Playing the Game
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.