Imoria

Imoria
Angband Variant
Developer	?
Based on	Moria
Theme	Fantasy
Released	?
Updated	?
Download	Linux (C) port
[Imoria port Official site]

The Imoria variant of Moria was made at University of Washington.

It included:

• water levels
• expanded town
• trading post (multi-user feature)
• increased difficulty

It was written in Pascal, and has been ported to C for Linux: http://www.angelfire.com/games3/imoria/imoria.html

The goal of Imoria was always the same: descend to level 50 (or greater) and defeat the Balrog. This was an incredibly difficult task, on par with successfully returning the Amulet of Yendor to your god in the classic roguelike Nethack.

Imoria featured randomly-regenerated dungeon levels. Unlike persistent dungeon games such as Nethack, players were faced with a fresh dungeon each time they ascended or descended to a given dungeon depth. For this reason, scrolls of magic mapping and detect traps were much sought items, as they enabled a player to more quickly ascend or descent by quickly locating stairways.

Imoria implemented a large number of player character classes and subclasses, modeled largely on the player classes in Second-edition AD&D. These included, among others, fighters, wizards, thieves, druids, bards, and monks. Different player classes had noticeably different abilities, including hit-dice per level, melee ability, spell availability, armor allowances, and the like. Some classes even had access to special town resources; the thief class, for example, could access a special thieves' guild, which gave the player access to special weapons, armor, and magic items--for a price.

Imoria included a vast array of monsters and items. Monsters supported a wide range of capabilities, including multiple melee attacks (claw/claw/bite), magic attacks (Ancient Dragon monsters, in particular, cast a large number of spells against the player), varying speeds (how many turns-per-melee round the monster got to take, versus the player), invisibility, teleport ability, teleport player-to-monster, walking through walls, and even psionics. The Balrog himself made use of all of these.

Items included many types of weapons (melee and ranged, one-handed and two handed), armors (which were wearable in a variety of armor slots on the character's body), magic items including rings, scrolls, potions, staves, and wands. Additionally, weapons and armor could be enchanted with ordinary plusses (or minuses) to-hit, to-damage, and to-AC. In this regard, Imoria deviated from AD&D, which uses a single value to augment both a weapon's ability to hit and its damage rating. Internally, weapons, armor, and magic items used a unified system for specifying magical abilities based on a pair of 32-bit bitmasks specifying abilities such as "detect traps" and spell-effects from the game's arsenal of spells. Further, Imoria included a "wizard mode" (not to be confused with the Wizard character class), where game administrators could enter a special item-editor mode and create one-off items out of raw bitmasks. Although originally intended as a playtesting and debugging tool, when the Trading Post feature was added, these one-off items became highly sought after because they could be exchanged from one player to another.

Like Nethack, Imoria also featured a food-and-starvation system, which was the bane of many players. Low level character starvation was common (although not as common as death-by-monster). High level characters rarely starved, because they had ready access to the town, through scrolls of town portal or similar magic artifacts, and could always teleport home for lunch, as it were. However, high level characters still commonly starved to death because of Imoria's speed system. Rings of speed (incredibly rare and highly prized items that doubled a player's turns-per-round) had a quadratic effect on the amount of food a player needed. Encumberance also affected how much food a player needed. Thus, a highly encumbered character wearing two rings of speed could require four or more times as much food as normal, and often players would forget to notice their hunger level until it was too late.

In total, Imoria was, for its day, a cutting edge roguelike. Although the end-goal was always the same, its extensive feature set created multiple play styles for players to explore and enjoy. Its inter-player trading post, in the pre-internet days, was a crude precursor to the massively multiplayer games in favor today. Although it has been over two decades since Imoria's creation, this author still remembers the pulse of adrenaline at walking my @-sign into a dungeon room only to be confronted by a menacing capital-D, or worse, capital-B.

The Balrog teleports you. The Balrog hits you. The Balrog hits you. The Balrog casts a spell. You feel confused! --more--