The Caverns of Larn ----------------------- Welcome to the game of Larn. At this moment, you face a great problem. Your daughter has contracted a strange disease, and none of your home remedies seem to have any effect. You sense that she is in mortal danger, and you must try to save her. Time ago you heard of a land of great danger and opportunity. Perhaps here is the solution you need. It has been said that there once was a great magician who called himself Polinneaus. Many years ago, after having many miraculous successes, Polinneaus retired to the caverns of Larn, where he devoted most of his time to the creation of magic. Rumors have it that one day Polinneaus set out to dispel an attacking army in a forest some distance to the north. It is believed that here he met his demise. The caverns of Larn, it is thought, must be magnificent in design, and contain much magic and treasure. One option you have is to undertake a journey into these caverns. Good Luck! You're going to need it! Help File for The Caverns of Larn ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ? help screen ^ identify a trap . stay here c cast a spell v program version D list items T take off armor d drop an item ^L redraw screen i inventory pockets Z teleport self e eat Q quit the game g give pack weight q quaff a potion S save the game P give tax status r read a scroll / what is this stuff? W wear armor w wield a weapon Movement: standard keypad arrows y k u 7 8 9 ^ \|/ \|/ | h-.-l 4-5-6 <- -> /|\ /|\ | b j n 1 2 3 v Mouse Movement => Click on character and drag to move, or => Click on character and release to stay, or => Click anywhere on screen to move one square Hold down the shift key and type a movement key to run in that direction. Hold down the alt key and click on an object or monster to identify it. Special Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When dropping gold, if you type '*' as your amount, all your gold gets dropped. In general, typing in '*' means all of what your interested in. This is true when visiting the bank, or when contributing at altars. When in the store, trading post, school, or home, an will get you out. When casting a spell, if you need a list of spells you can cast, type 'D' as the first letter of your spell. The available list of spells will be shown, after which you may enter the spell code. This only works on the 1st letter of the spell you are casting. larn ++ restore checkpointed game larn -s list the scoreboard larn -i list scores with inventories larn -n suppress welcome message when beginning a game larn -l print out the log file larn - specify difficulty of the game (may be used with -n) larn -o specify the .larnopts file to be used larn -c create new scoreboards -- prompts for a password How to use the .larnopts option file ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The file ".larnopts", if used, should be in your current directory (see -o). A sequence of words terminated by whitespace is used to specify options. Word Meaning bold-objects select bold display of objects inverse-objects select inverse video display of objects no-introduction do not display intro message enable-checkpointing turn on periodic checkpointing no-beep disable beeping of the terminal male choose your sex to be a man female choose your sex to be a woman name: "your name" choose your playing name monster: "monst name" choose a name for a monster savefile: "save-file-name" define what the savegame filename will be Your name and monster names must be enclosed in double quotation marks and may be up to 34 characters long. Longer names are truncated. Anything enclosed in quotation marks is considered one word, and must be separated from other words by whitespace. Explanation of the Larn scoreboard facility ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Larn supports TWO scoreboards, one for winners, and one for deceased characters. Each player is allowed one slot on each scoreboard, if the score is in the top ten for that scoreboard. This design helps insure that frequent players of Larn do not hog the scoreboard, and gives more players a chance for glory. Level of difficulty is also noted on the scoreboards, and this takes precedence over score for determining what entry is on the scoreboard. For example: if "Yar, the Bug Slayer" has a score of 128003 on the scoreboard at diff 0, then his game at diff 1 and a score of 4112 would replace his previous entry on the scoreboard. Note that when a player dies, his inventory is stored in the scoreboard so that everyone can see what items the player had at the time of his death. Note that once you win, the next game you play will automatically be at the next higher difficulty level. You will also owe some taxes on the gold you had at the end of the winning game. Thus the - option is not generally necessary unless you want to go back down a level. Amiga implementation notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For normal game play, the Amiga implementation creates a separate 8 color screen in which to run the game. The colors and the graphics characters are taken from the .monsters and .objects files in the Larn: directory. These files are in standard HACKICON format. You will be prompted to press return at the end of the game. This is to give you a chance to read any messages on the screen before it disappears. Wizard mode: This mode gives you a +25 lance of death, a +50 ring of protection, 25 levels of experience, and one of everthing in the game. It is useful for learning the game or for working off frustration (much better than kicking the stairs). To get into wizard mode, type an underscore (_) and type 'amiga' (with no quotes or carriage return) in response to the prompt. Note that wizard games will not appear in the scoreboard and there is no way out of wizard mode. You must have a name: "Wizard" line in your .laropts file for all this to work. Make a backup of this disk before doing anything. You can use the Icon Editor 'HackIconII' to change any of the colors or characters used by the graphics version of Larn. The characters for monsters and objects are kept in the files '.monsters' and '.objects' respectively. See the files 'HackIconII.doc', '.monsters.doc', and '.objects.doc' for more information. HackIconII was written by Doug Walker. There is also a configuration file '.larnopts' that you will want to edit to set your default options and player name. See the online help in larn (the HELP key) for more information. To install Larn on a hard disk, make a directory called DH0:LARN and copy the files from the disk into it. Then enter the CLI command assign Larn: dh0:Larn You can then execute Larn normally. ++++++++++++++++ COMMON PROBLEMS ++++++++++++++++ If Larn comes up with a totally black screen that stays black, check the Workbench screen behind the Larn screen. There may be a requester back there begging for your attention. Larn is a memory- and stack- intensive program. You need at least a 512K machine to run it. If you invoke it from the CLI, YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST 10K OF STACK. You can ensure this with the CLI STACK command: stack 10000 If you invoke Larn from Workbench, you don't have to worry about the stack size since it is preset to 10000. Besides stack space, Larn uses a lot of dynamically allocated memory. If Larn keeps crashing unexpectedly, especially near the beginning of the game, chances are you are running out of memory. Try running it with no background tasks and as few as possible open windows. If you execute it from Workbench, close all CLI windows before executing Larn so it can shut down the Workbench while running. Also, Version 1.2 of the ROM Kernel seems to take more memory that Version 1.1, so try 1.1 if you are having trouble with 1.2. You should not have to use this method, but if all else fails... If you are still running out of memory, reboot your machine and hit control-D as soon as you see the first AmigaDos window appear. Execute the stack command above, change directories to Larn:, and resize the window to as small as possible. Then type the Larn command: stack 10000 cd Larn: Larn If you get a requester asking for you to insert the volume 'LARN' in any drive when you go to run your copied version of Larn, then you need to rename the copied disk to LARN using either the CLI relabel command or the rename option from workbench. A common (VERY common) mistake is to delete the 'copy of' text from in front of the name leaving the space in front of LARN (Workbench likes to put 'copy of ' in front of any disk copied). Make sure you delete the leading space also. ++++++++ PLAYING LARN ++++++++++ If you've played Larn under UN*X or some other environment, you won't have any trouble with this version. Many of the commands are the same. Even if you haven't, however, you can use the menus in AMIGA LARN. Just hold down the right menu button and select the command. After you get to know the commands, you will be able to use the keyboard commands. The keyboard command equivalent for each menu selection is listed next to the selection. Three commands you will want to know are HELP, '/', and ALT-click. Pressing the HELP or '?' key gets you into the online help system. The '/' command displays all graphics characters used in the game. Finally, to identify a particular graphics character on the screen, point the mouse at a character, hold the ALT key, and click on the monster or object you want identified. Before you play, you might want to print out the file '.larn.help'. This is the file displayed with the HELP key. You can use all the standard 'vi' style keys to move your player character around in Larn. This is the way I prefer to play the game because it keeps my fingers in the same place I need them for entering commands and answering prompts. For your convenience, however, you can also use the arrow and keypad keys. In addition, you can control your character three ways with the mouse. First, if you just click the mouse anywhere in the playing area, the character will try to move in that direction. Second, you can click on your character and drag it wherever you want. This is called 'mouse tracking'. Third, to make your character stay where it he is, just click on the character and release. This is equivilent to the '.' command. All this is explained in the online help. NOTE: For your safety, Larn will not allow you to move over known traps and pits with the mouse. Also, if a monster takes a swipe at you while you are under mouse tracking, the tracking will be dropped. In case you're interested, when you are moving the player character with the mouse, Larn tries to move into one of the three cells next to the current player position that are closest to the mouse. It tries them in order of increasing distance. If all three are blocked, it gives up and does not move the player (a cell is considered blocked if there is a wall or a visible trap there). There is a special case if the player is right next to the mouse position but for some reason it can't move to that spot (for example, if the mouse was over a wall or pit). If that happens, Larn gives up immediately. Otherwise, it would probably thrash back and forth between adjacent squares and waste lots of time. This is because when mouse tracking is on, Larn tries constantly to keep the player directly under the mouse. If the mouse for some reason gets ahead of the player, Larn will move the player multiple times to let him catch up. +++++++ WIZARD Mode ! ++++++++ Wizard mode under Larn allows you to play with almost complete invulnerability. It is there to allow you to learn some of the finer points of Larn (and to help the me debug the program!). To get into wizard mode, you must first make sure you are using the player name of "Wizard" in your .larnopts file: name: "Wizard" This is not enough since you can play a perfectly normal game using this player name. You must get into Larn and type the '_' command. Larn will prompt for a password which happens to be 'amiga' (no quotes or carriage return). This mode gives you a +25 lance of death, a +50 ring of protection, 25 levels of experience, and one of everthing in the game. It is useful for learning the game or for working off frustration (much better than kicking the stairs). Once you are in, there is no way out of wizard mode! One caveat: wizard mode will not allow you to save high scores (that would be cheating, wouldn't it?) Hints --------- Usually you will get your hints by eating fortune cookies, but there is an easier way, just read this page and you know all the hints: gem value = gem * 2 ^ perfection sitting down can have unexpected results don't pry into the affairs of others drinking can be hazardous to your health beware of the gusher! some monsters are greedy nymphs have light fingers try kissing a disenchantress! hammers and brains don't mix what does a potion of cure dianthroritis taste like? hit point gain/loss when raising a level depends on constitution healing a mighty wizard can be exhilarating be sure to pay your taxes are Vampires afraid of something? some dragons can fly dos thou strive for perfection? patience is a virtue, unless your daughter dies what does the Eye of Larn see in its guardian? a level 25 player casts like crazy! energy rings affect spell regeneration difficulty affects regeneration control of the pesty spirits is most helpful don't fall into a bottomless pit dexterity allows you to carry more you can get 2 points of WC for the price of one never enter the dungeon naked! the monsters will laugh at you! avoid opening doors. you never know whats on the other side. infinite regeneration ---> temptation the greatest weapon in the game has not the highest Weapon Class you can't buy the most powerful scroll identify things before you use them there's more than one way through a wall The Magic of Larn --------------------- ALT = Alter Reality God only knows what this will do BAL = Fireball Makes a ball of fire that burns on what it hits CAN = Cancellation Negates the ability of a monster to use his special abilities CBL = Cure Blindness Restores sight to one so unfortunate as to be blinded CHM = Charm Monster Some monsters may be awed at your magnificence CKL = Cloud Kill Creates a fog of poisonous gas which kills all that is within it CLD = Cold Sends forth a cone of cold which freezes what it touches CRE = Create Monster Creates a monster near the caster appropriate for the location DEX = Dexterity Adds +2 to the casters dexterity DRL = Drain Life Subtracts hit points from both you and a monster DRY = Dehydration Dries up water in the immediate vicinity ENL = Enlightenment The caster becomes aware of things around him FGR = Finger of Death This is a holy spell and calls upon your god to back you up FLO = Flood This creates an avalanche of H2O to flood the immediate chamber GEN = Genocide Eliminates a species of monster from the game -- use sparingly GLO = Globe of Invulnerability This globe helps to protect the player from physical attack HAS = Haste Self Speeds up the casters movements HEL = Healing Restores some hp to the caster HLD = Hold Monster The monster is frozen in his tracks if this is successful INV = Invisibililty The caster becomes invisible LIT = Lightning Your finger will emit a lightning bolt when this spell is cast MFI = Magic Fire This causes a curtain of fire to appear all around you MLE = Magic Missile Creates and hurls a magic missile equivalent to a + 1 magic arrow PER = Permanence Makes a character spell permanent, i. e. protection, strength, etc. PHA = Phantasmal Forces Creates illusions, and if believed, the monsters die PLY = Polymorph You can find out what this does for yourself PRO = Protection Generates a +2 protection field SCA = Scare Monster Terrifies the monster so that hopefully he wont hit the magic user SLE = Sleep Causes some monsters to go to sleep SPH = Sphere of Annihilation Anything caught in this sphere is instantly killed. Warning -- dangerous SSP = Sonic Spear Causes your hands to emit a screeching sound toward what they point STP = Timestop All movement in the caverns ceases for a limited duration STR = Strenght Adds +2 to the casters strength for a short term SUM = Summon Demon Summons a demon who hopefully helps you out TEL = Teleport Away Moves a particular monster around in the dungeon (hopefully away from you) VPR = Vaporize Rock This changes rock to air WEB = Web Causes strands of sticky thread to entangle an enemy WTW = Walk trough Walls Allows the player to walk through walls for a short period of time