ANGBAND
Terminal RPGing
Shashank Sharma has been informed that an elf, an orc and a hobbit walking into a bar is not a bad joke but a common occurrence in RPGs.
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s been writing about open source software for 20 years and lawyering for over 10.
QUICK TIP
You can try to chip away at the wall by pressing T , but this doesn’t work with granite walls or hard rocks, as pointed out by the message at the top of the screen.
R edneck elves, good-guy orcs that love listening to metal, a chain-smoking werewolf and unstoppable FBI agent Frankenstein. That’s the cast of characters for Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International book series. But if you prefer the trolls, dwarves, hobbits, orcs and elves as imagined and popularised by JRR Tolkien in his writings, you’ll find plenty of them in Angband, a text-based role-playing game.
First released before there was an open source movement to speak of, Angband has since migrated to the GPLv2 licence and continues to be developed by a very enthusiastic community. The gameplay involves working your way through the 100 levels of the fortress Angband to defeat Morgoth. These names should be familiar to those who are well acquainted with Tolkein’s tales, beyond the LoTR.