Mystic Dungeon

Help | Dungeon

Characters

You are assigned a random race, stats, and name; you don't get to choose how you're born! But you do get to shape that character's development.

There are four primary stats:

• Strength: Physical prowess, fighting skill, toughness.
• Dexterity: Agility, manual dexterity, stealth & missile skills, evasion.
• Intellect: Logic, memory, technical skills, resistance to magic.
• Presence: Charisma, magical power.

As you adventure, you'll gain experience. When it reaches certain totals, you Level Up:

At each new Level, you immediately gain some Health and Mana, and recover all of it. You'll also get 4 Skill Points (SP), used to increase stat scores or specialized skills. You'll have to find the trainer in town to spend SP.

Equipment

You start with a small amount of gold coins.

You should immediately find the general store and invest in:

• A simple weapon like a club, dagger, or staff. Blunt weapons are better against undead. Sharp weapons are better against animals. You will find other advantage/disadvantages as you use weapons. Remember to ready new weapons and armor immediately: R to Ready, and pick the new item.
• Lockpicks, if you have good Dexterity.
• Candles, to increase the distance you can see in the dungeon.
• Rations, to heal a little in the dungeon.

As soon as you've made some money, buy armor, better weapons, more supplies, potions from the alchemist…

You can deposit money with the banker, and you and future characters (presumably named in your Last Will) can take it out. You can also leave items laying around town or in the dungeon; they may still be there later.

Death

You have a small amount of Health, and it goes down fast in battle. If you're not careful, you are likely to die.

When you die, your gold and items are left behind as a chest. But the dungeons do not give up treasure so easily, and your corpse becomes a new guardian.

On death and every save, your score will be computed and added to the high score tables; +100 per Level (and fraction for experience), +1 per 100 GP value collected. So a "perfect" score would be about 4,000. Good luck!

Load/Save

You can have a single save file on the server, which you can reload at any time you want, including from game over or title screen.

Some players like to play hardcore and only save/load when starting and ending a game session. This is fine, too!

Important! The dungeon does not auto-save. You must save your game before closing the game page!

Exploration

This game is half roguelike, half role-playing game. Most of the levels are pre-generated and designed, some monsters, treasures, and traps will be designed in place, others are random. Your objective will be revealed as you adventure further into the dungeon. Talk to all the NPCs, many have useful information for you, or sell goods or services you need.

Nothing happens until you take an action, and then every monster gets a turn. Most monsters are a little slower than you, but some are just as fast!

W A S D

↑ ← ↓ →

Move one step at a time.

Move into a monster to attack it.

Move into a door to bash it down.

.

Wait in place 1 turn.

G

Get item from floor.

O

Open a nearby door or chest with lockpicks.

P

Put item on floor. Only one item can be stored in a space.

R

Ready/remove equipment. All weapons and armor in your inventory will be shown, only one of each can be ready at a time.

T

Talk to a nearby NPC. If you move into them first, you'll see who they are; you can't fight the friendly NPCs.

U

Use item from inventory.

• Use a Candle, Torch, or Lantern to get light for increasing durations.
• Use Rations to heal.
• You'll have to experiment with other items!

TAB

Toggle sidebar between stat display, inventory, spells (if any), and hidden.

H

History panel show/hide, shows the last 256 messages.

F2

Load Game.

F3

Save Game.

Gates

The Floating Gate in town is an enigma. You appear there, but cannot go through it again. Perhaps if you find more gates in the dungeon, its mysteries will be unlocked.

About

Things this is like/based on:

• Primeval Adventure: My tabletop role-playing game, which I'm mostly using the system from.
• Reaper's Crypt: Another of my JS not-quite-roguelike RPGs.
• Dark Lord's Castle: Atari ST doorgame. Fairly unimpressive, BUT had editable maps, which I made good use of.
• Assassin: BBS doorgame. Multi-player interaction/assassination, world/city exploration.
• Alternate Reality: Atari 800 game. Acrinimiril's Gate to the City of Xebec's Demise. Premise and some shops and survival mechanisms, and maybe the combat system.
• Legend of Red Dragon: BBS doorgame. Daily combat grinder, multi-player interaction/assassination.
• pedit5/The Game of Dungeons/Orthanc: Grand-daddy of all CRPGs, designed around players competing for success. Here's CRPG Addict's playthroughs:
  • pedit5
  • Game of Dungeons
  • Orthanc
• DND/Telengard: Ripoff of pedit5 for '70s home computers, but one of the first CRPGs I ever played. I like the fixed maps/random contents.
• Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers, PJF's The Dungeon: Novels. The source of "The Dungeon" concept, an endless series of private worlds into which beings from many worlds are thrown to adventure.

TODO

This is very much a work in progress, many features aren't done yet.

• Species Skills, currently only Darkvision does anything.
• Deep lower levels.
• Guards move at higher level, let you talk to the Prince.
• Accessory items.
• Spells.

	Characters
	Equipment
	Death
	Load/Save
	Exploration
	Gates
	About
	TODO