Crapknocker

A few times, I’ve had really great or interesting runs in FrogComPosBand, so if you’ll bear with me, I’ll reminisce about them a bit here.

Angel runs

Angels have a ton of advantages compared to other monster classes. They have all the normal human item slots, they get basic resistances as they level up and they get a bunch of useful spells without having to tote around any books. The only downside is the huge experience penalty, it takes them forever to level up. They have to grind grind grind to get anywhere, but once they get there they can usually kick ass.

I’ve done a ton of angel runs. Usually they end up the same way as most of my decent runs: dead around level 30 after I try to fly too close to the sun and get burned. The one I most vividly remember was popping around the lower levels of Angband when they encountered the legendary Metal Babble. This is one of those enemies from other videogames, this time the Dragon Quest series. In those games, this enemy is nearly unhittable but gives a ton of experience and items if you do manage to vanquish them. In Frog, it has its own aura of darkness and fires high-level spells with a ridiculously high speed. It took me a few rounds to figure out why my health was dropping considerably until I noticed the little guy teleporting about. Since I was low on health, I used the Globe of Invulnerability spell to keep myself safe from almost all attacks. I say almost because it was that day that I found out that the Psycho Spear spell is one of the few, if not only, spells that go through the globe of invulnerability.

Sometimes that’s how your knowledge of the game grows, through the blood of your previous characters.

Dragon runs

Dragon monsters are really fun to play as, but have a few quirks that make them stand apart. First is the equipment slots. Most of their resistances have to come from rings, as they only have amulet, light, cloak and helmet slots apart from their six rings they can wear. They also have the breath weapon you would expect as well as pretty good claw and bite melee attacks. They get to specialize in a particular domain later on, which gives you some flexibility in how you want to dragon.

Breath specialization gives you powers and shapes for your breath weapon. Armor gives you an AC boost and occasionally reflection. Attack ups your melee and gives you some related buffs. Craft gives you powers related to making and dealing with weapons, Lore gives you identification and detection powers. Domination gives you summoning powers. There are also a few realms restricted to certain types of dragon, namely Death and Crusade. Only Death dragons can choose the Death realm, which gives you some summoning and nether-firing options. Law dragons can use Crusade, which gives some light healing among other powers, similar to the magic realm.

My most memorable run was with a steel dragon, which doesn’t have a breath weapon but does have incredible AC and slightly better melee than your standard dragon. I somehow managed to drag this guy to the higher levels in the game, as his melee kept being awesome despite lacking any distance attack. Also, the high AC helps slightly lower the damage you’re taking in melee, which is where you’re strongest. If I slapped on a few rings of protection with AC bonuses, I became very hard to hit. 250+ AC!

But like so many of my characters, I think I got double-breathed on by big dragons. And no matter what your resistances or AC are like, you push your luck too many times and eventually you’ll lose.

Filthy rag runs

As I’ve said before, I love running Filthy rag monsters. For a long time, I tried to get one with the Lucky personality off the ground, thinking that the luck would help offset the need to dive deeper before certain resists showed up on dropped armors. Turns out, the class is very weak in the beginning, somewhat weak in the midgame and stronger in the end. Having the Lucky personality’s -2 to all stats makes the early game that much more difficult.

Filthy rags are a patient player’s game. You need to get resistances, but to get them you need to go deeper but the puny offense of the class means that you have a hard time killing monsters. Not to say that it’s impossible, there are several Lucky rags on the Angband ladder, but you have to grind, grind, grind and hope you get lucky with your drops.

The big bottleneck for these guys is Confusion resistance, at least when I play them. Base resistances show up fairly early on and you can get them here and there without too much trouble, but getting that first bit of confusion is much more difficult. You’ll probably be wanting it about halfway through the Hideout dungeon, thanks to the good ‘ol Variant Maintainer unique that shows up there. But the only armors that even have the potential to drop with that resistance are ego armors ‘of the imp’ that might randomly get a single high resist. So not only do you have to get lucky and have an enemy drop one of these, which is difficult in itself, but then it has to roll confusion resistance out of all the possible high resistances, which is also rather unlikely. And because of how the filthy rags acquire resistances, you have to do this three times or possibly more. Remember, rags can’t wear rings or jewelry and gloves or boots that have confusion resistance only start dropping in much much lower depths. Good luck!

Same goes for gloves with bonuses to hit and damage. These also drop very rarely at the early levels and are your main source for increasing melee damage. And as you can’t equip a shooting weapon, your only other option are wands and rods which rags aren’t the best at. You can eventually find body armor and occasionally some boots with hit and damage boosts, but these are rare even at the deepest depths. Again, good luck.

So you have to grind to get exp to level up, which increases your life and melee damage. But you can’t dive too deeply since you don’t have the damage output to keep up. You could try and stairscum on high-level dungeons to maybe get some items just lying around, but this is even riskier.

I will say, I haven’t ever really gotten over this hump in my playthroughs. I once got a Lucky rag to level 30, but that was as far as he got as he (it?) was still missing tons of resists and had puny damage. One day I’ll roll that boulder up the hill, though, and it will stay at the top.

#FrogComPosBand

Just a few bits of general advice on playing #FrogComPosBand gleaned from dying over and over and over.

Once you’re deeper than level 30, watch out for summoners. Lots of different monster types can summon on you, which is generally a really bad thing to have happen. Watch out for qulythulgs, as that’s their main jam to summon nasty stuff right on top of you. Bigger demons can summon as well, which can also lead to chain-summoning which can royally ruin your day. Always have a means of escape; teleport scrolls work very well for this. You can also find ways to cast the genocide or mass genocide spells to clear things out, but be aware that for every monster you delete using these methods you lose 1 HP. When the dungeons fill with hundreds of monsters, this might do more than just sting. Also be aware that uniques are resistant to genocide.

Keep out of open areas, for the simple reason that monsters seeing you will begin to attack you. If you’re playing a stealthy class they might not see you until you’re closer or at all, which is highly to your advantage. Whenever you can choose the battlefield and tilt things to your advantage, you should do so. Open areas give the monsters the initiative to start chasing you, and many have very nasty distance attacks like Hell Lances or Mana Storms. Keeping out of sight of summoners can prevent them from summoning on you as well.

Buffing yourself up before a fight is almost always worth it. Potions of Speed, Heroism, Resistance, and temporary armor buffs like Stoneskin can make the difference between having to retreat and heal and sticking out that last turn and killing that tough unique. Eventually you will find a rod of Heroic Speed to hit you with both at once and perhaps save an inventory slot.

Always have a source of healing! Early on you will have to use potions of cure (light, medium, whatever) wounds but towards the midgame those won’t be as effective as you would like them to be. You can search for staffs of cure wounds that can have you back up in a jiffy, but as you go on, you will need to rely on potions and later staffs of Healing unless you have some healing magic to fall back on. Stockpile these potions! Buy them from black markets when you can. In the late game, staffs and rods of Angelic Healing can replace some of these needs, but having potions as your backup is a zero fail method you can always depend on. Potions do give you nutrition, so if you’re planning on chugging a bunch of potions, you may want to come on an empty stomach, as being Gorged slows you down significantly.

Always have a source of detection! Knowing what’s coming and how to deal with it is paramount. If there’s a tough unique up ahead, you would definitely rather know about it rather than just blindly getting ambushed. Furthermore, knowing the layout of the dungeon around you is helpful for the same reason. Taking a quick sprint across two tiles is much safer than walking up to that big summoning monster and just hoping they don’t get too many shots in before you get there. In the early game you will have to find or buy rods or staffs of Detect Monsters, scrolls of Magic Mapping and Detect Traps, but towards the midgame you will replace all these with rods of Detection, which rolls a bunch of useful things into one (monsters, traps, items, stairways). You will also find staffs of Clairvoyance later on to help map the terrain and light things up for you. You can also use potions of Enlightenment on levels you think will be tough to find out the whole layout at once.

Ideally, here’s how a battle against a difficult enemy would go: you use your rods or staffs or whatever to detect the enemy far off in the distance. You do a little magic mapping to see the terrain. You choose the best possible approach, one that keeps you out of line-of-sight until you’re right next to them. You buff up before you engage. Then you hit them until they drop all that delicious loot.

What actually happens in practice is that there’s some element you’ve forgotten or something unexpected occurs. For example, just out of range of your initial detection radius could be another difficult enemy that wakes up when you’re fighting the first, putting you at more of a disadvantage. The enemy could escape or even steal something of yours before running away. Enemies can also buff themselves with berserk rages and globes of invulnerability and the like. Some enemies can dispel your precious buffs or suck the charges from your wands, rods, and staves. One of your potions of speed might shatter after an enemy’s elemental attack, causing that enemy to be much faster than you were originally estimating.

You can always ‘l’ook at a monster and hit r to recall information you know about it. If you’ve seen that type of enemy before, you might know what it resists, what it’s immune to, it’s speed, it’s HP, lots of different information. This is invaluable, and you can turn on the ability to remember this info between characters in the settings. There’s a billion kinds of enemies, so having this info around can keep you out of the frying pan just a little while longer.

One last thing, don’t rush. The game doesn’t do anything on its own until you press a button to move or act. Take time to pay attention to what enemies are around you and what they might do in the next few turns. Other games may have conditioned you to push buttons quickly to get yourself out of danger, but doing this only gives enemies more turns to act while you might not be noticing what they’re doing. It’s tempting to start smashing the move buttons after an enemy gets you down to half health in one round, but acting without thinking, especially in the lower depths of the dungeon, will get you killed. If you get in a tough spot, think over your options before doing anything. Teleporting out is usually safe, unless there’s a big enemy you’ve passed by that’s awake somewhere else on the level that you might accidentally end up next to. Staffs and rods have a chance to fail and if you do in the midst of combat, the round you spent trying might be your last one. Keep low or no-fail options like scrolls or potions in your inventory as well.

Level feelings

I’ve you’ve been playing the game, you’ve probably noticed a message pop up, something like, “This level looks relatively safe.” This is the level feeling and can give you an idea of what’s waiting for you out there in the rest of the level you’re on. The color of the level indicator in the lower left of the main screen will change depending on what message you get. This only applies to the level you’re currently on, if you to a new level in a dungeon you’ll need to wait a bit there until you get a new feeling.

The level feeling takes around a hundred turns to pop up. But once it does there are several useful things you can take away from it that might change how you play the level. Possibly the best one is “There is something special about this level.” in a baby blue color. This means that somewhere on the level is an artifact, just waiting to be picked up. Depending on the level you’re on, this could be a huge find.

There are a few levels of messages that indicate how difficult the enemies you will be facing on the level are. The first, in light brown is something like, “You’re feeling nervous.” In the early levels (0-20), this probably means there’s a unique monster somewhere on the level. Next is, “You have a bad feeling about this level” in dark brown. That means there’s more difficult enemies waiting for you, probably still a unique or a few out of depth monsters waiting for you. The next level is in orange text and I can’t remember the message. The final one that I’ve seen is in dark red, indicating that there’s something extremely dangerous out there. Probably a vault or a bunch of out of depth monsters.

Line of sight

You’ve probably noticed that enemies don’t start firing distance attacks at you until they see you. There are a few ways to keep out of sight of monsters but still cause damage to them. The first is by using a rod, wand, or ammunition of exploding to fire an area of effect spell that hits the monster without you being in its line of sight. This becomes extremely useful when dealing with enemies like qulythulgs and druj (drujes?) that are immobile but can cause all sorts of problems for you if they see you. If you can avoid being seen by these guys and have enough charges or ammo, you can safely kill them from out of sight without them being able to do anything about it.

Personalities

These are options in character creation that can add some additional wrinkles to your run. A few of the easiest ones to ‘get’ are the Combat and Mighty personalities. They are trading your int and wis for additional strength, dex and con. If you’re planning a warrior-type, these can give you some extra early game oomph at the cost of higher device and spell failures in the lategame. On the flipside, there is Crafty or Shrewd, which somewhat does the opposite of the previous two mentioned.

Some of the wackier choices are Unlucky, which gives you a boost to all your stats, but makes it harder to get good drops, occasionally makes you miss in combat and gives you higher spell and device fail rates. The opposite of this is Lucky.

Sexy gives you a boost to a few stats but gives you inherent aggravation, which causes enemies to instantly wake up on level generation. This puts you at a serious disadvantage to start with, but can be mitigated a few different ways. And you can wear items that aggravate since you have it already.

The in-game help has good descriptions of how each of the different ones work, so check through the list and see if one might make an interesting twist on your character.

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 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. Preparing to fight big J

Some tips I've gleaned from excessively reading winning posts on the Angband ladder on what to do and how to prepare to fight the Serpent of Chaos:

Double breaths

You have to have a bunch of HP to even think of fighting the serpent. The main reason for this is that the big guy is super fast and even at +35 speed can get two moves on you before you have a chance to react. If the serpent decides to breathe some exotic element on you like chaos, it’s a problem. If he decided to do it twice in a row, it can be deadly. Having a big batch of HP is the best way to deal with this. That way, if you get taken down to minimal HP you can teleport out to heal before resuming the fight.

Another thing to keep in mind is that these double moves can occur halfway through the fight or when you’ve got him down to his last bit of health. You will need to keep your HP above a certain level to avoid instant death if the serpent gets a double move on you. The energy system underlying the turns in the game is somewhat randomized, so you won’t know this is coming until you get hit with it. Keeping your HP up is the best defense alongside having your resistances covered.

To help buoy your HP levels, you can do a bit of manipulation with your Life Rating. If you managed to come across a potion of Self Knowledge, you probably noticed you had something called a life rating. Here’s how I understand this system to work. Every level up, the game rolls some dice behind the scenes to determine how much HP you gain. Over the 50 levels you have available, a series of bad rolls can really hamper your total HP. To counteract this, you can drink potions of New Life, which reroll these dice and can give you a larger HP pool and potentially different stat maximums. Your life rating is a general feel of how high you could’ve gotten on these HP rolls. Anything over 100% is great here and potentially worth keeping. Basically if you stockpile enough potions, you can drink a New Life followed by a Self Knowledge to see how good your new life rating is. This can get you 50 or more HP in the endgame, which is nothing to sneeze at and may save your life.

Summon uniques

The Serpent of Chaos has a power that I think no other boss in the game has, to summon unique monsters. If you have gotten to him (it?), you have probably gotten surrounded by bunches of high level undead summons, dragon summons and tons of others. But summoning unique monsters is probably the most nasty one of them all. As you probably already know, unique monsters are some of the hardest to defeat in the game and can complicate any encounter they pop up in. This goes double if the encounter is with the toughest boss in the game, the Serpent of Chaos.

The quirk here is that the serpent will only summon uniques that are currently living, i.e. those that you haven’t defeated yet. The problem here is that there are a bunch of high-level uniques that can make your life hell in the lower depths of Angband. Some especially nasty ones are Godzilla and Nodens, both of which have boatloads of HP and devastating attacks so you don’t want to be engaging with them at the same time as the serpent.

One approach is to troll the lower levels of Angband in the 90+ range and try to kill all the uniques that pop up there. This is useful for two reasons, one it lowers the amount of uniques that the serpent can summon and two it gives you the really useful drops of the uniques from that low in the dungeon. Better equipment is always better.

Another way to deal with unwanted summoned uniques is to use scrolls or staffs of Destruction, which turn the usual dungeon terrain into random mashes of stone. Uniques caught in the radius of a destruction spell will be despawned from a level (not killed). However, if you accidentally catch the serpent in the radius of your destruction spell, he will also be despawned. But then he will immediately be respawned elsewhere in the level at full health, so you really don’t want to do this unless you’re trying to escape or something.

But destructing the level before the serpent finds you can be a useful strategy to limit line of sight and the summons that might occur. Enemies can only be summoned in the squares surrounding your @ character. If your back is to a wall, that’s a few less squares that bad guys can occupy trying to kill you. The only downside to this is that the serpent immediately knows where you are on the level as soon as you go down to 100 and will begin making his way toward you, smashing down any walls between you and him as he goes. Even if he tunnels through a few walls, taking control of the terrain you fight on can give you an edge in this battle of attrition.

There are a few things you can do to help even the odds, though. The first, if you’re planning on fighting the serpent in melee is to have as much damage as you can without sacrificing too much in the way of resists. Having a few pluses to hit and damage on random bits of equipment can end up giving you hundreds of extra damage per round. You’ll want at least 500 damage per round to even stand a chance in melee, and the more the better.

A few notes about the Serpent of Chaos. First is that he’s not immune to stun, so if you have a weapon that stuns or a reliable stunning attack, you can make the fight much easier by keeping him stunned, which I believe increases his chance to fail casting any magic (including summons) and lowers his chance to hit you in melee. Second, he’s considered an evil, living monster so if you use gloves of slaying that do extra damage against either evil or living monsters, they will work on him as well. My third note is that he frequently breathes chaos, so bring along at least double chaos resist to help mitigate that damage. He also has an aura of shards, so don’t go up against him without resisting that.

There are a few other techniques to reduce or prevent the serpent’s summoning powers. If you can mix it into your equipment, there are amulets of anti-summoning that exist in the game (denoted by [Sm). Keep your eyes out for those. Some classes have access to anti-magic, which also helps prevent summoning, which is also available in amulet form ([M). You can also turn the tables and have your own summoned minions occupy all the spaces around you so that big J’s summoning is blocked that way. This can be doubly helpful if you bring heavy monsters of your own to fight on your behalf. Some classes can summon dragons and Great Wyrms of Power (GWOPs) and Steam-Powered Mechanical Dragons are two types that I’ve heard hold up decently against the serpent. Even non-summoning classes can get in on the act by capturing these monsters in the capture balls available in certain stores, then throwing them (‘v’) when you want to release them, Pokémon-style. But be aware, the chaos breath he breathes has a tendency to polymorph monsters occasionally, so your big badass summons might get turned into tiny, fragile rats.

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