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LinuxRogue

Introduction

You have just finished your years as a student at the local fighter's guild. After much practice and sweat you have finally completed your training and are ready to embark upon a perilous adventure. As a test of your skills, the local guildmasters have sent you into the Dungeons of Doom. Your task is to return with the Amulet of Yendor. Your reward for the completion of this task will be a full membership in the local guild. In addition, you are allowed to keep all the loot you bring back from the dungeons.

Rogue is the original predecessor of Nethack, Moria, Angband, et al - hence the genre name "roguelikes". Originally written back in 1980, the source code has been lost and found several times and gone through a number of maintainers. Jesse Printz and I are the current maintainers of the LinuxRogue project, which aims to bring this historic game to the Linux platform.

This portion of the site is divided into two segments: one for people interested in playing Rogue on nwserver.ath.cx, and one for people interested in obtaining and using the source code.

For Players - connection instructions and online high-score table
For Developers - source code and changelog

For the Purists

This isn't the Rogue I know!

I can already hear some of the purists out there screaming: "Anybody can use Wizard mode? Changing the RNG? COLOR?! This isn't true Rogue any more..."

As maintainers we try to strike a fair balance between keeping this version of Rogue as much like the original as possible, and extending certain features of the game to make it more accessible to a wider audience. Wherever possible, we try to make those features optional, so players used to the classic won't be overwhelmed by the new stuff.

Rogue is a piece of history, and we do have a duty to maintain it as it was. But moreover, Rogue is a game, and anything that helps players to get into the game is a good addition. I'd like to think that if the original creators had designed the game on more modern systems, they would approve of these changes. After all, the challenge in playing should come from being chased by Vampires, not "which key is Up again?" We're not out to change the idea of Rogue, or the content - just make minor tweaks to the way you play it.

That said, if you still can't get over the changes, I keep a copy of linuxrogue-0.3.4.tar.bz2 around (the last version managed by Ashwin before Jesse and I took over). It should still compile and run, and it doesn't have any of our new features. It's still not "pure" Rogue (this whole thing is based off a clone codebase anyway), but it's marginally closer to Rogue than what we've done.