Dungeon Crawl

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Linley's Dungeon Crawl (or just Dungeon Crawl or Crawl) is a roguelike computer game originally programmed by Linley Henzell in 1995. Version 1.00 was released 1 October 1997, and the game is still being developed.

Overview

Crawl starts with the player's choice of one of twenty-six races: five different types of elves, two types of dwarves, humans, ogres, centaurs, merfolk, and other fantastic beings. Racial selection sets base attributes, future skill advancement, and physical characteristics such as movement, resistances, and special abilities.

Subject to racial exclusions, the player next chooses a character class from among twenty-eight selections. Classes include the traditional roles of fighter, wizard, and thief as well as specialty roles, among them monks, berserkers, assassins, crusaders, and elemental spellcasters. Wanderers represent an atypical option and receive a random skill set. Together, class and race determine base equipment and skill training, though characters may later attempt to acquire any in-game skill.

The Crawl skill system covers most abilities upon which adventurers might call. The skills include the ability to move freely in armor or silently, mount effective attacks with different categories of weapons (polearms, long or short blades, maces, whips, and staves), master spells from different magical colleges (the elements, necromancy, conjuration, enchantments, summoning, etc.), utilize magical artifacts, and pray to divinities. Training occurs through repetition of skill-related actions (e.g., hitting a monster with a longsword trains long blades and fighting skills).

Relative to most roguelikes, religion within Crawl varies more as a game mechanic. Its pantheon of twelve gods reward character conformance to particular codes of conduct. Trog, the berserker god, expects abstinence from casting spells and offers aid in battle, whereas Sif Muna expects frequent spellcraft in exchange for magical assistance. Some deities campaign against evil, matched by a god of death who revels in indiscriminate killing, while others prove unpredictable objects of worship. Xom, an example of the latter, toys with followers, meting out punishments and showering gifts on inscrutable whims.

The goal of Crawl is to recover the "Orb of Zot" hidden deep within a dungeon complex. To achieve this objective, characters must visit various dungeon branches, such as the Orcish Mines or The Lair, which often branch further in to additional areas, like the Elven Halls or The Swamp. Dungeon maps in Crawl persist as the player moves between levels. At the time of its development, this feature was not commonly implemented in other roguelike games.

Typical Dungeon Crawl screen

 wiki the Stabber ∙∙ High Elf ∙∙∙ #### HP: 5/16 #∙∙ Versions
As of January 2008, the most recent official release of Linley's Dungeon Crawl is version 4.0.0 beta 26, from 24 March 2003; a later alpha release, version 4.1.0, dates from July 2005.
The crawl-ref project was formed to address the seemingly stalled official development of Crawl, yielding the variant Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Project developers characterize official Crawl development as in "something close to hibernation", with development "largely invisible to the public." The most recent version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is 0.3.4, released on January 28, 2008.
Another variant with color tile graphics and mouse support also exists, released under an open source license based on the original NetHack General Public License.
The game has been ported to the Nintendo DS as DSCrawl.
 References
^ Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. SourceForge. Retrieved on 2007-08-03.
 External links
Official website
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on Sourceforge
Linley's Dungeon Crawl at Home of the Underdogs
Tile graphics version
CrawlWiki
Play Crawl online
13 Steps To CRAWL
Hints and spoilers