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ADOM is an older Roguelike, one of the "founders" of the genre, featuring traditional Roguelike gameplay. After a while its author Thomas Biskup no longer had time to continue development but was unwilling to release the source to allow other programmers to create "forks" and so it went many years without development until recently. Biskup decided to crowdfund renewed development on ADOM and began fixing many longstanding bugs and exploits and adding new content. Development is still ongoing and the latest versions are only available to those who paid $40 towards the crowdfunding campaign. I am not one of those people, so I'll be playing the most recent public release: Version 1.2.0 Prerelease 23. I have extensive experience playing the pre-crowdfunding version and have even won it a couple of times. However I have only dabbled with the newer releases, so the game could have some surprises in store for me. I know there are two new races and classes, a bunch of new mutations and I think there have been whole new quests and dungeons added which will quite possibly kill me if I make it that far. I will be making extensive use of the very spoilery Improved ADOM Guidebook, so if you care about being spoiled on game mechanics/what little story there is you might want to avoid this LP, starting now.
There are two main ways to win the game. The "normal" way is to find the chaos gate that is the source of the corruption in the game's setting (the Drakalor chain) and close it. The other option, known as an "ultra-ending" is to pass through the chaos gate into the realm of the chaos god and defeat him, becoming a new god yourself. I'll be attempting an ultra-ending. This involves performing a series of optional quests, most of which involve finding rare items and manipulating your alignment (various shades of Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic). For the most part the quests themselves are not difficult, merely time-consuming. However, as game-time passes, the level of background corruption (think radiation) increases and your character will begin acquiring chaos mutations with good and bad effects. Get too many of these and your character transforms into a writhing mass of primal chaos. In other words, game over. The alignment manipulation required in an ultra-ending also means you can't get your character crowned your god's champion as early as usual, and have to forgo the benefits of crowning until later in the game. Some of the special boss fights in ultra-ending quests can also be dangerous to an under-prepared character and I think I saw in the patch notes that the chaos god has been buffed since I got my one previous ultra-ending.
Time to generate a character. Upon selecting generation my character is assigned a random starsign.
I get Raven, one of the better signs. "Harder to trick by deceptions" means I get 75% resistance to the confusion ability of doppelgangers. Higher-level doppelgangers can be very dangerous so although very situational this is nice to have. "Messengers will reach you faster" refers to the reward for a specific quest, which I will get at a lower level. The reward is a decent artifact (unique) weapon. Nice but pretty much just icing. Stronger companions is mostly only useful to bards, who start with a pet. +2 Perception is nice enough, but Per is not a key attribute. What makes Raven great is the +10 speed. Base speed is 100, so this makes everything I do 10% faster. Very very nice. The dark lining to this silver cloud is that experience gain is modified by your speed - penalised if you have over 100 and boosted if you have less. Not a big deal though as the extra speed can be lifesaving and experience is no good if you're dead.
Gender selection. There are slight differences between genders in ADOM, the main one being that males start with +1 strength and females with +1 dexterity. I am aware that this and the other differences (which I won't go into here) are somewhat problematic but this is an LP about trying to get an ultra-ending, not an essay on feminism in gaming, so I'm just gonna brush it under the rug and continue. My character will start with high Str and middling Dex. As higher attributes are harder to raise than middling ones, I pick male for the easy Str boost.
Race selection. Race determines your character's starting attributes, equipment, skills, lifepsan and alignment. Mist Elf and Ratling are new to the crowdfunded versions and while I'm tempted to show one of them off, I'm playing to win so I'm going to go with the same race/class combo I've had most success and my first ultra-ending with, a drakeling barbarian.
Drakelings are unusual in that they get a special racial ability - they can spit acid at the cost of incurring some hunger. This is very nice early on and scales with level so it remains relatively useful for most of the game. As they are cold-blooded, drakelings are affected by cold and fire effects in special ways - cold slows them down and fire speeds them up. They also start with the useful skill of Food Preservation. This skill makes it more likely for defeated enemies to leave corpses behind, and slows the rate of decay of spoilable food in your inventory. Corpses are useful both as food and for boosting stats and conferring very useful intrinsic abilities such as resistances, teleport control, see invisible and more.
Class selection. Like races, classes affect your character's starting attributes, equipment and skills. Each class also has a unique set of class skills obtained at levels 6, 12, 18, 25, 32, 40, and the maximum level of 50. Class also affects the rate at which your character gains levels of weapon proficiency and how easily they can learn spells. Duelist and Chaos Knight are the new classes but as mentioned above I'm playing a drakeling barbarian.
Barbarians start with a shitload of strength and toughness, allowing them to brute force the early game - arguably one of the most difficult parts of ADOM for many classes. They also start with some very nice skills such as Dodge, Athletics and Herbalism. They have some pretty significant disadvantages however. For one thing, many of their class skills are kinda shit. Barbarians of most races start off illiterate, meaning they can't read scrolls or spellbooks. This means item identification will be limited to equip or use-IDing until I can get the Literacy skill. It also means my main method of uncursing cursed items will be dipping them in holy water as opposed to using scrolls of uncursing. As in many older RPGs and roguelikes, cursed items cannot be removed once equipped without first uncursing them. This is a bit of a double-whammy as I can't used ID scrolls to tell what items are cursed, and if I accidentally equip a cursed item I can't use an uncursing scroll to get rid of it. Fortunately I can use altars to have my god tell me the blessed/cursed/uncursed status of an item. Unfortunately there are no guaranteed altars early in the game.
My character's background. This is all completely irrelevant to gameplay except for my starting age. Characters will slowly age as game-time passes and if they reach middle/old age will take penalties to their physical stats and can even die of old age. In reality you'll either win or die to background corruption long before reaching old age naturally, however some enemies (ghosts) have an attack than can unnaturally age your character. For long-lived races such as elves this is irrelevant. For short-lived races such as orcs and trolls this is very very dangerous. Drakelings have a roughly human lifespan, which means I'll have to be careful of aging attacks but not as much as an orc would. Unnatural aging is reversible by drinking Potions of Youth or sometimes by drinking from magical pools in the dungeons.
ADOM offers the choice of having starting attributes modified either by a series of questions which each boost one or more stats while penalising others or just randomising them. I could use the guidebook to min-max here but 
Race and class have a much greater effect on your attributes than the questions and I haven't really noticed a significant difference between the results of the two methods anyway. I pick random.
New characters get one talent on creation and another every third character level. Certain races and starsigns get bonus talents, and if the total of your starting attributes is divisible by 7 you get one too, for a maximum possible starting total of 4 talents. I don't qualify for any of these bonus talents so I just get the one default. Certain talents, including all the attribute bonuses (Strong, Tough, Alert etc) can only be picked on character creation. I pick Alert (+1 Perception), which is one of two prerequisite talents for Treasure Hunter, which gives us more/better loot and is generally regarded as The Best Talent. The other prereq is Miser.
I name myself DB (drakeling barbarian) as I'll be renaming myself shortly anyway, for reasons I'll explain soon.
One of the additions in the crowdfunded version of the game is tiles. They don't look too bad. However the game runs slower compared to ASCII mode and I have some difficulty making out the grid sometimes with tiles enabled. Furthermore you can't see as much of the screen in tiles mode. I'll be playing in ASCII. I could switch mode every time I take a screenshot but again, Sorry tiles fans, you'll just have to deal with it. 
For my money ADOM's ASCII is some of the clearest and easiest to parse of any roguelike so there's that at least. I might throw you guys a bone now and then and include the occasional tiles shot for special locations/bosses etc.
I start in the northeast corner of the world map, represented by the brown @. Unlike many traditional roguelikes, ADOM features an overworld map containing several towns and many dungeons. Monsters can also be randomly encountered on the world map. I believe ADOM was the first roguelike to include a world map. The white ^s are high mountains and totally impassible. The grey ^s are regular mountains, impassible without a climbing set. The brown .s are roads. West and slightly south of me the grey * represents a dungeon. This is a new dungeon intended as a tutorial and a good place for new characters to pick up some experience and gear. However, the first consideration after character creation in any ultra-ending attempt is what type of monster will be our first kill. One of the ultra-ending quests involves descending to a dungeon level equal the the number of times you have killed the monster type that was your first kill. If it's something common like a giant bat or a goblin, this is potentially dozens of levels deep. Deeper levels spawn tougher monsters and have a higher rate of background corruption and can be very dangerous. This tutorial dungeon features only common monsters like these so I'll be skipping it for now. I follow the road past the newbie dungeon.
The brown o to my west is Terinyo, the first town and quest hub. The green &s are forest and the brown ~s hills. Rough terrain slows your movement over the world map. Terrain also influences the type of monsters you'll encounter in random wilderness fights.
You enter Terinyo, a tiny hamlet consisting of a few primitive cottages, a shop and a village hall. Trees grow peacefully between the small homes of the local populace. You feel at ease.
The green Ts are trees, the blue =s water, the grey #s walls and the brown /s open doors. (Closed doors are represented by a brown +.) The brown and blue %s are food for sale in the village shop. There are three quests I'll be grabbing here. One is from the Tiny Girl (red t visible to my east) and one from the sheriff (blue t wandering around somewhere not currently visible). The third is a choice between the Village Elder who lives in the town hall to my southwest and the Druid who hangs around the lakes in the middle. Choosing one locks out the quest from the other. The Druid's quest rewards you with a cursed artifact necklace and the very useful Herbalism skill. If you already have Herbalism (which, as a barbarian, I do) you get the less-useful Gardening instead. The Elder's quest rewards you with a discount in the food shop, but if completed in a certain way also rewards you with the not-very-useful Bridge Building skill and the otherwise very difficult to acquire Best Skill In The Game, Healing. The artifact necklace would be nice to have for one of the ultra-ending quests which requires giving an NPC several artifacts, but there's no way I'm passing up Healing, so I go with the Elder.
"Us village is pestered by critters from da caves to the southeast. The village carpenter tried to explore the dungeon but was not seen again. It would be great if ye could discover his whereabouts."
I also grab the other two quests.
"Hast ya seen my little doggie? 't disappeared near da dark hole on da pass... Me fears it got lost. Would'cha gettit back to me? Hurry! Mommy sayz dere a bad bad things in da cave."
Mommy isn't wrong. The second level of the Puppy Cave has a guaranteed ant hive. Warrior ants are a very legitimate threat to low-level characters. Furthermore, the bottom level contains a guaranteed lesser vault. Vaults are areas of a dungeon with a non-random layout, featuring lots of monsters. They are usually themed, for example you can find orc vaults or spider vaults. Some however are mixed vaults with a random assortment of monsters, often including some out-of-depth enemies. Again, a real threat to low-level characters. My character is probably strong enough to muscle on through if I played carefully but the rewards for this quest are shit (a small boost towards lawful alignment is the only thing of note) so I won't take the risk. If you don't enter the last level before the fourth in-game day (I won't) the puppy will be generated as a corpse. Sorry little girl. I'll fetch your dead mutt when I'm confident it won't get me killed.
"Listen! Kranach, the raider is roaming the countryside. He's a nasty raider out on pillage. Slay him and ye'll receive a nice reward. Aye lad, abide by the laws and us'll be friends. Ye know, we set bounties on the heads of criminals. Bring 'em in!"
Kranach is a random wilderness encounter. If your character reaches level 6 without killing him he pusses out and leaves the Drakalor Chain and won't spawn. Below this level, and especially at level 1 or 2 he is potentially very dangerous, depending somewhat on character race/class. If I'm unlucky enough to run into him at level 1 I can possibly take him. 50/50 odds. As a unique monster he does make a very nice first kill. However I most likely won't see him before hitting level 6. The reward is a lawful boost and 3000 gold - a tidy sum for the early game. The bit about the bounty refers to bringing the sheriff corpses of criminal monster types such as outlaws and bandits, for which he will reward a small sum of gold. Not worth the effort.
There's something else I need to do before starting the Elder's quest. I use my starting gold to buy some rations from the store, leave town and head southwest.
Southwest of Terinyo is Lawenilothehl, an outlaw settlement. The name is an anagram of "hole in the wall." 
You enter a derelict and muddy settlement occupied by equally derelict and muddy persons.
I can [l]ook around the map for more information on my surroundings. To my east is an Outlaw Leader. (Cyan @). "Slightly hostile" means he will attack me but not pursue me too relentlessly if I run. Outlaw Leaders are pretty tough for a low-level character to handle but barbarians are tougher than most. And I can spit acid. Outlaw Leaders are reasonably uncommon and would make a decent first kill. It's a bit risky but hey it's early days and I'm not risking much in giving it a shot.
Unfortunately my acid attacks miss and he closes to melee range.
ADOM features 7 "Tactics" settings: Coward, Very Defensive, Defensive, Normal, Aggressive, Very Aggressive, Berserk. These give bonuses and penalties to your to-hit and damage rolls for physicals attacks, and to your DV (Defense Value) stat.
Barbarians get a special ability I didn't mention earlier, called True Berserking. If they use the Berserk Tactic setting and are not wearing any armour (I start the game with none) then they will "lust for blood" when they attack, getting further offensive bonuses. Running around naked meleeing stuff is asking to die so I only ever use this before I find armour. Unfortunately the level 40 and 50 class abilities for barbarians are both buffs to true berserking and more or less useless. Anyway, I "critically wound" my foe with one swing, which means he's almost dead. In return he hits me twice for just over half of my 31 hitpoints. You can see my hitpoints in the bottom line of stats. (H) Also shown in this line are my DV and PV (Protection Value). DV affects my dodge chance and is currently penalised by the berserk tactic. PV is damage reduction. I have none as I have no armour. P is my magic Power Points. Exp shows my current level (1) and number of experience points (0). BVL is code for the dungeon or town I'm currently in. Sp is my speed. (110.)
In addition to [l]ooking at an enemy I can get [m]ore information including a description and a run-down of their stats based on my character's encounters with a given type of monster.
As we see here Outlaw Leaders get two attacks per turn and hit fairly hard. This would have killed most level 1 characters. Nasty. If he hits me like that again I'm dead. My options here are to take another swing and hope it kills him, or switch to coward tactics and run. After I spat acid at him he went from "slightly hostile" to "hostile" meaning he'll chase, but he only has the base 100 speed compared to my 110 so I could eventually outrun him. However I can't leave the map if he's adjacent, so I'd have to spend a turn running past him and potentially eat another two hits. I opt to press the attack.
Well shit. That's unfortunate. I was a bit unlucky to encounter an Outlaw Leader right at the zone-in for Holeinthewall but probably should have run away while he wasn't fully hostile. Never mind, next time: I hopefully kill something! Also a run-down of my character's starting attributes, skills, gear etc since I was planning to leave that until the second update anyway so as to get some actual gameplay in along with all the introductory stuff. See you then!