Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)

FreeBSD Manual Pages

  
 
  

home | help
DUNGEON(6)			 Games Manual			    DUNGEON(6)

NAME
       dungeon - Adventures in the Dungeons of Doom

SYNOPSIS
       dungeon

DESCRIPTION
       Dungeon	is  a  game  of	adventure, danger, and low cunning.  In	it you
       will explore some of the	most amazing territory	ever  seen  by	mortal
       man.   Hardened	adventurers  have  run screaming from the terrors con-
       tained within.

       In Dungeon, the intrepid	explorer delves	into the forgotten secrets  of
       a  lost	labyrinth  deep	in the bowels of the earth, searching for vast
       treasures long hidden from prying eyes, treasures guarded  by  fearsome
       monsters	and diabolical traps!

       Dungeon	was  created at	the Programming	Technology Division of the MIT
       Laboratory for Computer Science by  Tim	Anderson,  Marc	 Blank,	 Bruce
       Daniels,	 and  Dave  Lebling.  It was inspired by the Adventure game of
       Crowther	and Woods, and the Dungeons and	Dragons	game of	Gygax and  Ar-
       neson.	The  original  version was written in MDL (alias MUDDLE).  The
       current version was translated from MDL into FORTRAN IV by  a  somewhat
       paranoid	DEC engineer who prefers to remain anonymous.

       On-line information may be obtained with	the commands HELP and INFO.

DETAILS
       Following is the	summary	produced by the	info command:

	      Welcome to Dungeon!

	      You  are	near a large dungeon, which is reputed to contain vast
	      quantities of treasure.	Naturally, you wish to acquire some of
	      it.  In order to do so, you must of course remove	 it  from  the
	      dungeon.	 To  receive  full  credit for it, you must deposit it
	      safely in	the trophy case	in the living room of the house.

	      In addition to valuables,	the dungeon contains  various  objects
	      which may	or may not be useful in	your attempt to	get rich.  You
	      may  need	 sources  of light, since dungeons are often dark, and
	      weapons, since dungeons often have unfriendly  things  wandering
	      about.   Reading	material  is  scattered	 around	the dungeon as
	      well;  some of it	is rumored to be useful.

	      To determine how successful you have  been,  a  score  is	 kept.
	      When  you	 find  a valuable object and pick it up, you receive a
	      certain number of	points,	which depends  on  the	difficulty  of
	      finding  the  object.  You receive extra points for transporting
	      the treasure safely to the living	room and  placing  it  in  the
	      trophy  case.   In addition, some	particularly interesting rooms
	      have a value associated with visiting them.  The only penalty is
	      for getting yourself killed, which you may do only twice.

	      Of special note is a thief (always carrying  a  large  bag)  who
	      likes to wander around in	the dungeon (he	has never been seen by
	      the  light  of  day).  He	likes to take things.  Since he	steals
	      for pleasure rather than profit and  is  somewhat	 sadistic,  he
	      only  takes  things  which  you  have seen.  Although he prefers
	      valuables, sometimes in his haste	he may take something which is
	      worthless.  From time to time, he	examines his take and discards
	      objects which he doesn't like.  He may occasionally  stop	 in  a
	      room  you	 are  visiting,	but more often he just wanders through
	      and rips you off (he is a	skilled	pickpocket).

COMMANDS
       brief	      suppresses printing of long room descriptions for	 rooms
		      which have been visited.

       superbrief     suppresses  printing  of	long room descriptions for all
		      rooms.

       verbose	      restores long descriptions.

       info	      prints information which might give some	idea  of  what
		      the game is about.

       quit	      prints  your score and asks whether you wish to continue
		      playing.

       save	      saves the	state of the game for later continuation.

       restore	      restores a saved game.

       inventory      lists the	objects	in your	possession.

       look	      prints a description of your surroundings.

       score	      prints your current score	and ranking.

       time	      tells you	how long you have been playing.

       diagnose	      reports on your injuries,	if any.

       The inventory command may be abbreviated	i; the look command may	be ab-
       breviated l; the	quit command may be abbreviated	q.

       A command that begins with '!' as the first character is	taken to be  a
       shell command and is passed unchanged to	the shell via system(3).

CONTAINMENT
       Some  objects  can  contain other objects.  Many	such containers	can be
       opened and closed.  The rest are	always open.   They may	or may not  be
       transparent.   For  you	to access (e.g., take) an object which is in a
       container, the container	must be	open.  For you to see such an  object,
       the  container  must  be	either open or transparent.  Containers	have a
       capacity, and objects have sizes; the number of objects which will  fit
       therefore  depends on their sizes.  You may put any object you have ac-
       cess to (it need	not be in your hands) into any other object.  At  some
       point, the program will attempt to pick it up if	you don't already have
       it,  which process may fail if you're carrying too much.	 Although con-
       tainers can contain other containers, the program doesn't  access  more
       than one	level down.

FIGHTING
       Occupants of the	dungeon	will, as a rule, fight back when attacked.  In
       some  cases, they may attack even if unprovoked.	 Useful	verbs here are
       attack <villain>	with <weapon>, kill, etc.  Knife-throwing may  or  may
       not  be	useful.	  You have a fighting strength which varies with time.
       Being in	a fight, getting killed, and  being  injured  all  lower  this
       strength.  Strength is regained with time.  Thus, it is not a good idea
       to  fight someone immediately after being killed.  Other	details	should
       become apparent after a few melees or deaths.

COMMAND	PARSER
       A command is one	line of	text terminated	by  a  carriage	 return.   For
       reasons	of  simplicity,	all words are distinguished by their first six
       letters.	 All others are	ignored.  For example, typing disassemble  the
       encyclopedia is not only	meaningless, it	also creates excess effort for
       your fingers.  Note that	this truncation	may produce ambiguities	in the
       intepretation  of  longer  words.  [Also	note that upper	and lower case
       are equivalent.]

       You are dealing with a fairly stupid parser, which understands the fol-
       lowing types of things:

	      Actions:
		   Among the more obvious of these, such as take,  put,	 drop,
		   etc.	  Fairly  general  forms of these may be used, such as
		   pick	up, put	down, etc.

	      Directions:
		   north, south, up, down, etc.	and  their  various  abbrevia-
		   tions.  Other more obscure directions (land,	cross) are ap-
		   propriate in	only certain situations.

	      Objects:
		   Most	objects	have names and can be referenced by them.

	      Adjectives:
		   Some	 adjectives are	understood and required	when there are
		   two objects which can be referenced with  the  same	'name'
		   (e.g., doors, buttons).

	      Prepositions:
		   It  may be necessary	in some	cases to include prepositions,
		   but the parser attempts to handle cases  which  aren't  am-
		   biguous without.  Thus give car to demon will work, as will
		   give	 demon car.  give car demon probably won't do anything
		   interesting.	 When a	preposition is used, it	should be  ap-
		   propriate; give car with demon won't	parse.

	      Sentences:
		   The	parser	understands  a	reasonable number of syntactic
		   construc- tions.  In	particular, multiple  commands	(sepa-
		   rated by commas) can	be placed on the same line.

	      Ambiguity:
		   The	parser tries to	be clever about	what to	do in the case
		   of actions which require objects that  are  not  explicitly
		   specified.	If  there  is  only  one  possible object, the
		   parser will assume that it should be	used.  Otherwise,  the
		   parser will ask.  Most questions asked by the parser	can be
		   answered.

FILES
       dtextc.dat     -	encoded	messages and initialization information
       dsave.dat      -	save file

BUGS
       For those familiar with the MDL version of the game on the ARPAnet, the
       following is a list of the major	incompatabilties:
	      -The first six letters of	a word are considered significant, in-
	      stead of the first five.
	      -The syntax for tell, answer, and	incant is different.
	      -Compound	objects	are not	recognized.
	      -Compound	 commands  can	be delimited with comma	as well	as pe-
	      riod.

       Also, the palantir, brochure, and dead  man  problems  are  not	imple-
       mented.

AUTHORS
       Many  people  have  had	a hand in this version.	 See the "History" and
       "README"	files for credits.   Send  bug	reports	 to  ian@airs.com  (or
       uunet!airs!ian).

				March 11, 1991			    DUNGEON(6)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dungeon&sektion=6&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.0>

home | help