Introduction

What is this?
Angband is a third-generation roguelike game. Rogue begat Moria back in the 1980's, and Moria begat Angband in the early 90's. Angband is a hack-and-slash roguelike; it's all about beating up monsters to get experience and loot, so you can beat up bigger monsters for more experience and better loot. Diablo 1 is basically Angband with graphics and a plot. And real-time combat.

Angband's been in more or less continual development for its entire 20-odd-year history. Its codebase is surprisingly clean for such an old project; as a result, there's a ton of Angband variants out there. Heard of Zangband? ToME? Sil? They all originally started as Angband variants.

So what am I in for?
ASCII graphics! Procedurally-generated levels! Turn-based combat! A weird mix of old D&D, Tolkein, and whatever the devs have seen fit to throw in!

Angband is an infamously long game; players sometimes spend months on a single character. I'm going to do my best to keep the pace up and, if necessary, just plow through characters. I'm pretty decent at this game, but that doesn't mean that every character will win. "Play fast, die young, leave an ugly corpse" used to be my motto, but then they removed the Charisma stat so I guess my corpses are all

now.

Will you be playing as [X] race or class?
Maybe! Once our first character dies I'll throw things open for you guys to inflict different possibilities on me.

Will you be playing my favorite variant?
I'm not, but our awesome fleet of goons is playing plenty of variants, and I've linked their posts, below. Seriously, you guys rock.

Where can I get the game?
The official releases are available here. If you want to play on the bleeding edge, then you can download the nightly builds here. I strongly recommend that new players read Bonus Update 2, which goes over character creation, as some races and classes are markedly better than others.

I can't be bothered to actually download official releases. I have a Git clone of the latest development version; that's what we'll be playing -- it's functionally like playing one of the nightly builds. Every once in awhile I'll pull and recompile. Practically speaking this won't mean much except that we might find the occasional bug. Usually these aren't game-breaking!

Freude

Bryson

Friar Tuck

Bonus

Other stuff
You might also want to check out the ToME4 LP megathread that got its start here.

There's also an active LP of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, another classic roguelike.

The Let's Play Archive

Angband

by TooMuchAbstraction

Introduction

Table of Contents

Freude

Bryson

Friar Tuck

Bonus