messages with : m.

First bottom row: name, stats, alignment:
Strength - melee damage/to-hit, initial HP
Learning - skill/spell learning rate
Willpower - psychic resistance, initial HP/MP
Dexterity - dodge, traps, ranged weapons
Toughness - HP and recovery from conditions
Charisma, Appearance - affect NPC/monster reactions
Mana - magical force/resistance, MP
Perception - sight radius, spotting traps/secret doors
Alignment - goes from chaotic through neutral to lawful. Will change if you do good/evil stuff. Alignment is also related to your diety, so if Edmund behaves like a scoundrel and falls to mainly-chaotic, he'll automatically renounce his current faith and take up the one of the chaotic human god, with appropriate risks of pissing of his former deity.

Second bottom row:
DV - defensive value; more = you're harder to hit
PV - protection value; more = you take less damage with each attack
H - current/max hit ponts
P - current/max power points (magical resource)
Exp - level/xp gained since getting a level (you can check XP requirements with x)
UCa - name of current location ("unremarkable cave" in this case)
SP - Speed, 100 is average. If you have more speed than a monster you can get extra turns/attacks, and vice versa. (It's actually a dynamic display you can change with : t to show last action's energy cost/your gold/ammo left/turns elapsed in game.)

Third bottom row (sometimes see previous screenshot): basic controls, clickable.

But we've wasted enough time here, let's go kill something. Oh, here's a friendly face!



Not so friendly.

Goblin rockthrower: This shrewd goblin has risen above the plain fighters with his deadly missile abilities. No longer having to fight on the front lines, this goblin stays at the rear (where it's safer), firing a hail of death at the enemy.







We dispatch him with ease. He leaves a potion and a scroll. We take both.

(Potions, scrolls, books and the like get generic labels at first. Those are randomized on each playthrough, so if you drink a yellow speckled potion and get more HP, you can drink another one safely because it's some kind of healing, but if you start a new character, a yellow speckled potion might be potion of poison!)



A few more steps west, the surroundings start looking more like what we'll be dealing with most of the game. That is, underground dungeons.





Down south we find a longbow and some arrows in a dead end.



This is what happens if you pick up ammo with no ammo equipped. The game asks if you want to add it automatically. The Y/n is important in that the capital marks the default option, if you bash into a peaceful creature you'll get something like "really attack the small child? y/N" so you don't turn the whole town hostile on accident.

What did you say? What missile slot? Here, have the inventory screen:



It starts with all the items you're wearing/wielding. You change/equip stuff by selecting a slot here. You can try out unknown items in hopes of getting to use a magical artefact even if you don't have an identify scroll. In fact, use-ID and wear-ID are common ways to die try out new items in roguelikes.

Your backpack is accessed by the "view stuff" option. That's where the longbow, potion and scroll are. Wait a sec, are we even literate? Let's check our skills.



ADoM is mostly skill-based. Your race and profession might govern your stats, but each level-up will give you some chances to roll for skill advancement. I'll explain them later, what interests us now is Literacy - with a skill of 12 we can barely sign our name, so I wouldn't bet on a magical scroll not exploding in our face.



We do, however, have a wand. Wands are basically spells-in-a-stick with a limited number of charges. Good as temporary firepower or for utility reasons, like here! The game gives us a wand of cold to show environmental effects. You can either freeze the water or swim across if you feel lucky (I don't, especially with Swimming 36 and in chain armor).

We freeze a few spots and create a bridge, which lets us attack the cow:



Minotaur: Once thought to be but a legend, these muscular humanoids with a bull's head are now frighteningly real. At home in the twisting underground labyrinths, these cursed beings search for unwelcome visitors, who are given a very violent greeting. With those horns that seem sharp enough to pierce plate mail, you hope it doesn't see the red blood on your weapon.

Let's not jump to conclusions, it's a tutorial dungeon after all. We hit him a few times and drop him (and us) to a low health. The game helpfully informs us that we can call on our god for help:



We have a piety resource. Each thing we sacrifice on our god's altar adds piety, each prayer uses it up. A starting character has enough for one, maaaaybe two divine interventions. But hey, I'm a fighter, he's weaker, I can tank a few hits...



This is what it looks like. You trade hits, the message log boils it down to hit/miss/dodged/found weakness/deflected with shield/etc so you have to watch what happens to know if the monster is too nimble and you're lacking accuracy, or just can't pierce its tough hide.

As I told you, the cow goes into critical HP, panics and starts fleeing. I give pursuit, because I know that the tutorial dungeon is non-randomized and the only open corridor ahead has a trap in it





...and of course the minotaur decides it'd be better to go berserk and kill me first. That's it, people. The single most dangerous enemy in this game is overconfidence. I could've zapped him with the wand, set a more defensive fighting stance, kept my distance to give myself some breathing space, equipped the longbow and finished him at range, but nah, I had to be a big hero.



We get a detailed writeup - it shows a summary of our character's abilities (even those we didn't know during the game), we also get an option to ID our whole equipment:



Get used to this screen. You're gonna see it a lot.



At least we got onto the highscore list - mostly because it's not very high at the moment, I've just downloaded this new version. Give it time. It'll grow.



* * *

Next time: We create a real character that gets somewhere

BTW, if you want to see some particular class/playstyle for the next character, read/learn about some aspect of the game, want me to do some particular quest first, or just see something wrong in my updates, just post! I'm open to all suggestions (except the obviously suicidal ones smile:.