Larn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Larn is an old roguelike computer game that was originally written by Noah Morgan in 1986.
[edit] Game
Larn was the first roguelike game to have a constant home level for the player - in this case, a town. The town in Larn had a bank, a shop, a trading post, a school, a tax administration office (called the LRS), entrances to both parts of the dungeon, and home.
The purpose of Larn was to travel to the end of the dungeon to obtain a potion of cure dianthroritis for his ailing daughter. The quest was time-limited, measured in 'mobuls'. The dungeon itself was composed of two parts - the main dungeon, with 10 levels, and down the volcano shaft, with three levels.
The dungeon levels were consistently 67 characters wide by 17 characters long. Some levels were randomly generated, while others could be configured or created by editing the maps file.
[edit] Versions
Larn was originally created for the Unix operating system, but is no longer updated in its original form. It might still be possible to find version 12.3 in the DOS executable format. In 1987, Phil Cordier edited the source code to create a enhanced version. He dubbed it "Ultra-Larn", commonly known as ULarn, which added some features, including more levels, more weapons, actual character classes, and it requires an entirely new strategy to win. ULarn is still being maintained by Josh Brandt at [1]. The original Unix version of Larn, 12.0 is still shipped as part of the games collection with the NetBSD operating system, and possibly other BSD variants. Complete source code for this version is available in the NetBSD source tree, and is kept in working order, but no new features have been added to the game in many years.
Since the game is open-source, there are many Larn variants on the Internet, ported to such operating systems as Solaris, Amiga, Atari TOS, and Microsoft Windows.
