Dungeon Crawl: Come Die with Me

Ouch! That really hurt!
* * * LOW HITPOINT WARNING * * *
The giant newt hits you.
You die…

There is a folder in the root directory of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. It’s titled, simply, “morgue”. In my case, it should probably be “The Necropolis”. Hundreds of heroes are interred there, from newt nibbled weaklings to fallen demon duellers. The early ones have unique names, but after a while I decided to just use the same moniker for certain character archetypes: Milkfist for my minotaur monks; Stabby McSly for my kobold assassins; Fancy Dan for my high elven wizards. A farmer doesn’t spend much time naming animals destined for the slaughterhouse. A glance at the Necropolis tells me that over a dozen Milkfists have fallen in their quest for the Orb of Zot—the fantasy MacGuffin that Stone Soup uses in its, uh, narrative—and most never made it past the early levels of the dungeon.

I’m not much of a power gamer. I’m not a grinder, a stat studier, or an exploiter. Generally, I try and go with the flow and let a game take me where it will. That’s all well and good for most action games, where a second chance is a quickload away, or linear adventures that don’t punish mistakes, but “going with the flow” in Stone Soup leads to a quick death. One wrong keypress that takes you closer to that invisible horror and wham, the character you’ve nurtured for three hours is gone. All you’re left with is the cold stats of their existence, their entry in the morgue. Stone Soup has changed me. I hunch over the keyboard and inch my doomed protagonist along, my fingers tapping away at hotkeys in a twitchy staccato dance. Mistakes—and there have been many—have taught me that no danger in the game should be underestimated. I meet a new creature and I cheat. I look it up on the Stone Soup wiki. I read its stats and decide whether to fight it or run away. This is not something I would have done before. Before I might have condemned such behaviour, claiming that it dispelled the mystery of fantasy dungeon spelunking, but now the stakes are too high. I can’t have another Schwing-Schwing incident.

Schwing-Schwing was my Spriggan assassin. She was resistant to fire, corrosion, and magic. She was faster than a stung cat, stealthy as a shadow’s fart, and stubbornly vegetarian. She wielded a 4+4+ dagger of speed and could levitate at will. I had high hopes for her. She was stung to death by killer bees after I ordered her to eat a bread ration in the middle of their hive. I had meant to tell her to take out her awesome rod of destruction and hasten their passage from the ecosystem. Instead, in the two turns it took her to eat the bread, she was swarmed. Schwing-Schwing died with crumbs and barbed stingers covering her tiny spriggan body.

That’s the problem with Stone Soup. It’s an unforgiving bastard of a game, yet no matter how many times I’ve died, I always feel culpable: as though I could’ve prevented it if I’d been a little cleverer. Of course, there are situations where one can’t hope to win: when the game generates high level monsters on the earlier levels, abominations that your fresh cheeked dungeon neophyte can’t fight. Oh, did I mention that the ghosts of your previous characters can check out from the morgue and haunt you? I’ve fought ghosts who were killed by ghosts themselves. One day Schwing-Schwing MKII will be eviscerated by the original. This is a roguelike, after all. The random number generator that governs drops, map layouts, and so on can seem like a paid off referee sometimes, but there’s rarely the sense that it is unbeatable. That’s what keeps me coming back for more. I’m the jilted lover who can’t take a hint. I’m the pensioner in thrall to a one armed bandit. It’s not your fault, baby, I lose because I’m shit. Next time it’ll be different, I promise.

Veterans of roguelikes like the venerable Nethack and Angband will be familiar with this feeling. They might even be wondering why I’m not playing either of those games. The answer is that I’m spoilt by Dungeon Crawl now. It has a clean, comprehensive tileset, it’s in very active development, and the interface is the best I’ve seen in a roguelike: mouse based inventory management, auto-explore, and being able to click on specific tiles to travel anywhere on the lovely mini-map all seem completely natural to me now. Mutations both benign and malign add spice to character progression. There’s a balanced minimalism to the game that appeals to me: you can buy items, but you can’t sell them for gold, thus negating much of the hoarding and beancounting frequently found in the genre.

I’ve vowed to finish this game. I’m going to get the three runes required to access the Orb of Zot and I’m going to ascend with it. Then I’ll never play Stone Soup again. Probably.

So, while I continue my quest, I want to know if you, gentle Gaming Daily reader, want to die ascend to glory with me. Post a comment with your preferred race, class, god, and name and I’ll run the character, documenting its progress and eventual demise, for a later report.

Race is the greatest determinant in how a character will play. It governs how well they learn skills, how much and what they need to eat, how quick they are, and a host of other variables. The differentiation between the races is one of the main draws in Stone Soup. Playing as a Ghoul, who can eat any corpse, is a completely different experience to playing a vegetarian Spriggan or a sanguinophile Vampire.

Classes are somewhat less important, determining starting skills and equipment, or what god you begin with, for certain characters like the Chaos Knight. Class does not affect how quickly you learn skills—that’s all up to Race.

Gods are major factors in how the game plays out. Most have rules that you must abide by to win favour and avoid punishment. These might involve dedicating corpses to their majesty, avoiding the use of magic, and more. Piety will bring rewards such as the ability to enter bullet time, summon allies, and more. Some of the Gods are capricious representations of the random number generator: Xom’s boons and punishments being almost completely arbitrary, and Nemelex Xobeh’s gifts taking the form of decks of chancy cards. The worship of either can lead to entertaining but short games.

I am still relatively new to Stone Soup, so I’ll be learning as I go along. Tips are, in fact, appreciated.

The type of character you pick doesn’t really matter, so long as you don’t care about it living long, but I’ve had more success with kobold/spriggan asssassins, minotaur monks, high elven wizards, and dwarven fighters than any other pairings. Granted, I haven’t tried them all. Unlikely combinations might be…entertaining.