Aminet 43/Aminet 43 (2001)(GTI - Schatztruhe)[!][Jun 2001].iso/Aminet/game/role/kamband.lha/Kamband20/kamband.txt

Text File | 2001-04-08 | 15KB | 339 lines

The amalgamated Kamband help file. (Alpha version.)
Conforms to version 2.0 "Baalzebub".
Work in progress by Ivan Tkatchev.

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I. Words of Wisdom.

1. Introduction.

  First of all, Kamband is not Angband. In it's current incarnation it is
a demented, mean-spirited roguelike with Nethackish elements masquerading
under an Angband skin; as such, don't be surprised at anything. One of the
guiding elements of Kamband development, for good or evil, has been the
separation from the classic philosophy of Angband.

  The Kamband site is hosted on sourceforge, http://kamband.sourceforge.net

II. Playing the Thing.

1. General Hints.

  The most important thing you must keep in mind is that unlike Angband
(and to some extent Nethack) Kamband is a roguelike that completely disregards
equipment. All items in the game are quite transient, and even the most
powerful items quickly wither away and die; food potions and dragon scale
mail rots, potions and bottles break, swords scratch and snap. That means
that the player must seek hidden potential within himself, as corny as that
sounds; the game provides ample opportunities for that. The next paragraphs
will provide some character "career choices" that the player can follow,
regardless of initial race and class.

a. Piety.

  The game has 26 gods, each with his/her own personality and special traits.
Roughly, they can be divided into evil/benevolent gods and rare/common ones.
All characters start without a religion. To join a cult, all you need to do
is find an altar in the dungeon and sacrifice anything at all of value on it.
(The key is 'O' while standing over an altar.) Each god has his or her own
altar type. Once you have joined, you are given various bonuses, depending
on the god you now worship; on the other hand, you are now required to
regularly appease your god with sacrifices of valuable objects. Your standing
in the cult is computed solely on the basis of the net worth of the objects
you sacrifice, thus it is not important what kinds of items you sacrifice and
when. There are three levels of standing in a cult, "rewarded", "favored" and
"championed", each giving more bonuses over the previous ones attained.
Note that your standing drops over time, and if it gets sufficiently low
your god will start severely punishing you and generally making your life
miserable. "Evil" gods require sacrifices much more frequently than "nice"
ones, but on the other hand usually give nicer bonuses. You can check your
religious status if you press the "sacrifice" key ('O') while not standing
over an altar. If you have a hard time finding an appropriate altar while
dungeon-diving, you can bash ('B') any other altar to convert it; note,
however, that bashing altars is a dangerous activity. The gods don't like
mortals to get too uppity.

  Another option for religious characters is praying. (The key is 'p'.)
Praying allows you to ask your god for help during a difficult situation.
With any luck you might be saved even in a seemingly hopeless situation.
Praying is a very dangerous activity; praying too frequently or praying if
your standing is too low pretty much amounts to suicide.

  As a side bonus, if your character happens to be a priest or a paladin,
he will be treated more leniently when sacrificing and praying; even better,
those who are priests will have access to more in-depth information on their
religious standing in the Temple in the town.

b. Chaos.

  The game allows the character to change the original shape of his body
during the course of the game. The two methods by which this can be achieved
is mutations and shape-shifting. Mutations are gained from potions or by
being breathed on with chaos; gaining a new mutation is a random process, and
what's worse is that "good" and "bad" mutations are about evenly split.
However, once a mutation is gained, it stays with you forever unless you
drink a potion of "remove mutation". Shape-shifting is a different process --
you change shape either by drinking a potion or by using your innate ability.
(For example, if you're a lycanthrope.) Your shape is a temporary condition
and will wear off soon; on the other hand, each shape allows you to use
several special magic spells which are available only while in that particular
shape. (Regardless of character class.) You cannot wear any armor while
shape-shifted.

c. Leadership.

  The game has a concept of a "pet" monster, though in real-life terms pets
are closer to "allies". Each pet will attempt to eliminate hostile monsters
to the best of its ability, and all killed monsters will contribute to
your experience as if you killed it personally. The three main ways of gaining
pets are innate ability, (when you're playing a beastmaster)
religious allegiance and spells. Unless your pets are gained by fortune of
your religious standing, the total number of pets is limited by your charisma.
Pets are not completely stupid and will do things like target enemies while
avoiding damaging you, following you when you call for them and even listen
to your orders. You can press the "pet call" key (usually '#') to call your
pets to your side or target them at something else. Note, however, that
calling pets tends to aggravate enemy monsters. Pets will generally be happy
to die for you, but abusing them by throwing things or firing spells at them
will cause rebellion.

d. Charity.

  There is an extensive system of quests in the town; completing quests is
a great way of collecting precious items. Many quest rewards turn out to be
artifacts. There are two main sources of quests, one in the castle and one
in the sorcery tower. Obviously, the quests in the sorcery tower are more
geared towards the magic-user. Once you have accepted a quest (you can select
any quest you wish, but only one at a time) simply walk onto the
"quest entrance" tile to start the quest. Sometimes you can safely exit the
quest, sometimes not; in any case, be very careful as our opponents tend to
be wildly powerful.

  Besides general bonuses you can get from places like the castle, arena and
gambling house, each class has a special guild building which gives
class-specific bonuses. On the whole, it is possible to play a full-fledged
game and build up your character to a high enough level without ever
stepping foot in the dungeon.

e. Magic.

  There are a great abundance of magic-using player classes, some of which
are designed to be played without melee combat at all. For example, the
"Mutant/Corrupted" race/class combination, which is a physically weak
character with randomly generated purely offensive spells. Listing all
the classes is not the goal here, so just try it out yourself to see.

f. Avatars.

  One special class is the avatar, where you start from the beginning
worshiping a god and proceed through life trying to fulfill a fate
given to you by your god.  Each god has his or her own particular
preferences, which will be revealed to you by an occasional "fate"
imposed on you. A fate is a little assignment, for example, to kill a
certain monster or sacrifice some item; in actuality there are many
different combinations possible, and each god interprets fates a
little differently. Just as an example, Melkor the God of Shadow likes
to collect rings, Stribog the God of Winds tries to protect birds from
harm, etc.

If you complete your fate, your luck rating goes up; if you fail, your luck
obviously goes down. This luck rating is a purely internal counter and not
visible to the player in any way. However, once in a while the game decides
to reward lucky players in some way, usually by a bonus of some sort.
Each bonus costs a little luck and lowers your luck rating somewhat.

On the other hand, if you are unlucky enough to have negative luck, the game
will start punishing you instead of rewarding, though as before each time
you are punished your luck will slowly increase towards zero.

2. Miscellaneous Hints.

  There are other neat features in the game, which include:

a. Alchemy.

  You can collect ingredients in the dungeon and mix them in different
combinations (the '$' key) to create items. Each item that can be mixed
has its own combination of ingredients, though this combination is forever
fixed and identical for every copy of the game. You start the game with a
few known alchemical recipes, and if you happen to discover new ones you will
memorize them. Note however that mixing high-level items is difficult for a
low-level character.

b. Corpses.

  You can collect corpses and turn them in to the beastmaster for rewards if
your corpse type happens to be on the bounty list. Beware, however -- the
bounty list is updated quite frequently.

  Note that if you play a necromancer class, you can put corpses to much
better use -- when you cast "raise dead" on any corpse, you have a chance
of turning it into a live pet of the same monster. Note, however, that if you
fail the consequences can be very harsh, for example, sanity loss.

c. Level Generation.

  The game has a large amount of different weird levels -- from strange
("themed") vaults to flooded or destroyed levels. The frequency of weirdness
is quite large, so that pretty much every level is bound to be "weird".
Note that the "weirdness" frequency can be toggled by an option.
Furthermore, outside the town is a randomly-generated infinite wilderness.
Be careful, though, the wilderness is a difficult and very unpredictable
place!

d. Sanity.

  Your character has a "sanity" stat -- this is like health except that it
will not heal simply by resting; to heal your sanity you must drink a special
potion. On the bright side, sanity is damaged only by special "mentalic"
monsters such as mind flayers.

e. Shop Vaults.

  You can turn on Nethack-like shops with a option. (Turned off by default.)
The bonus is that you get a realistic-looking home and an ability to steal
in a limited way.

f. Crime.

  Committing crimes will summon town guards, so beware.

g. Weird Races.

  There are some races that dramatically change the gameplay dynamics -- for
example: ghosts, vampires, death molds. I won't explain all of these here,
though -- try it yourself or simply read the changelog.

3. Item Damage.

  The game implements item damage in a very strict way -- all items quickly
decay and break, worn down by use or simply time. Unless you are using an
artifact and have artifact damage turned off, you should always keep at the
back of your mind that the weapon or armor you are using is temporary. This
is especially important for low-level characters, since being stranded in
the middle of a dungeon without any weapons is horrible.

  The other important fact is that magic items are usually very fragile --
it does not take too much force to break a potion or snap a wand; what's
worse, when magic items break they usually explode. Sometimes this is
enough to set off a small chain reaction. This applies to items you carry
in your inventory, so for example carrying a Potion of Death is extremely
dangerous.

4. Surviving.

  Getting your character off the ground is easy, but usually when you reach
what seems to you a comfortable level horrible things seem to suddenly happen.
Before you know it, you experience a sudden, random death. This is because
the game does not scale well to high-level characters -- just because you
are level 9 and comfortably equipped does not mean you can relax at 50'.
The ways of dying are so varied and sudden that at no time should you
let your guard down and start doing rash things.

  Here I list a few most common ways of sudden death:

a. Sanity.

  Sanity loss is almost impossible to protect from, and getting appropriate
potions is difficult for low-level characters. Your best bet is to steer
clear of sanity-draining monsters and use powerful remote attacks to take
care of these. Since such monsters usually have very little hitpoints, you'd
want to strike preemtively and only once.

b. Quest Inflation.

  Up to a point the quests and arena monsters seem easy, but at some
point a quick jump in difficulty happens. Simply don't try to take all the
quests in one stride and think twice before rushing in. If in doubt, it's
much better to run away.

c. Uniques.

  There are a few low-level uniques that are devastating to low-level
characters, namely the Black Death and the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Remember that it only takes one shot to destroy these, so if you keep them
at a distance and strike first, you'll do fine. If you have no distance weapon,
simply throw some junk at them. The difficulty, of course, is when you
are stuck in a narrow corridor and the monster is coming at you straight
through the wall, in such a case there is little you can do except hope
that you do not die immediately. Your best solution is to stick to open
levels, though this opens up new difficulties.

d. Open Levels.

  Open levels really shift the balance towards group monsters with high
speed; a pack of Cave Spiders on an open level is difficult to handle even
for a relatively experienced character, especially when you are playing a
fighter-type. When playing an open level a good idea is to get as many
pets as possible, simply so that any monster has to fight it's way through
several layers of dead bodies before it can reach you.

  The wilderness is even more difficult than open levels in the dungeon,
simply because you have no good way of judging how powerful the monsters
populating that area are. Just don't rush from screen to screen too quickly.

III. Appendix A: Key List.

  This is a list of in-game key defaults.

'w': Wear or wield equipment.
't': Take off equipment.
'd': Drop something.
'k': Destroy ("kill") an item.
'e': Show equipment.
'i': Show inventory.
'I': Examine an object. (Includes damage status.)
'A': Activate an artifact.
'E': Eat something.
'F': Refill a torch or lantern.
'f': Fire a projectile weapon.
'v': Throw something.
'a': Fire ("aim") a wand.
'z': Fire ("zap") a rod.
'q': Drink ("quaff") a potion.
'r': Read a scroll.
'u': Fire ("use") a staff.
'$': Mix alchemical recipes.
'{': Inscribe an object.
'}': Uninscribe an object.

'+': "Alter" a grid.
'T': Dig ("tunnel") into a wall.
'.': Begin running.
',': Hold still. Special powers for immovable chracters.
'g': Pick up items.
'R': Rest.
's': Search for hidden doors/traps.
'S': Toggle search mode.
'<': Go up a staircase.
'>': Go down a staircase.
'o': Open a door or chest.
'c': Close a door.
'j': Jam a door with a spike.
'B': Bash a door or an altar.
'D': Disarm a trap.
'M': Look at the map.
'L': Look around the dungeon.
'l': Examine things around you.
'*': Target a monster or location.

'G': Learn ("gain") new spells.
'b': Read ("browse") a spellbook.
'm': Cast a spell or use an innate power.
'p': Pray to your god.
'O': Sacrifice something.
'#': Call pets.

'~': Show character's knowledge.
'C': Examine character info.
'=': Change options.

Ctrl-'S': Save but do not quit.
Ctrl-'T': Show in-game time.
Ctrl-'X': Save and quit.
'Q': Suicide.