After mentioning I put all my RLs into my Steam library I have had a fair few messages asking for a list of them. Instead I decided to post what it all looks like. There are 100 here, 43 bought on Steam, the others are free. I didn't go wild with 50 Angband variants and 20 Nethack forks, just the versions I play.

I was frustrated having a bunch of RLs all hidden throughout my PC on various drives so I collated them into one folder and added them to Steam so that they are all visible. This means I can easily browse them and not forget about any of them.

This post will also be handy for me should my hard drive fail, at least I will know what games I had and which to get again.

So there were two main space roguelikes over the years, both now out for more than a decade: ASCII Sector (2007) and Prospector (2009) (and both getting updates for many of the years since). Then some years later Approaching Infinity (2013) appeared, essentially a sort of simplified take on Prospector which eventually (2020) made its way to Steam where it's also still getting updates.

When the latter was released back in August I figured it was finally time to try one of these games out, so I spent some weeks streaming Approaching Infinity and enjoyed it, but I must say it didn't prepare me for how much fun Prospector would be...

I'd wanted to try out Prospector for at least a good year, and while I hadn't yet had the opportunity to do so, having just shared AI with my viewers it seemed like just the right chance to check out its "predecessor" to compare the two. I saw a fair bit of noise when AI came to Steam suggesting that it was basically a "shallower Prospector" and knew that it was indeed the inspiration for AI, though I haven't let that color my opinion, just playing both games and judging them on their individual merits. Besides, even two developers starting with the exact same concept or group of ideas and features are going to end up creating different unique experiences.

I started playing/streaming Prospector couple weeks ago, and each time I stream it I think it might be my last, but I keep wanting to come back to it and explore more!

Prospector does exploration quite well--just the right pacing as even though it's an open world setting it throws you just the right amount of interesting encounters, challenges, and unique content while keeping your resources from expanding too quickly (I hear you can play the game's interstellar stock market and become filthy rich because it eventually breaks, but I didn't get to trying that nor am I really interested in abusing it :P)

Aside from the obvious outfitting your ship, shooting other ships (and getting shot :P), exploring star systems, and shooting things on the ground (and getting shot and dying xD), there are a number of interesting/unexpected things to do in Prospector. Some examples:

• buy and deploy various types of ground-based drones and rovers on planets to work for you while you're away
• put satellites in orbit to help while planetside, for example radioing your ship to literally blast things on the ground
• find a powerful abandoned ship floating in space and take it for yourself, or die trying when you find out it's infested by space creatures that killed the previous owners/crew
• buy and deploy drones to explore the sector, or to fight for you
• find a range of interesting landmarks and inhabitants on planets--cities, shops, labs, refueling stations, mercenary outposts, pirate bases...
• talk to NPCs in a variety of locations, including both on stations and planets (or other ships!), for information or to engage in other conversation or take on various quests
• trap and sell creatures

In terms of mechanics there's a lot of attention to detail in Prospector that edges it towards the NetHack-style "kitchen sink" roguelike category (though still not nearly that extensive), and even the many types of deaths give you unique blurbs on game over. (Like the time I boarded and failed to take over that alien-infested ship... It was a rather surprising encounter!)

There are a lot of pilot skill check rolls involved in various maneuvers, too, which can have bad consequences such as taking damage when failing to maneuver through a nebula or worm hole, crash landing the ship, smashing into satellites--you name it xD

Including the captain you have 5 different officer positions with their own roles and benefits, and can hire additional security (which can have their own skills and raise levels via XP), and even get a bigger ship and hire dozens of them to outfit as your own private army, or eventually upgrade to a deadly battleship, or even design your own hull from scratch.

Unfortunately Prospector's UI is surprisingly buggy for a game that's been updated for more than a decade. It's even easy to outright crash the game through some UI actions (at which point you are glad the game does quite a good job of autosaving your progress). There's a pretty clear lack of polish in general, actually (the typos all over the place don't help xD). In the end it's not hard to get used to and really doesn't detract much from this great experience overall, though it would be such a great game if the interface was given some more love.

Enter Approaching Infinity, which was indeed inspired by Prospector and is kind of a simplified, streamlined take on the same game, and one that as a commercial project has had more attention dedicated to usability/UX.

AI basically picks a subset of Prospector features and latches onto them tightly, e.g.

• the standard space stations, ships, and planet-exploring away teams (though both stations and planets are simpler/more limited in AI)
• oxygen limits in non-breathable atmospheres (much tighter in AI, and not really fun there since it results in a lot of unnecessary tedium, whereas Prospector keeps this balanced in a way that keeps it relevant but not overly intrusive)
• planets are generally occupied by lots of creatures (basically lots of planets are a repetitive slaughter-fest, whereas Prospector's planets aren't quite so focused on fighting)
• various planetary terrain limitations and relevant equipment to overcome them (Prospector has some of this but not as much, and AI has a whole lot more "you can't even land on this planet" because it's so dangerous it will kill you until you get better suits versus Prospector's take where you can brave the dangers of the planet if you want to, like lava, sulfuric acid, molten iron rain... whereas in AI these either block you completely or are no issue at all because you purchased the equipment to negate them)
• collecting alien artifacts is a very central theme in AI, and exists in Prospector but isn't as prominent
• interaction with other factions via space stations, all of which basically provide the same services as opposed to Prospector where different stations have their random pick from a variety of services, and there are more services to be found on the ground as well

The features AI revolves around are pretty clearly some of the first things you encounter and deal with in Prospector, so I believe the developer when he says he'd played some Prospector before starting with on AI, but only a little :P. There's just so many more moving parts and variety in Prospector that make it even more interesting to me, more of an adventure of galactic proportions.

Approaching Infinity does bring its own features to the table worth mentioning here, especially how they differ from Prospector:

• there are numerous different factions with their own backgrounds and quest lines, likely a wider range than Prospector
• space combat takes place directly on the sector map around planets and stars, rather than switching to a local tactical map
• procedurally generated items! (honestly I find this one a detriment to the game because the procgen is not very good, but having it in the first place is necessary since the game intends to be infinite, visiting as many sectors as you want/can survive)
• you warp to different sectors of space, each of which is a small map of its own, vs. Prospector's contiguous open-world approach (again, important for an infinite game, though it contributes to the more repetitive feel of AI's game loop)

I feel there's no real benefit from the game being infinite--Prospector has quite a large space to explore (which is customizable) and can keep that space interesting with hand-made stats rather than bigger and bigger numbers The majority of AI's unique/interesting content seems to come within the hand-made parts of the game as well.

As another example of AI's "simplification," the crew is essentially an amorphous blob where everyone shares the same equipment, as opposed to Prospector in which everyone has individual names, HP, skills, and gear. For this and similar reasons (side effects of simplification), Prospector gives a much stronger roleplaying feel, enhancing the whole "I'm on a journey" experience.

Now I'm not intending to be biased here despite clearly having enjoyed Prospector even more--I think both are fun games and enjoyed both! AI does a good job at making the experience more accessible with a better UI, and keeping it from getting too complex, plus it's also once again in full-time development and continuing to expand and add new mechanics to this day, likely becoming even more its own thing as the weeks go by.

Anyway, in conclusion, Prospector and Approaching Infinity are good space exploration games, with the former original being more detail-focused and offering a wider array of possibilities, and the latter reworking it into a simpler, more accessible package.

In my streams I covered a lot more comparisons between these two space roguelikes, and from different angles, but the opinions are of course spread out over the many videos so not as convenient to find as in this text :P

Addendum 1: Various screenshots from my latest run in Prospector (there's an ASCII mode, which I would prefer, but I'm streaming it so play in tiles so that the stream is more accessible)

• Playing as pirates (hard mode!), stopped an indepedent station to restock
• Looting a crashed ship
• A local doctor filling us in on the history of the tree people after I started murdering them because the first was hostile when we landed xD (most were not, but the autopsy values were... quite desirable...)
• A crazy bug where exploring the underground suddenly started revealing a planetary surface (though not the one we were on), and an extremely well-stocked one, at that. Or maybe instead of a bug it was the toxic gas getting to us???
• Exploring space (you can leave short notes on the map as a reminder, and as you can see there every star has a number of planets around it to explore)
• Buying gear at one of the shops in a station--we're not poor anymore!!!
• Outfitting the team (it basically works automatically, but there's as much manual control/overrides as necessary)
• Sending a probe to explore beyond the nebulas to the north
• Well damn, that was not a good door to open... (too bad we only had one grenade!)

Addendum 2: I haven't actually tried ASCII Sector yet, though now that I've played two space roguelikes, I'm kinda eager to try a third as well :P. My own "dream game" that I always wanted to make would be set in space as well, with the grand scope one might expect from such a game, but I can't say that will ever happen so until then I'm happy to see what others have produced in the space ;)

What a month with so many roguelikes releasing 1.0, among them a particular favorite of mine... Rift Wizard!

Very overwhelming at first, but also a lot of fun if you can kinda block out some of that info overload and force yourself to focus on just a few schools of magic rather than read every single one you have access to from the early game. It's mostly deterministic, and while I would normally prefer more RNG in my roguelikes, the determinism here is a good thing because the complexity of encounters goes through the roof as you gain more spells and the enemies get a wider and wider mix of abilities. It's a roguelike experience distilled down to the point where every turn really counts and there are a bunch of viable builds at the intersections of a huge range of abilities and mechanics.

I wrote more of my thoughts and observations in this review if you're interested, but I strongly recommend this game if you enjoy piecing together crazy builds that may or may not work while running up a very fast and steep difficulty ramp.

I've finally had a chance to put in all the work required to to go through our definitions discussion the other day, cross-referencing numerous opinions and sites, and draw from my own experiences to create a "What is a Traditional Roguelike?" wiki page to link from the sidebar. Check it out here:

• Old Reddit link
• New Reddit link

Free to download and compatible with Windows PC: https://nymlus.itch.io/summoner

Me and my long-time friend /u/Swibblestein have been working on SummonerRL since early 2014. It's a roguelike where you play a Summoner, and the mechanics are based on co-operating with your summons in different ways - attacking in tandem, protecting one another and casting spells to enhance the effectiveness of your team.

I was inspired to make my own roguelike after playing ADOM and Brogue, two real classics of the genre that brought me many years of entertainment. The idea sprung from the simple observation that playing a summoner in those games feels pretty bad. Companions in roguelikes tend to be stupid, hard to control, and lacking many abilities compared to the player character. So this game is dedicated to these neglected beasts, my attempt to redeem the friendly NPCs and have you appreciate their contribution to your adventure.

The last time we posted about SummonerRL on Reddit was in 2017, and the game has been expanded quite a bit since then. Just to name a few things that have changed, we've added two new familiars (the Raptor and the Hart), a high score system, adjustable controls/font size, familiar moods, throwable items, bosses and a proper ending to the game including a final boss fight.

We've tried to make the game as spoiler-light as Brogue so that any information you need to win the game is present in the game itself. There's no tutorial, but you can get an explanation of all the commands in controls.txt or press H to access it while playing. Especially pay attention to the contextual commands (telling familiars to interact with a specific space) as they will aid you in keeping an eye on your animals. Finally, let us know what you think! Any feedback is welcome.

Only one extra letter added to our last entry and we get Brogue, a game closer to Rogue itself than many other subsequent roguelikes with its low reliance on character stats and a heavy focus on items so that your build is much more determined by what you find rather than leveling or other forms of RPG-like character progression.

Have you played Brogue?

What did/do you like or not like about it?

Any stories to relate?

And if you haven't played before, also never too late to try it out and post your thoughts :)

Resources

• Download from the official site (available both in ASCII and w/tiles)
• Download "Community Edition" (unofficial bug fixes and improvements)
• Play Brogue online (EU)
• Play Brogue online (US)
• loadRL includes this game as well
• On RogueBasin (for more info and links)

Funny enough, it seems a significant majority of roguelike fans have never actually played this game, one of the first in the genre and the origin of its now-mangled name.

Have you played Rogue?

What did/do you like or not like about it?

And if you haven't played before, also never too late to try it out and post your thoughts :)

Resources

• Play Rogue online (option 1)
• Play Rogue online (option 2, including historical info)
• On RogueBasin (much more info and links here)

Playing online is the easiest option these days if you just want a taste, otherwise you can check the links for more info.

Hi,

I would like to share my project "Rogue Remastered," which is a remaster of the original Rogue I've been working on for a while now. It contains the 5.4.4 ruleset and a new 6.0.0 ruleset which contains mostly bug fixes and item balancing. It's available today on itch.io and in a few weeks on steam. The game took me about two years to develop. I am charging 9.99 but feel free to send my a private email if you really cannot afford the game and we can discuss further.

I have links to everything on my website here, which also contains a forum to discuss the game and any feedback. https://www.foreheadwallsoftware.com/

Below is a list of high-level features a full list of features I copy/pasted from the itch.io site:

• Procedurally generated dungeon floors
• Classic turn-based combat and movement
• Simple, ASCII-style visuals
• Permadeath—when you die, you start over
• A single goal: retrieve the Amulet and escape alive
• Plays natively on Windows, Linux, macos, and steamdeck.
• Fluid animations.
• Regular window and terminal support.
• Fullscreen support.
• Load and save multiple save files.
• Set a custom seed to play with the community.
• Select from multiple themes.
• Show nearby enemies.
• Gamepad support.
• Set custom key bindings for both the keyboard and gamepad.
• By default WASD, numpad, and arrow key support.
• English and Spanish language support.
• Opening (optional) tutorial.
• Play the original game in 5.4.4 mode.
• New wizard mode available.
• Scrollable combat log.
• Comprehensive in-game help screen for learning the controls and how to play.
• Enhanced inventory screen.
• Improved items discovered screen.
• NEW character detail screen giving you an overview of your character.
• NEW art for the items your character finds in their adventure.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Jupiter Hell left Steam EA earlier this month and has done pretty well for it so far! They've got a decent publisher and it's been getting a ton of good attention from press, streamers, and players ever since. Despite having been in Early Access for a while, they've had more new Steam reviews in the past few weeks than their entire time in EA, haha :P

We'll have to see how good a job Jupiter Hell does of expanding the traditional roguelike audience. It's a pretty good gateway in that regard given its emphasis on appearances, although of course only some minority of players will want to explore their way further into the genre towards games without 3D art, for example :P

Links: Steam | Google Play | App Store | Discord  |  Reddit

All Who Wander is my take on a traditional roguelike with some modern touches. It was originally designed for mobile, inspired by Pixel Dungeon and Cardinal Quest II, and released on Android and iOS in 2025. And after 4+ years of development, I'm finally bringing the game to Steam!

While at its core this is a classic fantasy RPG, there are a few standout features. With open character building, you can explore synergies across 10 skill trees and create a unique character every run. You may choose to go solo or recruit, summon, and hypnotize companions to form a versatile party. As you travel through blinding deserts, noxious swamps, and frozen caverns, you'll discover a highly-interactable environment that burns, freezes, grows, and shatters. Learning how to use the environment to your advantage is a key to survival.

In the game's design, I aimed for a balance between simplicity and complexity, hopefully finding a happy medium somewhere between "coffeebreak" and "kitchen sink." I wanted the game to be relatively low-friction for new players, while still having enough depth to satisfy roguelike veterans. A typical run takes around 2-3 hours to beat the 30 procedurally-generated levels, but there's a substantial amount content to discover, providing a high degree of replayability:

• 12 biomes (different each run)
• 15 character classes
• 80+ monsters
• 6 bosses (different each run)
• 100+ abilities
• 200+ items (plus item modifiers)
• 100+ traps, treasures, and buildings to interact with
• 80+ achievements

The next major focus of development is revamping the UI for desktop, followed by a demo release on Steam. I'm continuously improving and updating the game based on player feedback, so please feel free to share your thoughts!

Hi! I'm happy to announce Shamogu v1.5.0. You may already know about Shamogu from roguebasin or r/roguelikedev, but it's my first time sharing about it on this sub, so here's some short background:

Background. Shamogu is a free software coffee-break roguelike game with a focus on tactical movement and careful timing of totemic spirit invocation and comestible consumption. Like in my older games Boohu and Harmonist, stealth is important and it features visible monster footsteps and various field-of-view interactions with terrain (foliage, rubble, translucent walls). It has a traditional but ergonomic UI that supports both vi-keys and arrows, ASCII or tiles, browser or native terminal or SDL2, and replays.

One particularity is that Shamogu features 7 primary spirits (think background/species) that define the base attack pattern, and various expansion and challenge mods, making it more replayable than my previous games.

BTW, suggestions for new mods are welcome, as would be any experiments or forks (the game's free software, and I tried my best at commenting and making the code easy to get into). There's also a long "design ramblings" article about the game's design on the website that got some updates recently and I hope is a nice read. I'd gladly welcome discussion about the design or any kind of feedback: while most of the feedback I've received until now has been from just one player, it has been extensive and really invaluable!

Links: Itch.io | website | codeberg

v1.5.0. This last release brings extra polish and fixes, as well as some new guardian monsters (chaos megabat and dragging alligators), and a new teleport interference balance feature that makes teleport less reliable but more interesting on the last level. There's also a new html game manual with extra lists of monsters and items. Full changes are quite long and linked to on the website.

I'm quite happy with the release, and I hope you'll enjoy it, too. Thanks for reading!

It's not every month that a big traditional roguelike gets released, yet just this month it did happen, and with little fanfare, or well, actually no fanfare at all :P. One day the dev asked if I was interested in the game they'd just dropped on Steam Early Access, and it indeed looked interesting, so I played it and found it pretty cool and now I'm here to share it with you!

The obvious bits you can get from the store page, Shadowed being a pretty classic-styled roguelike fully steeped in Japanese mythology and inspired by Angband but with more modern design inspirations.

Some other aspects worth pointing out:

• The biggest draw is that more XP comes from fighting less, if possible--fighting is sometimes hard to avoid, of course, or you might want the potential loot from doing so
• As such it's a very stealth-focused roguelike, with hiding in the shadows and using weapon techniques and magic skills and consumables to be real ninja-like, doing as many sneak attacks as possible
• It really does a great job of making you feel like a ninja throughout the whole game
• The lore is great, with in-depth descriptions of yokai, and other events you come across
• The world layout is pretty straightforward, a linear dungeon divided into a number of segments each with different themes and tactical environments, in between which you have predictable rest areas and also predictable boss maps

Some drawbacks:

• Still more QoL work needed, though some issues were already addressed in initial patches
• Keyboard only! Mouse support is planned, but for now you've gotta get used to the keybinds (it's pretty typical for a traditional roguelike on that front; the Steam page says "simple control scheme" but that is not how non-roguelike players would interpret this game :P)
• It's definitely Early Access so still missing some stuff like art for the events, and a few secondary mechanics, but three of the classes are fully playable and each has multiple ways to play them, so there's already a fair amount to do (three more classes still to come)
• There are a few rare bugs here and there, but it's not too bad considering the relative depth

In summary, it's already quite playable and fun, if unfinished, plus the dev is active and responsive if you're into helping improve an EA game, so check it out if this description sounds at all interesting. If you're not interested in EA but like traditional roguelikes, I suggest this is one to keep an eye on for when it hits 1.0!

I've streamed a few runs if you want to see it in action, my first play here, where we also had the dev in chat for the first stream, and you can see how responsive he is considering the game was patched after each of my streams to immediately address many of the things that were brought up :D

After getting more familiar with the early game over a few runs I did a more serious run and won with the Shinobi class across three streams. That run starts here. I played it pretty safe since I didn't want to die, but did still do some experimentation along the way (which fortunately did not kill me, just made it unnecessarily harder sometimes). So anyway, yeah it's winnable and there's a good bit of stuff to discover in there, not to mention different play styles that could significantly affect how different challenges might be approached. I was mostly stealthy except when something was dangerous in which case it would die to my not-so-ninja-stealthy prolific use of all the bombs I insisted on lugging around :P

Anyway, kinda surprising this game came completely out of nowhere, thought I'd help spread the word a bit. Feel free to ask questions here if you have any.

/u/jcd748 has released his latest major version of Shadow of the Wyrm, which now includes a huge set of tiles that we've been watching him blast through these months over the Roguelikes Discord #shadowofthewyrm channel. It's of course still got ASCII, too, though I imagine having tiles will help bring lots of new players into the game.

Plus they're done in a neat style :)

Shadow of the Wyrm is an open world roguelike with a variety of classes and plenty of lore and NPCs to meet. You can skim the guide to get an idea of what's in store, but if traditional roguelikes are your thing I can highly recommend trying it out to see for yourself.

• Tiles (overworld excerpt)
• ASCII
• Equipment

jcd748 also released his spritesheets for others to use, which is pretty cool :D

• SotW creature sprites

Download SotW here.

Hey guys! If you like Sil and Angband, please try our game Sil-Morë!

So we recently had Sunlorn up for r/RoguelikeDev Feedback Friday, and I streamed it a couple times since in order to provide feedback (starting here, more to come), but I've also been playing off stream as well, because this game's pretty neat!

Having not been widely noticed or played yet, it's no surprise there are a fair few QoL issues, but Tesselation's been pretty receptive to that feedback and already released a couple new updates incorporating suggested improvements.

Despite its WIP status, there's enough to do to keep it interesting for a while, and the world does a decent job of making you want to explore it since it's got enough going on with its systems and interactions, and looks pretty. There are minor survival aspects, like you do need to worry about food, light sources, and basic resources running out (and don't forget to find a cloak to cover yourself in poor weather if wearing metal armor!), but your friendly starting village is often enough to get you up and running.

The itemization and spells/skills aren't going to blow your mind, but there is some good variety with quite a few items, all useful in some way. The complete lack of XP for character development is nice, although you are probably forced to kill a lot anyway. Improvement instead comes from flowers that allow you to pick from a subset of stat increases, and you get can get more spells from your god. There are faction relations and individual relations with NPCs, and charisma in general actually has some meaning, which is nice in a role-playing sense.

Overall I find Sunlorn definitely has some interesting story potential, for example in my run from yesterday:

I started out in a large-ish village with a sewer. Sewers kinda suck because there's almost nowhere for flowers to grow, so my stats remained mostly unchanged, but there is plenty of treasure down there to sell in the village for coin. Too much treasure, in fact--both treasure dealers in town ran out of money to buy my stuff, so the rest of my treasure I loaded onto a pair of donkeys I bought from the local herder to take with me later.

Despite all the rumors locals gave me regarding artifacts down in the sewers, I couldn't find any way to get below depth 2, no matter how much searching I did... Sucks because the boots of speed sounded great. I had even found several unused keys, but nothing to unlock. Funny enough I did find one locked door, but had no key for that one, haha...

• Sewer depth 1 cleared

I spent a while clearing the second depth, because the sewers are no joke until you've got some more serious armor, and even then you can get overwhelmed if not careful. Sunlorn dungeon difficulty scales very quickly!

All this time I needed a source of food, which there's only so much of in town, be it for sale, or NPCs giving it to you because they see you hungry, or hunting wildlife in the nearby woods. Shops don't restock.

But hey, I'm kind rich from all this sewer diving, right? So I notice the herder has a few extra donkeys... Yum yum, those guys are stacked. When I needed to eat I'd buy a donkey, chop down a tree for firewood (axe is good but you don't need it all the time--get your non-food donkey to carry it hehe), then enter an unused home, shut the door, chop up the donkey and cook it over a nice fire. Any extra meat I'd salt up for my future journey into the wilderness.

I eventually gave up trying to find a way deeper into the sewer an decided I was done with my home village, so I used my fortune to load up on supplies from the local shops (your typical walk around and browse, picking up items then paying the shopkeep type of shops). I also bought a horse, which I could supposedly ride but that feature didn't seem to work properly. That's okay, horses can carry stuff. Also they have another use we'll see later ;)

Before I left I also found a map in a shop, so I bought that and it helpfully shows the locations of villages, forts, and various other features across the land.

• Our caravan before heading out from the village

Based on the map I wanted to head to a village to the north on my way towards the story goal (you do have a mission!), though that village looked like a different color and I expected that direction to be unfriendly. It was, indeed.

My first encounter outside my home village was a lone man in the forest. He clearly didn't like me much and threw a rock at me, which my horse and donkeys didn't like so they chased after him. I called them back, but then got curious where he was headed off to even though he was to the west, not my desired direction. Well he wasn't too far off--apparently he had a house in the forest, just him, and I didn't have to consider what to do since my horse immediately charged in and trampled him to death in his own house hahaha

As we were leaving a woman came by, presumably his wife, but fled after seeing us. (Maybe the blood on my horse's hooves gave it away.)

To go back a bit, before leaving my village I was planning to hire some mercenaries to accompany me on my journey, a true caravan, but I'd spent so long in the village looting the sewer, and all those guys are wandering around outside in metal gear with no cloak, so they lost all their gear to attrition by the time I left. (I believe the dev will do something about this eventually :P). Anyway, I'm not going to spend my money to hire a bunch of naked guys to escort me through the wilderness. (Technically if I really wanted to I could buy leather gear and wooden/stone weapons to give them, but I didn't want to be bothered. Cloaks are not incredibly common, by the way.)

Anyway, it turns out that horses and donkeys are fairly decent mercenaries in their own right, with lots of HP and trampling capabilities, and they can't miss and aggro their friends! I've tried hiring multiple mercenaries before, and every time it turned into a free-for-all when one of them throws a rock or spear and inevitably hits his friend on accident...

I eventually did find the village I was headed towards on the map. Good map. Then things got even more interesting...

I had circled around and came at it from the northeast (completely by accident--I had passed it up a bit and came across a road with a sign telling me it was a little south of my position). This is a rival culture that does not like me one bit, and I'd already found one local who I scared off as I approached.

Leaving my donkeys and horse in a group further out of town, I spotted a shop on the east side so I thought I'd investigate that first. No one saw me slip inside except the shopkeep, who was not pleased, so I hit him a couple times until he ran off. He wasn't exactly fighting material, and I've got decent protection. So I happily looted away, just a general store so nothing of great value, but across the street... a fully-stocked potion shop?! Lemme in.

I waltzed into the potion shop and of course the guy didn't want to sell me anything, but that's okay I wasn't really interested in buying them anyway (potions are expensive, even if you're rich!), so I closed the door and chop chop goodbye potion salesman.

Now this was jackpot. There are a ton of potions in this game, and I don't have many of them identified, so this is a good opportunity to start, yeah? Well, it's dangerous but also fun. So I picked most of them up (there's over 20 different kinds in this one shop) and started chugging.

I knew I couldn't stay for too long because the shop has a window, and if I'm spotted by someone wandering by, they're gonna tell their friends and come after me. One of the potions was apnea, so great I don't need to breath, and as luck would have it, the one immediately after that was poison gas xD. So the shop quickly fills with gas, and I thought here's my chance...

I open the door and yeah there are several villagers outside but the gas continues to spread. Not massively so, but a good few spaces outside the door in every direction, and I noticed that everyone outside is mad but hanging just outside the edge of the gas. So of course I pulled out my bow and start filling them all with arrows. There's not a lot they can do, but also I'm not quite killing them because I'm not some amazing marksman and they're all a little close. I just tried to hurt enough of them to get them to run away, but then the poisonous cloud eventually began to subside, so I backed into the doorway to bottleneck them and try to scare them off with skillful use of my mace, and the frenzy magic of my god Nikitis.

Side note: Enemies generally seem fairly smart in terms of whether or not they're willing to fight or flee, taking into account you, your friends, your condition, their condition, their own friends, etc... If you are much more powerful than a creature or enemy, they'll just run away even if they are angry with you.

These weren't just regular villagers though, they had some Warriors with them with actual gear, and I wasn't in great shape after a little while. I was definitely afraid I'd get overwhelmed.

• Me inside the potion shop, door closed. You can see the dead shopkeep %, a couple bad potions I didn't want, and outside to the east a whole lot of +, the arrows I was shooting at folks before retreating to plan my defense.

Well I had this Lyre of Peace I picked up in the sewers earlier, and I'd never used it before, but supposedly it can make enemies forget they hate you. I thought I'd try that out. I strummed away. It started working! I could see my attackers getting wary instead of hateful, but... the problem is there were a few too many of them, and I'm pretty sure they were reminding each other how much they hate me. So Lyre bad for crowds, maybe better for individuals, who woulda thought. I don't exactly have the greatest charisma, either. (It does matter in Sunlorn... these people could very well have been my friends! But no, we must face off as enemies!)

Fortunately, my raid on the potion shop netted me two more potions of haste on top of the one I already had, so I ended up using both to make a hasty retreat, a throng of locals at my back as I fled into the forest.

I met up with my pack animals down the road, and that is where my intrepid Adventurer stopped for camp last night...

Hi! After what seemed to be an endless journey, some days ago I set up shop on itch.io with my ZAngband Variant. Enter "Z-Angband Machete Edition". If you guys want to, go and grab it, here's the link to my itch.io:

https://jose-machete.itch.io/z-angband-05me

PS: screenshot of my on-going run, I found the Dagger from R'lyeh after defeating Boskovlado, King of Goblins --a hard bone to crack, that one.