Crapknocker

The midgame in FrogComPos Band is characterized mainly by trying to cover your resistances while still doing enough damage to be able to kill monsters. You'll also want to pick up as much speed as possible. But the main thing you'll be doing is exploring. While in town, go ahead and hit that < key and take a good long look at the wider world around you.

You'll notice other towns, dungeons and paths between cities. For now, try and stay on the path to reduce the chances of getting ambushed by random monsters. It might not be much more than annoying now, but later on in different zones the enemies can quickly ramp up in difficulty. For now, head to Anambar, the city in the northwest, and down to the troll / orc caves just southeast of it.

If you get stuck there, try some of the other dungeons around your level. Try to pick up useful detection staffs and rods, especially detect monster and detect traps. Keep potions of cure critical wounds on you at all times, just like teleport scrolls. Do the various quests found in different towns throughout the world. Be aware that these quests are usually quite a bit harder than the danger level indicates, especially the Cloning Pits quest.

Once you've got the cash flow, you can teleport between towns you've visited by using the option in the inns. This can be helpful when you're flush on dosh and would like to upgrade some equipment. Take a shopping trip to every city’s black market and you might find a handy ring or stat potion. Perhaps a staff of Enlightenment to map the dungeon for you? As you level up, the black market will offer better and better quality items to purchase.

You'll be towards the back end of the midgame when you're going through different dungeons, hunting dragons and other bigger monsters for their tasty item drops. Your resists will start to look good; you'll have something close to double coverage of your base resists and decent single coverage of some of the high resists. You’ll start swapping different sets of equipment in to try and get better combinations that will let you do more damage or have better resists. You’ll start thinking about diving down Angband to finish off the final bosses of the game.

The Endgame

I can’t give too much advice on the endgame, having only gotten there a handful of times myself, but in general, be a coward. Detect everything as thoroughly as you can before ever entering a room. Kill every weak enemy you can for exp and use every cheesy strategy you can come up with. Dig holes in walls to draw out powerful monsters and fight them one on one. If you’re an archer, use scrolls of phase door to bounce around once a monster gets into melee range with you. Use every advantage at your disposal, because once you’re in Angband facing down monsters that breathe multiple elements simultaneously, can stop time, and summon enemies that then summon more enemies, you’ll wish you had run practiced running away earlier.

In general, keep more items in your inventory than you think you'll need. When you have more than 300 HP, start carrying around potions of Healing for emergencies. Speaking of Healing and Healing potions, you'll want to hoard all you can of these to prepare for the final fight. Use them if you need to, it's stupid to die with an inventory full of healing potions, but keep as many as you can for later.

Check out the Angband ladder for FrogComPosBand https://angband.live/ladder/ladder-browse.php?v=FrogComposband&r=&c=&n=&e=&s=0, especially other characters of your class. Read spoilers on monster levels, spells, anything you can find.

Advice for quests found in towns: https://pastebin.com/ZLZZz45j

Demigod mutations: https://pastebin.com/hTi24Nky

Arena rewards and various other small spoilers: http://nikheizen.github.io/pages/rewards.html

Dungeons, dungeon guardians and quests: https://pastebin.com/AVsp31k8

One last bit of advice, maybe try the Munchkin personality if you get stuck in a rut. It gives huge boosts to your stats, makes it easier to level up, and starts you with a million gold. You can't really get credit for beating the game using this mode, but it is great for trying new character combos and learning how places you've never been work. It's worth checking out at least once, especially if you're learning the game.

#FrogComPosBand

So how do you actually play FrogComPosBand, and more importantly how do you win?

First off, you have some options in playing the game. I highly suggest you download the precompiled binaries from the author's GitHub. You can also compile directly from the source code, but unless you know exactly what this means and what it entails, don't do this. You can also play online through your browser via angband.live.

Visually, you have options too. You can try to use the graphical tiles option, but I've found that most unique enemies are not rendered correctly and end up basically invisible using this method. I therefore suggest going native and playing in good ‘ol ASCII mode. That way you get proper representation of your monsters and you can pack a lot of info on your main screen to boot.

Speaking of screens, since these types of games date back to the days of the terminal, you have some additional options that can make your life easier. You can freely resize your main window to show as much of the game as your resolution can handle, but you can also have additional windows that serve specific functions. In game, press the equals key (=) to go into that menu, by which I mean hold shift and press the + key at the same time. Yes, the game differentiates between lower case and upper case letters and the same goes for all the other keys on the keyboard. There are a lot of things you can do in this game, and there is a unique input for each one.

I like to have a window showing my inventory, one with my equipment, one showing the message log in case I missed something important and a final window showing the visible enemies in the area. This is mainly because the game is designed to fuck with you and occasionally throws things your way like the space monster, which is represented on screen by a blank space. Or the creeping coins, represented by a dollar sign that looks exactly like piles of treasure but these attack and poison you. Being able to tell foe from dungeon feature will save your life more than once.

The Early Game

If it's your first time playing, you'll have to create a character and I've already run through the ridiculous amount of options there. But for a first-timer I'll suggest a Mercury Demigod Warrior. Warriors are a pretty solid class, easy gameplay consisting of hitting monsters with the biggest weapon you can muster and the Mercury demigod heritage gives you some speed on top of all of that.

Once you actually pop into existence in the starting town of Outpost, you'll need to control your character. You move by using the number pad keys. You attack in melee by going up to a monster and ‘bump’ attacking them (moving into them), trading blows each turn until one of you backs off or dies.

There's also a bevy of shops and places to go in town, so I'll do a quick overview of those. Armor, weapon, potion, magic items and booksellers are in every town, as are a food and light source vendor, and a temple shop that sells healing potions among other things. Finally, there's the black market where you can buy rare and expensive items.

For your first purchases I recommend buying a brass lantern and a flask of oil to fill it, since that gives you an extra square radius of light compared to the torches you probably started with. You should also probably buy a few pieces of basic armor from the armor shop. This should improve your initial survivability.

There's also an inn and mayor’s office where you can accept quests. Quests are optional, usually single level challenges that come with a reward upon completion. The first two available in Outpost are the Thieves’ Hideout and the Trouble at Home quests. Do the Trouble at Home one from the inn first, as it's the easiest. Once you go down the stairs that have appeared in town (you have to enter > to go down the stairs, yes I mean shift plus period) you'll be faced with killing a few mean mercenaries. The good thing is that they don't come after you until you attack them. If you have a sling or other distance weapon, fire it to aggro one to you and get a free hit or two along the way. Get used to maximizing every advantage you can against the monsters, they definitely don't fight fair. You'll probably have to finish off the merc in melee, which will knock you down a few HP. Rest up between fights (either hit the 5 key a bunch of times or R to specify how long) and kill all the happy singing drunks that stumble about, there's no downside and they sometimes drop money. Finish off all the rest of the mercs and feel free to explode a bit before you take the stairs back up. There are a few potions and rations in the back you can nab to sell in town to get you a bit of extra gold. Sell all the potions, they aren't that useful. Keep the rations for when you get hungry later. Don't forget to get your reward from the inn when you're done.

The Thieves’ Hideout is a little tougher, you'll probably want to be level 3 before attempting it. What I like to do to make this leveling process a bit faster is to go on the stairs to the dungeon just outside of town, go down to see if there's anything interesting just within that first room and go directly up if not. People on forums and messageboards call this stairscumming and it's fairly useful throughout the game. Kill a few low level enemies, grab a few items to sell, level up and buy a ranged weapon if you don't have one and maybe better armor. Go down into the den once you're ready to take on the quest.

Don't move once you're down the stairs, you are surrounded by traps except for in one direction. Which direction you won't know immediately. The bad guys will start coming to you, so when you see them start shooting them with arrows or pebbles or whatever. They will probably hit you and steal a little gold then teleport away. This is irritating, but actually to your advantage right now. When they run up again you can shoot them a few more times until you wear them down and (hopefully) kill them all. But still, don't move. Hit the s key to search around you until you locate the traps. You can try to disarm them (D), but it might be easier to go around. There are several more traps throughout the level so search a bit before you step. Gather up the treasures remaining and head back up. Get your reward, probably a magic weapon, from the mayor and you're well on your way into the early game.

With the cash you get from that, it's time to buy some things that will save your life. First, healing potions. Go to the temple shop and buy 5-10 of the largest healing potions you can afford. Go to the potion / scroll shop and buy 5-10 scrolls of Teleportation. Use these liberally throughout your game! It may feel cowardly to run away, but it only takes one fatal mistake to end your entire run. Stay safe and live longer. They put that low HP warning in the game for a reason.

With those quests under your belt, you can start diving into the early dungeon right outside of town. Dive a few levels in, always resting up between combats, until the monsters start to feel hard. Once your inventory fills up with items, head back up to town to sell and clear up space.

This is a good time to tell you about item identification. As you probably noticed with the potions, you don't always know what an item can do upon first encountering it. You can drink a potion to identify it, but this can be a bad idea if it turns out to be a potion of Poison or Death. If you hold onto weapons for a while in your inventory, you will eventually get a feeling about the quality of the item. The game will pop up a message about this and the item will say something like {good} or {excellent} in your inventory. The good or excellent ones are magic, you can read a scroll of Identify on them to figure out their exact stats. Same goes for potions, but very early on that might be cost prohibitive so you can just sell one in a stack to find out what they all are. Same goes for stacks of ammunition. To get around buying all those individual identify scrolls, I like to make my next goal in the early game to get enough cash to buy a staff of identify, usually sold by the magic item shop in town. They go for 2-3k but recharge themselves for free, so save up.

Once your item identification needs are met, you've probably leveled up once or twice and are tired of going up and down all those stairs. Let me introduce you to the Scroll of Word of Recall. Reading it in town takes you to the lowest level of whatever dungeon you've visited. Reading it in the dungeon brings you back to the most recent town you were in. So helpful. This will be your main mode of transfer range back and forth throughout the game. Keep an extra one in your inventory in case your last one gets burned up.

Now that you've got easy access to the dungeon, you can resume diving to try and get down to the bottom of the Warrens and kill Mugash the Kobold Lord. He doesn't have any special powers, but he does hit hard and have a whole group of other kobolds along with him. Don't let them surround you, fight them one at a time and retreat and heal if you take too much of a beating. Once you take him down you'll probably want to use the stat point you get to up your strength. That lets you hit harder and carry more stuff in your inventory before you get overloaded and start to lose points of speed (always a bad thing).

Once you kill Mugash at the bottom of the dungeon you can continue your adventuring exploits in the Hideout dungeon to the southwest. It starts at level 9 and has more human-type enemies which results in much better drops. You will probably see your first excellent items down here and if you're lucky an artifact or two. There are also some heavy unique monsters that show up here, so beware.

One of the biggest pitfalls I've succumbed to again and again in this dungeon is lack of confusion resistance. One particular unique, the Variant Maintainer, causes confusion on hit but more irritatingly also summons software bugs that also confuse on hit and explosively multiply. There are also quiver slots that shoot arrows that confuse on hit, so without confusion resistance you'll be stuck with no means of escape. Keep an eye out for rings with confusion resistance while shopping throughout your early game playthrough.

Once you've conquered your second dungeon, you begin to enter the midgame.

#FrogComPosBand

Being a roguelike that has been passed around like the proverbial town bicycle, the mechanics of FrogComPosBand are an agglutination of lots of people's ideas of what might be fun over an extended period of time. Needless to say, they're complicated.

Regardless of your character choice, you'll have the same basic stat categories: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution and charisma. The game again shows it's D&D influence here by adopting the 3rd edition style of stat progression. In that system, stats start at zero and go up to 18, which is considered peak human ability. Above that, stat increases are incremented by the 18/10 notation, meaning that for every 10 after the slash in the total is basically an extra point in that stat.

Attributes can be increased by equipment, temporary buffs, rare and expensive potions, by hitting level up milestones, or by defeating guardians of different dungeons throughout the world.

Backing up a bit, Nethack and older games started you out in the dungeon and had towns where you could buy and sell equipment randomly found throughout. Somewhere along the line, people added an overworld and static towns that you would teleport to back and forth from the dungeon. Like other variants, FrogComPosBand has an overworld with multiple dungeons as well as multiple towns to buy, sell and complete quests in.

One of the other core systems of the game is the resists system. As you might expect, monsters can cast spells and breathe various elements to try and kill you. This damage can be mitigated somewhat by having resistance to that element.

Resists can come intrinsically; if you're playing as a red dragon it wouldn't make sense to be vulnerable to fire. But the majority of your resists will come from equipment.

Press C (by which I mean shift+c, it has to be a capital C) to see your character page. Hit page down and page up to scroll through it quickly. Here you can see what your current resists are along with what equipment, if any, is affecting them. There is tons of information on this screen, read through it all at your convenience.

As you might expect from a family of games that have been forked and maintained for more than 30 years, there are more than your basic assortment of elements. Acid, electricity, fire and cold are your basic resistances, but by no means are they the end of the story. Poison, light and dark attacks also exist but are less common than the basics. Then you get into the more exotic, or ‘high’ resists: confusion, sound, shards, nether, nexus, chaos, disenchantment and time.

Interestingly, each element, base and high, has their own special effect if you get hit with it without any resistance. Acid degrades your armor, reducing your overall AC and making you easier to hit. Electricity can destroy jewelry in your inventory, fire can burn scrolls and books, and cold can shatter potions you are holding.

Poison starts a counter that slowly decrements, causing damage each turn until it expires or is cured. Light and dark can blind you and also change the lighting status of the dungeon.

Confusion is a status effect that causes you to move randomly and prevents you from using certain magic and items. Sound can stun you, reducing your ability to hit monsters and cast magic. Shards cause cuts, a more severe status that behaves similarly to poison. Nether is used by most undead enemies and reduces your maximum HP, stats, experience and overall level. Nexus can teleport you, polymorph you or permanently scramble your stats which can be devastating to the unprepared. Chaos has several random effects including extra damage, stat loss and healing the monster that hit you. Disenchantment permanently reduces the bonuses your equipment provides you. Time is the rarest element found in the game, only used by a handful of monsters, resistance provided only by a small number of items. Getting hit by it can ‘turn the clock back’ and reduce your stats, experience, and level.

Having a resistance to an element reduces both the damage you take and the likelihood of receiving a negative effect like potions shattering by like 90%. Having double resistance to an element reduces damage further and lowers the chance of negative effects by like 99%. When you get breathed on by a Great Wyrm of Perplexity, you're going to want all the confusion resistance you can get.

Along with all those bad things, there are several other status effects that can cause you trouble. You can be afraid, hallucinating, paralyzed, have your life drained, be slowed down, be hit by invisible enemies, afflicted by hunger, have your equipment cursed, contract an illness, get ancient blood curses cast on you, or even be crushed by earthquakes. All of these have various ways of being mitigated but the unwary can have their run cut short by any one of them.

Aside from stats and resists, there is another very important consideration for the aspiring adventurer: speed. Most roguelikes run on the basis of turns, i.e. you act and the monsters simultaneously get to act. But if you have a greater speed than the monsters you will get to act more frequently and vice versa. Underneath this system in FrogComPosBand is the energy system. In general, you get a certain somewhat randomized amount of energy each turn and the higher your speed the more energy you get. If you have above a certain threshold, you get to act. Slowed enemies take longer to cross that threshold and therefore get fewer turns. So the more speed you have, the better.

Outside of player characteristics, you've also got a rather large world to explore. Dungeons exist outside the towns with randomly generated layouts, each one with its own general theme. Some feature narrow twisty passages between rooms, some have rooms with open areas between. Some have forests that block line of sight between you and the monsters. Some have constant elemental effects that can damage you. Certain dungeons have families of monsters found within, like dragons found high in the mountains or knights in castles.

Dungeons have a difficulty rating indicated by their depth. In old versions of Angband they used feet notation, i.e. 3750’ deep, which is still referenced in some odd places in FrogComPosBand like the scrolls of Rumor that give random, occasionally helpful advice. In modern versions they use ascending level depth, meaning the higher the dungeon level, the harder the difficulty.

The overall goal of the game is to descend to the 99th level of the dungeon Angband, kill Oberon the guardian to be able to go to level 100 and then kill the Serpent of Chaos therein. Making this extra difficult is the quirk of the Angband dungeon to feature out of depth monsters. As you descend levels, monsters are generated to populate the dungeon. But in Angband, the game pulls harder monsters from its repertoire than any other dungeon in the game.

The other quirk in Angband is that certain levels are guarded by what's called a unique enemy. Unique enemies have their own specific name, generally have higher HP and do more damage than their normal versions and have special powers not present in their more common versions. Early on, you might encounter an orc boss that is resistant to confusion and can summon other orcs to his aide. Later on, uniques can get mountains of HP, breathe exotic elements on you, teleport away when their HP gets low or cast devastating spells on a regular basis. The fun really comes when the game has selected an especially nasty guardian for that level and until you kill them the stairs to the next level won't appear.

The flip side is that uniques drop better items than any other enemy type in the game. Items in FrogComPosBand come in a ridiculous variety. There are daggers, short swords, long swords, two-handed swords, rune swords, diamond edges, and blades of chaos. There are bo staffs, glaives, hatchets, scimitars, latajangs, sticks and fishing poles. There are slings, bows, crossbows and guns. There are dozens of different types of body armor, boots, gloves, shields and helmets. There are light sources like lanterns, jewelry, and crowns. There are also consumable items like potions and scrolls. There are books to cast magic from. There are magic wands, rods and staves that produce spell effects.

Equippable items come in four varieties. Normal, magic, highly magic (or ‘ego’ items), and artifacts. Magic items generally have a bonus to hit and damage or armor. Ego items come with a bouquet of enhancements like resists or extra effects on hit. Artifact items have all of the previous effects and usually one or two other things you can't really get anywhere else. By the end of the game, you will be wearing primarily artifacts. You want artifacts, you need artifacts.

Enemies can drop any kind of item at any level. There are low level unique bosses that can drop low level unique items. The deeper you go into the dungeon the better the quality of the items that drop from monsters and that can be simply found on the ground.

One important exception to this are vaults. Vaults are special areas that can be generated in any dungeon that contain treasures and monsters better and harder than you would normally find at that level. This ups the risk/reward calculation you're constantly doing while playing the game. And greed has been many a character’s fatal downfall.

#FrogComPosBand

After my win in ToME 2.3.4 I tried a few different roguelikes. I bounced off Brogue, as it was too distantly related to the style of game I knew so well. I ended up playing and eventually winning Tales of Maj’Eyal with a Dwarven Bulwark, even though the systems there were still fairly distinct from Angband.

I bought Caves of Qud, which is an amazing game, albeit very far removed from Angband. It pulls off its far far future setting much better than any other game I've ever played. Still haven't won that one, though.

Which brings me back to FrogComPosBand. I was looking for a game I could play during my commute with my dinky, graphic-card-less laptop. I searched around for what the new hotness in roguelikes was at the time and found this guy.

FrogComPosBand is what happens when decades of work on different variants of the same game get mashed together. One of the big ‘selling’ points of this game over other variants is it's kitchen sink approach to game design. It contains the vague Tolkien theming of Angband, the Amber references of Zangband, the Cthulhu monsters along with dozens of other sources of influence from other videogames like Doom to much farther out references to books and anime.

It also has dozens and dozens of different classes to play. From your standard fighter to mages of many different stripes to rogues. But there's also real oddballs like the mirror master and magic eater classes. Playable monster races are also well represented by orcs, skeletons, mummies with special curse mechanics, vampires, and liches. Again there are odder choices like boits and kutars along with half-titans and klackons.

But my favorite addition to the player pantheon are the monsters that have no distinct class, the ones that radically transform how you play the game. For comparison, your standard warrior can equip things you would expect: swords, shields, magic rings and the like. But you can also play as a hydra which starts with two heads and able to equip a helmet on each one. As you level up you gain more heads, more attacks, and more head equipment slots. Or you could play a jelly which starts with only four equipment slots but is able to equip any type of item in them without restrictions.

Or you could be a straight-up dragon with a powerful breath weapon and claw and tail attacks. They can equip tons of rings, but have limited slots for other equipment. Dragons come in many different elemental flavors as you might imagine but are also able to specialize in one of several areas. They can choose to augment their breath weapon, making it even more devastating. They can specialize in melee attacks, giving them an even greater edge in up-close combat. They can also become masters of different forms of magic, from teleportation to summoning.

But my favorite monster race is the lowly filthy rag. Unable to equip anything and unable to attack aside from a basic punch, you gain power by absorbing other sets of armor, gradually getting better armor class, resistances and other core attributes. It starts out weak but can be overwhelming if you survive into the endgame.

And that's not even the only monster type with that mechanic! There are death swords that do the same for melee weapons. And the tricky ring monsters that ensnare wearers and absorb the essences of other jewelry.

And all that is just the tip of the iceberg in character creation!

#FrogComPosBand

I was working a summer internship at a mosquito control company many years ago with two other people. We traveled a lot to different areas which gave us a decent amount of downtime where we could do what we pleased. Being dudes, we played a lot of videogames.

One guy had his own shard on Ultima Online where we all made characters and farted around. This was fun, killing monsters and navigating the weird economy of UO that had built up years after most of the player base had moved on. But occasionally I would see the other guy playing a game on his laptop with tons of windows open and weird tiny little tiled graphics. I asked him what the heck that was and he told me it was ToME, short for Tales of Middle Earth. It was a free game, so I installed it and gave it a whirl.

The game I played was ToME 2.3.4, the final release of that version before the developer went on to make an aborted attempt at ToME 3, then moving on to the much more successful Tales of Maj’Eyal. Which is a great roguelike in its own right, but before I tell you that story, I need to tell you this story.

Rogue was released for Unix microcomputer systems in 1980. It was a text-based game that centered around going through a dungeon, battling monsters and acquiring items. It was inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and other computer games of the time. One of the selling points was that every time a new game was started the dungeon would be different and that once a player character died, it was permanent and irreversible.

Eventually, the source code for Rogue was released so people could add or change the behavior of the game. This led to variants like the still popular today NetHack which eventually gave birth to variants like SLASH'EM (Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack – Extended Magic). All of these games had a similar design ethos, a single character traversing a huge, randomly generated dungeon to accomplish a difficult goal with only one chance to succeed.

Angband was another one of those variants. Since the antecedents were heavily influenced by Tolkien, as was much of early nerd culture, it's only natural that a game would fully embrace that heritage. Angband is named for the huge dungeon of Morgoth and many of its items and enemies carry on that theming.

Angband, like it's predecessor, also ended up open source which allowed for even more variants. Zangband (short for Zelazny Angband) incorporated elements from Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber novels. Cthangband used monsters from H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. ToME went all in with a fully explorable Middle Earth.

I was hooked on ToME for a good long while. The early game was fairly easy to get through and there were a few ways to bypass it entirely, although not without risk. After quite some time playing, I managed to push through to the end game and actually win with a Dark Elf Mindcrafter (#515 on the Angband ladder!).

I eventually got fired from the internship after bringing in a router so all us interns could get on the Internet at the same time. At the start they told us there would be a possibility of getting hired full time afterwards, but I checked years later and they were still offering that same internship position so I think they were full of shit.

#FrogComPosBand #roguelikes