Sangband 1.0.2 ("Skills Angband") by Leon Marrick and the Sangband team: an Angband variant without character classes. You earn experience and spend it on 27 skills, and what you raise decides whether you become a warrior, a spellcaster, a burglar or something in between.

• About the game
• Keyboard controls
• Saving your game
• Tips
• New player's guide
• Playing in the browser
• Credits
• About this version

About the game

Sangband ("Skills Angband") is one of the oldest Angband variants and among the first roguelikes with skills instead of classes. Chris Petit released it in March 1994; Michael Gorse (1995–97) and Julian Lighton (1997–2001) carried it on, and Leon Marrick, maintainer from 2001, rebuilt it into version 1.0.0 (2007). This is 1.0.2 (2011), with Joshua Middendorf among the developers. The goal is Angband's: go down through the dungeon below the town and defeat Sauron (level 99) and Morgoth, Lord of Darkness (level 100).

• No classes. You pick a sex and one of fourteen races (Human, Elf, Hobbit, Gnome, Dwarf, Half-Orc, Half-Troll, Dúnadan, High-Elf, Dark-Elf, Giant, Ent, Drúedain, Beorning). Everything else comes from the 27 skills you raise with the experience you earn.
• Oaths: commit to the Oath of Iron (the great warrior arts), one of the four magic Oaths, or the Burglars' Guild, and give up the others for good.
• Four realms of magic: Wizardry, Piety, Druidic Lore and Necromancy, seven books each. Druids watch the weather; druids and necromancers change shape.
• Talents ([, p) that come with skill levels, and forging: weapons, armour, potions, scrolls, rings and amulets made from components and magical essences found in the dungeon.
• Quests from the town's Inn, and a score that rewards killing uniques with as few skills as possible.

Keyboard controls

Essential keys

Sangband has two keysets: the original one (below) and a roguelike one (walk with h j k l y u b n), switched in the options (=).

Saving your game

• Saving is automatic. Every save goes straight into this browser's storage (IndexedDB). The page saves every two minutes while the game waits for your next command, and whenever you switch to another tab or window.
• Ctrl+S saves and keeps playing. Ctrl+X saves and quits; press Play again (or reload the page) to continue.
• Reloading the page continues your newest living character. The browser asks before you leave a running game.
• When your character dies you see the tombstone; Play again then opens the start menu for a new character.
• File ▾ → Export save downloads all your characters as one file (sangband-save.json); Import save loads such a file, or a single Sangband savefile. Use them for a backup or to move to another browser or computer. New game deletes the characters stored in this browser.
• Your window layout, text sizes, window titles, fonts and the Tiles and Audio choices are stored in the same browser storage.
• Private/incognito windows and "clear site data" delete the stored game. Export first if the character matters.

Tips

• Press $ before your first trip down: you start with a little unspent experience, enough for a point or two in Wrestling or Karate and in Throwing or Archery - Slings (the game's own tutorial advice).
• You start with food, torches and gold but no weapon or armour: buy flasks of oil (General Store, 1) to throw with v, or a sling and shots (Weapon Smiths, 3), some light armour, and Cure Light Wounds potions and Phase Door scrolls (Temple 4, Alchemy Shop 5). Wield a torch (w) before you go down.
• Raise a few skills well rather than many a little: costs climb quickly with the level, similar skills make each other cheaper, and skills you have not practised cost extra (the price shows grey, then yellow, orange and red).
• H explores until something happens; press it again after each stop. > walks to the nearest known down staircase, and a second > takes it.
• Rest (R & Enter) after fights, and look at a monster (l) before you fight it.
• Once you can afford it, buy a lantern and a shovel or pick, and keep a scroll of Word of Recall to get back to town.

New player's guide

Your first character

After the title screen press a key and choose New Character. Pick a sex and a race (the race matters much more: it sets your stats, abilities and which skills come easily), then either enter minimum stats or just press Enter for each, accept the odds, and type a name. Right after you arrive in town the game offers its own short tutorial: press ? at that moment to read it.

Experience and skills: how Sangband works

Sangband has no character level to grind towards. Killing monsters, learning what objects do, casting a spell for the first time, disarming traps and unlocking doors earn experience, and experience is money you spend. The sidebar shows it as EXP (unspent experience). Press $ for the skills screen:

• Choose a skill with its letter (a–z, :) or the cursor keys. The top lines say what the next point costs and what the skill does.
• + (or =) raises it, - lowers it (you get the experience back for points raised on this visit), Enter keeps the changes, Esc throws them away, ? is the skills help.
• Your power (bottom left) grows with the skills you own. It gives you hit points, and the experience needed to raise skills goes up with it.

The skills fall into groups: melee (Swordsmanship, Clubbing, Jousting, and the barehanded Wrestling and Karate), missiles (three kinds of Archery, Throwing), magic (Spellcasting, Magical Power and one skill per realm), Magical Device, the rogue's Burglary, Perception, Stealth, Disarming, Dodging and Spell Resistance, the four forging skills (Weaponsmithing, Armor Forging, Alchemy, Magical Infusion) and Shapechange.

Three rules decide how cheap a skill is. Cost climbs fast with its level, so a character who spreads points over everything ends up good at nothing. Similar skills help each other: Swordsmanship at 30 makes Jousting up to 30 cost half. Practice matters: a fighting, magic, device, burglary or disarming skill you have hardly used costs extra, so raise skills you actually use. The game also keeps a score that is higher the fewer skills you needed to beat each unique.

Becoming a warrior, a caster or a burglar

You choose a path by what you raise, and some steps are for good:

• Magic: raising Spellcasting lets you pick a realm (Sorcery, Piety, Druidic magic or Necromancy). Buy the realm's first book in the Bookstore (7), then cast with m: you do not learn spells one by one, every spell of a level up to your Spellcasting skill is yours. Piety wants blunt or blessed weapons.
• Oaths: a combat skill of 25 opens the Oath of Iron (the strongest fighting, most hit points, no magic at all). A realm skill (Wizardry, Holy Alliance, Nature Lore, Blood Dominion) of 20 opens that realm's Oath: full-strength spells and plenty of mana, but weaker at fighting. Burglary 20 opens the Burglars' Guild. You can take only one, and never go back.
• Talents come with skill levels and Oaths: [ lists them, p uses a combat talent.

The town and the dungeon

Walk onto a number to enter a shop: 1 General Store, 2 Armory, 3 Weapon Smiths, 4 Temple, 5 Alchemy Shop, 6 Magic Shop, 7 Bookstore, 8 your Home (safe storage); the Inn (+) gives quests. Inside, p buys, s sells, I inspects and Esc leaves. Night in town is dangerous. You start on the town's down staircase: > takes you into the dungeon, where every level is new each time. Go deeper only as fast as your character can take it; if your hit points fall, drink a potion, read Phase Door or run.

Items

Press i: the list has a cursor (2/8), a letter does an item's main action, Shift+letter drops it, Ctrl+letter inspects it, Enter opens a menu of everything you can do with it. Every prompt that asks for an item shows the list with the same cursor. Unknown potions and scrolls are learned by use, and learning them earns experience too.

Playing in the browser

• Windows: the map fills the big window; Inventory and Visible (the monsters in view) are on the right, Messages along the bottom. Recall, Equipment and Character can be turned on under Windows ▾, which also puts the layout back.
• Resize windows by dragging the gaps between them; the game redraws them at their new size. Drag a title bar onto another window to move it there; the ✎ button on a title bar renames the window.
• Zoom: hover over a window's title bar for its A− / A+ buttons: they change its text size, and on the Map the size of the tiles.
• Tiles switches between David Gervais' 32×32 tiles and text. In text mode the Map title bar has its own font choice; Font sets the other windows' font.
• Audio ▾: Sound effects and Music are off by default. The sounds are Sangband's own samples (gaps filled from the Dubtrain pack); the music is Sangband's own jukebox: town tunes, and in the dungeon quieter or wilder songs as the danger around you changes.
• Keys: arrow keys, the numeric keypad or 1–9 move you; Shift + direction runs. The mouse works in the command menu and the item lists (left click chooses, right click goes back).
• Browsers keep a few shortcuts for themselves (Ctrl+W, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+N, and Cmd shortcuts on a Mac), so those never reach the game: in the roguelike keyset use the Enter menu (or T in the original keyset) to tunnel.
• If the game ever crashes, a message appears at the top; reload the page to continue from your last save.

Credits

• Sangband by Chris Petit, Michael Gorse, Julian Lighton, Leon Marrick and Joshua Middendorf (title screen, lib/file/news.txt); 1.0.x by Leon Marrick with developers Joshua Middendorf, Christer Nyfält and Scott Yost and many contributors (docs/readme.txt).
• Angband by Alex Cutler, Andy Astrand, Sean Marsh, Geoff Hill, Charles Teague, Charles Swiger, Ben Harrison and Robert Rühlmann; based on Moria (© 1985 Robert Alan Koeneke) and Umoria (© 1989 James E. Wilson).
• Licence: the source is GNU GPL version 2 (parts also under the Moria licence), as its file headers and docs/copying.txt state; artistic works keep their own terms.
• Tiles: David Gervais' 32×32 tiles as shipped with Sangband (copyrighted freeware; palette tweaks by Leon Marrick).
• Sounds: Sangband's own samples (lib/xtra/sound); missing events from the Dubtrain Angband Sound Pack v3.1.0 by Dubtrain (dubtrain.com/angband), Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
• Music: Sangband's own tunes (lib/xtra/music/jukebox.cfg): from Angband; from ToME by Reenen Laurie (with Dirk Laurie, and Grieg's "Åse's Death"), GPL; from Falcon's Eye by Jaakko Peltonen, NetHack General Public License. Rendered to Ogg for the browser (MIDI with the FluidR3 GM soundfont).

About this version

• Based on Sangband 1.0.2 (the release sangband_source_102.zip, 2011), from the Google Code project skills-angband, svn trunk r313.
• Original source: code.google.com/archive/p/skills-angband (svn trunk r313), committed unchanged as 230e028.
• Our changes (web port, auto-explore, stair walking, command and item menus, tiles, sound and music, web build): memmaker/sangband, 230e028...main.