I’m thirty years late to Ancient Domains of Mystery, more commonly known by its acronym ADOM. Created by Thomas Biskup in 1994, it is a computer role-playing game (CRPG) that is often described as Rogue-like. There’s an irreverent but informative video that discusses this issue amidst a high-speed playthrough of the ASCII version of ADOM. While there are spoilers, they go by much too fast for you to remember any of them, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ve never played the original Rogue so I have no basis for comparison. The three features that stood out to me are that it is turn-based, the dungeons are procedurally generated, and there is permadeath – when your character dies, the game immediately records it and all you can do is restart from scratch with a new character.
Most of my experience with computer games was for a half-decade in the mid-to-late 1980s, sometimes referred to as the golden age of CRPGs with plenty of different designs with new spaces to explore. I was first hooked by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and got through Ultima V before life took over. In the last year, however, I have been rediscovering the cousins and close descendants of those early games. I’ve been surprised by delightful obscure gems such as Antepenult alongside well-known old classics such as the first Might & Magic.
The old CRPGs required patience. You had to grind your way through lots of fights to earn experience, gold, and better weapons and armor. You had to level up your spellcasters to access more powerful destructive and protective magic. The baddies and bosses got harder. You needed special items to access special areas. I don’t have the same patience now as I did forty years ago, but I am enjoying the discovery aspects of ADOM. There’s a huge world to explore (mostly underground since it is a dungeon-crawler) with tons of different items. You don’t know what’s around the next corner so you’d better be prepared to fight or run. There’s a sweet satisfaction with surviving a nail-biting encounter, discovering a strange new space, or coming across an item you’ve never seen before.
I think I’m on my tenth or twelfth character in ADOM, and only the second to make it to the mid-game stage. (You die early and often, which is part of the exploration.) My previous troll fighter reached level twelve and made it to Dwarftown but got killed shortly after, somewhere in the Caverns of Chaos. I currently have a hurthling archer that successfully completed many early quests that I’m quite attached to now, so I am save-scumming (allowing me to restart if something bad happens or my character is close to death). What’s a hurthling? It’s like a halfling, hobbit or bobbit. If you recognize any of those names, you’ll know that CRPGs borrow heavily from Tolkien and its D&D derivatives. In ADOM, mithril gear is better than regular gear made of wood, leather, or iron. It’s also lighter – and carrying weight matters! But there’s also adamantium and eternium. ADOM has no problem mixing genres.
While I had no idea what I was doing in the first several games, experimenting with different objects and strategies, now that I have mid-level characters, I would prefer to not go back to the beginning and grind my way anew. (I’ve always had Fate decide all aspects of my starting character rather than picking my own stats.) So alongside my natural experimenting within the game world, I’ve also started referring to Internet resources (such as the ADOM Guidebook). In addition, I’m watching my way through a very entertaining play-through on YouTube, where I’m pacing myself episode-wise so my character is roughly at the same level. I’m learning that ADOM is even bigger than I thought, and there are things you can do that I hadn’t even considered. I suppose I’m learning from the large community of those who had gone before me. Long-term players have played thousands of games over the years and built up a lore of knowledge.
It’s a bit (or perhaps a lot) like science – discovering the natural “laws” of the world around you, what you can do and what you can’t do. There’s the trial and error approach which I used early on, and there’s learning from the community of those who have trialed-and-errored a lot more and are sharing the results of their labor. Finally, there might be folks who have looked at the code and can say something about the “hidden” underlying rules. This is how we humans learn. Many before us have experimented directly, and the fruits of discovery have been passed down to us so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. As a teacher, it’s an integral part of my job to pass down this knowledge in my field of expertise, which is chemistry. One thing I convey to students is that we can come up with abstractions to understand the underlying rules of chemistry. This includes mathematical models that powerfully allow us to make predictions of what will happen in a different situation; it’s like discovering the source code of nature!
Yes, I could try to “enjoy” grinding my way through ADOM with no outside references. But I think the exploration is enhanced by tapping into the wisdom of the community while being careful to avoid spoilers. Without it, I think I would just give up – ADOM is a hard and unforgiving game. But games also allow you to explore the paths not taken, and ADOM’s many different starting characters and strategies, and its multiple endings (from what I’ve gleaned without looking at any of them in detail), provide a certain satisfaction. The procedurally-generated dungeons add to the game’s high replay value. For someone with my old-school 1980s CRPG background, ADOM provides an exploration experience at its finest. Warts and all. My character recently grew horns due to increased background corruption. That was yet another recent surprise with reaching the mid-game!
