Blades of Rogue

version 1.0

This scenario was inspired by the game Rogue and gives similar gameplay. It consists of many randomly generated levels whose difficulty progressively increases. The scenario requires that you play a singleton, that is a party with only one character, as in Rogue. It is recommended that you start with a freshly made level 1 character, and adjusting the game's difficulty setting should give fairly good control over the difficulty of the scenario.

Note that this is not intended to be any sort of exact duplication of Rogue, so there are numerous significant differences, due to reasons such as limitations of the game engine and the designer's personal preferences.

Also, please be aware that this scenario uses unusually much computation in order to generate randomized levels. This means that moving from one level to the next may take some time on older computers.

FAQs

Hints and Tips

Since you're going to have a singleton, it's important for your character to have a variety of skills. Starting with either a point of Mage Spell skill, Priest Spells skill, or both, has much to recommend it: since your MP is completely restored at the end of each level, Bolt of Fire is a useful ranged attack at low levels, and Healing can be invaluable even at quite high levels. Both thrown Missiles and Bows skills can be lifesaving, and having both is useful because of the randomness of ammunition availability. Also, slings require no ammunition, but bows, particularly crossbows, can offer much higher damage done. Expect to be switching your weapons for many fights in order to use just enough of your limited supplies to win while saving up better equipment for tougher fights later. You will also need to be able to fight close up with melee or pole weapons. Melee weapons are plentiful early on, but pole weapons offer the greatest power later on. It can actually be worth the cost in skill points to make a transition from one to the other part-way through the scenario.

One very useful tactic is to begin a fight by pelting an enemy from extreme range with arrows, fireballs, or just rocks. Every time the enemy advances toward you, you can take a few steps back along a tunnel and then fire another shot. Then, when your enemy closes in, you can turn and strike a sudden melee blow on your weakened opponent for the kill. This is a good way to kill enemies who would defeat you in a simple hand-to-hand duel. Watch out, though, as spell casters and creatures with breath weapons can hurt you from a distance; it may actually be better to grapple with them at close range and finish them off quickly. Likewise, this applies to monsters that move very quickly, like quickghasts, which can chase you down in only one turn.

Another useful tactic when cornered, is the fact that using a potion, wand, or scroll requires only 3 AP. So, on a typical turn with 4 AP you can use a cheap, relatively expendable Wand of Bolts to shoot and enemy for just a bit more damage, or drink a healing potion to keep yourself alive, and then still have 1 AP to strike a blow.

Although beginning mage and priest spells are a great help early on, it might appear that later on magic skills will be of less use since there are no trainers to sell spells. Fear not! For unknown reasons there are many scrolls scattered through the Dungeon of Doom that can give pointers on improving oneself as a mage or priest. (That is to say, you can learn new spells and learn spells at higher levels as you go on.) While a pure mage or priest probably won't make it, there's no reason not to still make a significant investment in magical skills.

Note that there are no alchemy ingredients to be found in the dungeon and no first aid kits, so skill in potion making or first aid will likely be useless.

Lastly, try to do everything you can on each level before going on to the next. After all, later levels will only get harder, so you'll want to collect all of the experience and equipment that you can before you move on. That being said, there may be some times when you're boxed in and can't kill the enemies you face, in which case it may be better to just drop down a level and hope for the best.

Known Bugs

• The automap is not cleared on entering a new level in the Windows version.
• In rare cases the arcane lore skill granted by Identification Scrolls may become 'stuck', not being removed when the identification time limit runs out.
• Some testers claimed that after playing the scenario for some time, text boxes in the game stopped displaying correctly until the game was restarted. This error has never been satisfactorily reproduced.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jemand, Ephesos, Randomizer, Lazarus, TerrorsMartyr, Nioca, and Arsenic for beta testing.

Graphics

Most importantly, thanks to Arancaytar for getting this idea rolling and not minding my taking it over, and also to Lazarus for his keen observation about terrain scripts.

If you have questions or comments, please email me at niemandcw@gmail.com