<geek>
I've been addicted to Roguelikes off and on, starting on my family's Macintosh Performa several years ago, with Moria. After a while I switched to Angband. Then more recently I discovered Angband variants like ZAngband and the like. I never really cottoned to ZAngband, though. I don't want a wilderness, or quests, or special levels. Not really. And while some of the new classes/races were cool, I never really got the hang of any spellcasting class in that or any other Angband, and warrior-types are pretty dull in most games unless you can customize them and get special attacks and such.
A few months back I stumbled across Steamband, an Angband variant which is themed around Victorian-era literature and people. Picture yourself fighting troglodytes and Eloi, vicious chickens, dinosaurs, various kinds of steamtech automatons, etc. Were that all, it would be mildly amusing, but it would be nothing special amidst so many other variants that mostly make such thematic changes.
Steamband goes a *lot* further, though. Inherent racial and class powers, a totally revamped level/stat system which gives most of your boosts in power to a broad skill tree system which includes race and class specific skills. Want to fight better? Advance the various "X Combat" skills. Learn Martial Arts, maybe. Specialize in specific weapon types. Learn skills that increase your criticals, up your base damage, speed your attacks. Want to cast spells? Learn Latin, then Occult Magic or Spirituality depending on your path. Learn subskills that improve your ability to cast certain sorts of magic. Raise your willpower with Tempered Will. Become Erudite, making your magic-oriented stats higher at the expense of strength. Etc. The base skills are available to every race and class, though some of them are better at them than others. Specific subskills, and skills relating to class or race powers, are only available to specific kinds of characters. Your Adventurer, while primarily a melee combatant, can certainly learn some basic magical or engineering skills, for example. But he'll never be able to toss around Neural Blasts, as those are a Medium class power.
How to earn these lovely skills? Levelling gets you a random number of skill points, though gradually less as you become more powerful. You can also find books lying around the dungeon and turn them back in to the Library, netting between 1 and 20 skill points depending on the book and a random roll. You can also complete quests, given at the library, which offer skill points as one of many possible rewards.
Then there are the completely redesigned races. Human races make up nearly half, with various nationalities having mild stat differences, an occasional intrinsic power, maybe a racial skill. To make up for their relative blandness, they have a pretty mild exp bonus/penalty, and more importantly, they are able to research and install "steamware", (i.e., steampunk style cybertech.). More esoteric races include several brands of fae, with considerably more intrinsic abilities, potential mutations, and/or racial skills, especially the multi-race "Fae Pathways" skillset, allowing teleportation. Also giants, ogres, goblins, djinn, rakshasa, ghost, two varieties of mecha (Automaton and Steam-Mecha), who are unable to eat regular food or drink potions, subsisting primarily on oil. They also receive massive stats at the beginning without being able to increase them further, and have a wide array of potent racial abilities. They're basically for beginners. And then there's the true challenge, the Old Ones, who have a whole bunch of innate abilities and specials...but are also exp drained continually.
....anyway. There's lots more cool stuff, and it's well worth playing, but I was originally writing this to brag about my new character, a Ghost Medium who is working out just *swimmingly*. Being able to duck through the nearest wall makes the low HP/WP woes a lot less significant, and the telepathy allows me to locate and terminate potential foes with ease...well, except for things like chickens and alien spores, which're too dumb to show up, and automatons, which don't have minds, per se. This means they also don't die when I Neural Blast them, so I've been forced to do a bit of branching into Occult Magic (which I wanted to do anyway, as offensive magic is invariably cooler than the defense magic of the priestly types). Occult magic is definitely not for the faint of heart. Nearly every spell carries with it some sort of casting cost over and above the base SP cost of the spell. The basic offensive spell, Aim of the Will burns your HP every time you cast it. Later spells will do stat drain damage, open cuts on your body (which causes continual HP loss until cured or closed on their own.). Probably worse in the later books. Failure can have even worse consequences. Fortunately, there are ways to safeguard against the penalties, eventually reaching a point where basic casting is effectively free.
There's nothing quite like gliding through walls distributing psionic or icy magical death liberally to all comers.
</geek>
I've been addicted to Roguelikes off and on, starting on my family's Macintosh Performa several years ago, with Moria. After a while I switched to Angband. Then more recently I discovered Angband variants like ZAngband and the like. I never really cottoned to ZAngband, though. I don't want a wilderness, or quests, or special levels. Not really. And while some of the new classes/races were cool, I never really got the hang of any spellcasting class in that or any other Angband, and warrior-types are pretty dull in most games unless you can customize them and get special attacks and such.
A few months back I stumbled across Steamband, an Angband variant which is themed around Victorian-era literature and people. Picture yourself fighting troglodytes and Eloi, vicious chickens, dinosaurs, various kinds of steamtech automatons, etc. Were that all, it would be mildly amusing, but it would be nothing special amidst so many other variants that mostly make such thematic changes.
Steamband goes a *lot* further, though. Inherent racial and class powers, a totally revamped level/stat system which gives most of your boosts in power to a broad skill tree system which includes race and class specific skills. Want to fight better? Advance the various "X Combat" skills. Learn Martial Arts, maybe. Specialize in specific weapon types. Learn skills that increase your criticals, up your base damage, speed your attacks. Want to cast spells? Learn Latin, then Occult Magic or Spirituality depending on your path. Learn subskills that improve your ability to cast certain sorts of magic. Raise your willpower with Tempered Will. Become Erudite, making your magic-oriented stats higher at the expense of strength. Etc. The base skills are available to every race and class, though some of them are better at them than others. Specific subskills, and skills relating to class or race powers, are only available to specific kinds of characters. Your Adventurer, while primarily a melee combatant, can certainly learn some basic magical or engineering skills, for example. But he'll never be able to toss around Neural Blasts, as those are a Medium class power.
How to earn these lovely skills? Levelling gets you a random number of skill points, though gradually less as you become more powerful. You can also find books lying around the dungeon and turn them back in to the Library, netting between 1 and 20 skill points depending on the book and a random roll. You can also complete quests, given at the library, which offer skill points as one of many possible rewards.
Then there are the completely redesigned races. Human races make up nearly half, with various nationalities having mild stat differences, an occasional intrinsic power, maybe a racial skill. To make up for their relative blandness, they have a pretty mild exp bonus/penalty, and more importantly, they are able to research and install "steamware", (i.e., steampunk style cybertech.). More esoteric races include several brands of fae, with considerably more intrinsic abilities, potential mutations, and/or racial skills, especially the multi-race "Fae Pathways" skillset, allowing teleportation. Also giants, ogres, goblins, djinn, rakshasa, ghost, two varieties of mecha (Automaton and Steam-Mecha), who are unable to eat regular food or drink potions, subsisting primarily on oil. They also receive massive stats at the beginning without being able to increase them further, and have a wide array of potent racial abilities. They're basically for beginners. And then there's the true challenge, the Old Ones, who have a whole bunch of innate abilities and specials...but are also exp drained continually.
....anyway. There's lots more cool stuff, and it's well worth playing, but I was originally writing this to brag about my new character, a Ghost Medium who is working out just *swimmingly*. Being able to duck through the nearest wall makes the low HP/WP woes a lot less significant, and the telepathy allows me to locate and terminate potential foes with ease...well, except for things like chickens and alien spores, which're too dumb to show up, and automatons, which don't have minds, per se. This means they also don't die when I Neural Blast them, so I've been forced to do a bit of branching into Occult Magic (which I wanted to do anyway, as offensive magic is invariably cooler than the defense magic of the priestly types). Occult magic is definitely not for the faint of heart. Nearly every spell carries with it some sort of casting cost over and above the base SP cost of the spell. The basic offensive spell, Aim of the Will burns your HP every time you cast it. Later spells will do stat drain damage, open cuts on your body (which causes continual HP loss until cured or closed on their own.). Probably worse in the later books. Failure can have even worse consequences. Fortunately, there are ways to safeguard against the penalties, eventually reaching a point where basic casting is effectively free.
There's nothing quite like gliding through walls distributing psionic or icy magical death liberally to all comers.
</geek>