Larn

Lineage

Larn has no parent game. Noah Morgan wrote it in 1986 for Unix, in the spirit of Hack, Rogue and Moria, as its manual says, “but with a different feel and winning criteria”. Kevin Routley continued it up to 12.3 (1991); 12.4.x followed for Windows. In 1987 Phil Cordier turned it into ULarn with real character classes.

The version played here is RL_M, maintained by Gibbon (atsb) since 2014 as if development had never stopped: 26.4 adds spreading water and lava on the volcano levels. See the family tree.

Credits

Screenshots

Trivia

• A game of Larn can be finished in one sitting, unlike NetHack or ADOM. (Wikipedia)
• Morgan’s original Larn is still part of the NetBSD games collection. (Wikipedia)
• Win, and the Larn Revenue Service sends you a tax bill for your “undeclared income” — owed in your next game. (Wikipedia; source: bill.c)
• Each win makes the next game harder: the difficulty level rises by one. (Wikipedia)
• The disease your daughter has is called dianthroritis. (Wikipedia)
• In 2026, at 40, Larn is one of the oldest games still developed from its original code. (Wikipedia)

What's unique

• A deadline. The cure must be home before the time (in “mobuls”) runs out.
• A town you come back to: a bank that pays interest, a school that raises stats, a trading post, the tax office — one of the first persistent home levels in a roguelike.
• Fixed levels. Ten dungeon levels plus a volcano, and each level stays as you left it.
• One sitting. A game takes hours, not months.
• New in RL_M: water spreads and erodes, lava flows and destroys walls.

Code dive

• Language: C, about 20,700 lines. Monsters, objects and spells are plain tables in data.c.
• Environment: 1986 Unix terminals with termcap; later MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Windows. RL_M builds on everything from a DEC VAX to OS/2.
• Maze files: some levels come from a hand-drawn maze file (larnmaze); fortune cookies from lfortune.
• This port: a curses shim drawing tiles, compiled to WebAssembly. Source: memmaker/larn, upstream atsb/RL_M.

Stats

Manual

Larn’s own help file, the intro plus the full command list: read it here (text). It is also the in-game help (?).

Getting started

1. Open the game, read the intro and press Enter.
2. You start in town. Stand on a building and press E to enter: the school raises stats, the stores sell armour and weapons, the bank keeps your gold. Escape leaves.
3. Stand on the dungeon entrance and press E again to go down.
4. Move with hjklyubn; c casts, i inventory, Enter lists all commands.
5. Bank your gold: it earns interest while you are away.

Help

There is no walkthrough, but the aim is always the same: find the potion of cure dianthroritis (on the last volcano level, guarded by the demon prince) and get home in time. Tips:

• Don’t hurry at first: the time limit is generous. Build levels on the upper floors.
• Put gold in the bank early: interest pays for the expensive gear in the Dealer’s shop.
• Learn protection and magic missile; cast vaporize rock to cut through walls.
• More: larn.org and the Wikipedia article.

Cheats

• Wizard mode works here: press _. No password: you get stats of 70, a lance of death, all spells, the whole map, and experience of 6,000,000. Wizards are not scored.
• Save scumming: Export save / Import save.