Larn

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Larn is an old roguelike computer game that was originally written by Noah Morgan in 1986.

1 Game
2 Versions
3 Ularn
4 External links

[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 cure of dianthroritis potion itself is buried at the bottom of the volcano shaft. However, in order to successfully fight volcano monsters, the player has to acquire adequate experience, power and gold pieces in the dungeon's 10 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. 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. The development of Larn stopped at version 12.3, which was released in 1991. In 2007 development was continued by a new maintainer.

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.

[edit] Ularn

In 1987, Phil Cordier edited the source code to create an 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].