What are you talking about? Part 1 - Shadowfist

It occurred to me that I've just unleashed a bunch of Angband players on my LJ, and I'm going to spend some amount of time talking about some moderately obscure stuff that they may not have heard of.

Similarly, other people may have no clue what this Angband thing is.

Thus, I've decided to write some quick primers on what the heck I'm talking about. (Or might talk about, at some future date.)

Shadowfist

Shadowfist is a collectable card game, based on Hong Kong action movies. (And, to a lesser extent, action movies in general.)

The basic premise is that the philosophy of feng shui is true - that places with good chi flow bring good fortune. If you are attuned to a Feng Shui site, things start to go your way.

Attune to enough of them, and the entire world goes your way.

So, among those in the know, control of feng shui sites is all that really matters. There is a secret war going on over control of these sites, with the ultimate stakes being control of the world.

But wait, there's more...

There are portals to a place called the Netherworld. From there, you can get to other periods in history. If somebody takes over the world in the past, then history will be rewritten. Everybody who's been to the Netherworld remembers the old history, but nobody else does.

The purpose of this background is really just so you can have Shaolin Monks, ancient Chinese eunuch sorcerers, modern day killers straight out of a John Woo movie, and futuristic supersoldiers all in the same dustup.

And I haven't even mentioned the insane flying cyborg monkeys with bad pun names. (Their leader is the Battlechimp Potemkin.) Or a bunch of other things.

(The basic world background is also used in the RPG Feng Shui, from Atlas Games.)

The game itself plays very well, though it is a first-generation CCG, which means the rules are fairly heavy.

It's one of the best multiplayer CCGs out there. The play dynamics make it really hard for any player to be eliminated, or for one player to just take over the game.

As a two-player game, it's still pretty good, but there's something of a snowball effect once one player establishes an advantage.

All in all, it's very cool, even if you're not into HK movies. (I wasn't when I started playing, and I'm still not really.)

Of course, I'm one of the design team, so I may be a little biased.

What are you talking about? Part 2 - Angband

Angband is a roguelike game.

Roguelike games are games that are, well, like Rogue. (Useful definition, no?)

Rogue was a fairly simple dungeon-crawl game, back in the fairly early days of computer games. You went into a dungeon, killed monsters, picked up treasure, and kept going down until you found the fabled Amulet of Yendor.

Then you started going up again. If you got out, you won.

Most likely, you died horribly. And death was final. No restoring from your last save - it was deleted.

The dungeon was randomly generated. So were the items. (In one game, a yellow potion might be of healing. In the next, poison.)

The graphics were done with ASCII characters. You were a little @ symbol. The monsters were letters.

A lot of games were built on or inspired by Rogue. You can even see the influence of it and its descendants in some commercial games, most notably Diablo and Diablo 2. Nethack is probably the best known of the modern non-commercial roguelikes.

In this case, Rogue inspired Moria, which begat Angband. It's very very loosely based on Tolkien's works, but really it's a purely tactical dungeon crawl. There's no plot, just a goal. (Go down 100 levels of dungeon. Kill Morgoth. Win.)

And it still uses ASCII graphics. (OK, there are also other options for graphics, but I'm an ASCII man myself.)

It's a lot of fun.

Part 3 (RPG theory and the Forge) will take longer, as it's more of a pointer and a rant than it is an explanation.