rec.games.roguelike.adom

Long-form reference · 1,923 words · about a 8-minute read

The group and its era

Ancient Domains of Mystery first appeared in 1994, written by Thomas Biskup and released for Linux, with MS-DOS and Windows ports in January 1996. It stayed free for the whole of that first life: ASCII display, permadeath enforced by a single save file the game erases as it loads, and a plot spine unusually firm for the genre: the Drakalor Chain of Ancardia, and a coming of Chaos whose corruption works on the body faster the longer the player takes.

ADOM talk was conducted in rec.games.roguelike.misc before the game had a room of its own. The dedicated group was created on its first proposal, by a vote of 232 to 21, and announced on 22 February 1997. The branch it joined was organised by title — angband, moria, nethack and rogue alongside misc — with a moderated announce group and, from 1998, a group for the people writing the games. The branch name had itself been argued out on the network in 1993, when the existing per-game groups, rec.games.hack and rec.games.moria among them, were put up for consolidation: rec.games.dungeon.* was proposed as the umbrella, and rec.games.roguelike.* was picked instead as the least of the available evils. The wider structure is described on the rec.* hierarchy page.

The charter, culled from the vote result announcement and carried in the newgroup control message of 27 February 1997, described ADOM as an ASCII-character graphics adventure game in the style of Omega and NetHack, and opened the group to anything pertaining to it, including requests for help locating and playing the game and announcements of new versions, which were also to go to the branch's announce group. Other roguelikes belonged in rec.games.roguelike.misc, large binaries on an FTP or web site to be pointed at from a post, and commercial matter nowhere at all. The charter also wrote the group's central custom into its constitution on the first day: when posting information about gameplay that is not in the manual and not common knowledge, it is customary to put a notice such as [SPOILERS] in the title of the post.

What the word meant was, for most of the group's life, local custom rather than definition. The Berlin Interpretation — the checklist of random dungeons, permadeath, turn-based grid play and resource pressure cited ever since — was not drawn up until 2008, at a developers' conference in Berlin, which took ADOM as one of its five canonical games.

What the Berlin meeting produced was a scorecard rather than a boundary. It set out nine high-value factors — random dungeon generation, permadeath, turn-based play, a uniform grid, non-modality, complexity enough that a goal can be reached in several ways, resource management, a hack-and-slash focus, and exploration with the discovery of unidentified items — and five low-value ones behind them, from the control of a single character through a run to a status display given in numbers. The factors were derived from five canonical games: ADOM, Angband, Linley's Dungeon Crawl, NetHack and Rogue. Those who drew the list up were explicit that it measured how roguelike a game is, and that missing a factor disqualified nothing, any more than holding the factors qualified anything. The group was by then eleven years old.

The game under discussion

The game opens with a choice of character from twelve races and twenty-two classes, a combination that shapes everything after it, and an alignment — lawful, neutral or chaotic — which governs the quests offered and the response of deities and other characters, and which moves with the player's conduct, so that a chaotic character can work its way back towards law. Play runs through the Drakalor Chain, a mountainous region of the world of Ancardia; after six thousand years of relative peace, reports spread of dangerous dungeons and frightening monsters, and the sage Khelavaster finds an ancient prophecy of the Coming of Chaos and of a champion who will meet it in the Chain. Most dungeons are generated procedurally, but once a level has been made it stays made and is the same on re-entry.

Two mechanisms supply the group's spoiler files with most of their subject matter. The first is corruption. The forces of Chaos work on the landscape and on the character alike, producing mutations — antennae, a tail, altered features, magical abilities acquired whether or not they are wanted — some helpful, some crippling, many of them both, arriving faster the longer the player takes to close the gate through which Chaos enters. A character corrupted completely becomes a writhing mass of primal chaos and the game ends. The most powerful chaotic artifacts corrupt merely by being carried, lesser ones only when wielded or invoked. The second is that there is more than one way to win. The regular ending, and the one that existed first, is to find the gate and close it; entering the gate instead gives access to the special endings, reckoned the harder achievement — becoming a demigod, or a heroic sacrifice that stops the invasion — one of which requires the character to be almost fully corrupted.

What was discussed

The group's real subject was knowledge and how to handle it. A game this size could not be finished without shared findings, yet much of its pleasure lay in not knowing, so the community managed that tension rather than resolving it, in an elaborate spoiler etiquette set out at length in the group's own FAQ.

A spoiler was defined there as something not obvious and not in the manual whose knowledge bypasses the problem-solving process: that an artifact called Kinslayer exists was fair game, its powers and whereabouts were not. Posts carrying it took a [Spoily] tag, or [Major Spoilers] for a ground-breaking discovery, plus a warning inside the text and about twenty lines of spoiler space. The space had to be asterisks rather than empty lines, which some newsreaders truncated; the reasoning was that many people moved from post to post without reading subject lines and always saw the first screenful. ROT-13 was debated many times as an alternative; spoiler space kept winning.

Around this grew a shorthand for the group's standing post genres: YAVP for a victory, YASD for a stupid or sad death, YAFM for a game message somebody found funny enough to share, RFE and Pre-RFE for feature requests, and YAGBU — Yet Another Guidebook Update — for a discovery to be folded into the ADOM Guidebook, maintained by Andy Williams, which the FAQ called the definitive source of information about ADOM. Newcomers were asked to search the Guidebook and then the archive before claiming a find. Not everything settled amicably: the Improved Guidebook copied and altered the original without permission and added material obtained by disassembling the game, which Biskup had asked people not to do; the FAQ listed the resulting argument among topics to approach carefully, alongside the release of the source code and the proper use of the save feature.

The rest of the branch

Eight groups made up the branch, and their one-line entries in the newsgroups file say plainly what each was for.

• rec.games.roguelike.rogue, .moria, .angband, .nethack and .adom — one group to a game, each described as the computer game in question and nothing further.
• rec.games.roguelike.misc — rogue-style dungeon games without other groups: the catch-all, and where ADOM was discussed before it had a group.
• rec.games.roguelike.announce — major info about rogue-styled games, moderated.
• rec.games.roguelike.development — design and programming of roguelike games.

The announce group was among the first of them and the only moderated one, created in August 1993 alongside misc by a vote of 229 to 100 as a place for FAQ lists, announcements of new versions and patches, and news of new rogue-style games, with every posting cross-posted to the most appropriate other group in the branch. Its charter named Aliza R. Panitz as initial moderator and gave the moderator one pointed discretionary power: to change the subject line of a posting, especially to add the word [SPOILERS]. The development group followed in May 1998, by 175 to 19, for programming and design across the family, new games and modifications of existing ones alike, with binaries and advertisements ruled out.

Context

The author's presence changed the group's function. Biskup posted here, announcing new versions, and the official site's request-for-enhancement database was fed through the group by design: he asked that proposals be aired on the newsgroup first, so that duplicates and things already implemented could be filtered by veteran players before reaching him. A volunteer community triaging between users and a single developer, in public and on the record, is a shape early-access communities arrived at much later.

Plain text, threading and permanent archives suited the material unusually well. A spoiler file is a reference document, and a medium that quoted precisely, wrapped at seventy-two columns and kept everything retrievable hosted it better than the web forums that replaced it. The group's FAQ registers the changeover directly: a section added in a later revision opens by explaining to arrivals from the web what a newsgroup is and why messages take time to propagate.

Both conversation and game moved on. Discussion migrated to ADOM boards on the web, including the forum that links here. Development, dormant since 2002, restarted after an Indiegogo campaign that ran from July to August 2012 and raised $90,169; the revived game went commercial, reaching Steam on 16 November 2015, while the classic free version remained available. The archive remains a substantial record of how the game was worked out.

What became of the game

Development ran from 12 July 1994 until 20 November 2002 and then stopped, version 1.1.1 standing as the last of that first life; beta-quality Mac OS X ports appeared in 2006. Biskup had meanwhile started a next-generation successor called JADE, later renamed Ancient Domains of Mystery II with Jade kept as the engine name, and after the revival worked on a further sequel, Ultimate ADOM. The Indiegogo campaign of July 2012 reached its initial goal of $48,000 on 22 August, fifty-one days in, and closed at $90,169; the game entered Steam Greenlight in May 2014, and the HD re-release followed on 16 November 2015 for Windows, macOS and Linux. A classic version is still available free from the game's own site, alongside the paid edition sold on Steam.

One thing neither the hiatus nor the revival changed. Biskup had said early on that the source code would be published after version 1.0, and then reserved it, to keep some mystery about how the game worked and to limit the spread of unsanctioned variants. That is the background to a good deal of the group's work: what the code would have shown, players established instead by experiment and by inspecting the running game and its binaries, which is also what set the Improved Guidebook outside the line the author had drawn. Biskup has credited the community around the game as the main reason his games exist.