What's so Special About 27? Let's Play Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and Find Out!

Welcome to Let’s Play Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup! Following on from Netbrian’s excellent Nethack LP and Stiv’s equally spectacular Angband one (which is still ongoing), I decided that it was time to explore into another branch of the roguelike family tree--a branch filled with… soup?

First, a quick history lesson. Dungeon Crawl is a free, tactical roguelike with a wealth of available character classes and jobs. It’s the youngest of the major roguelikes, with the first version not debuting until 1997. Its development philosophy is an explicit reaction to and attempt to fix what the developers view as the flaws of other games in the genre, such as a reliance on spoilers and rewards for boring playstyles. The original Dungeon Crawl development is moribund at this point, but a few years ago, a new team stepped in and began work on the Stone Soup branch, which is still in active development today (in fact the latest version just came out a few days ago). To learn more, I’d recommend John Harris’s excellent @Play column on the game, or just download it yourself and try it out.

I’ll be starting the playthrough in earnest next week, but before we can enter the soupy dungeons, we need some adventurers willing to throw away their lives for our bloody entertainment. That’s where you come in -- take a look at the character creation options below, and come up with some foolhardy heroes.

For each one, I’ll need: Name, Sex (the game doesn’t care, but I need to know which pronoun to use), Race, and Job. If you have a portrait image to use for the character, it wouldn’t hurt either. If multiple people throw their support behind a particular character idea, I’ll use that one first -- otherwise, I’ll just be going down the list as each one bites the dusty soup. Don’t worry too much about mechanics yet; I’ll be explaining things as I go along.


These are the races. Most of them are pretty self-explanatory with a modicum of RPG experience, but there are some unusual ones as well if you want to live dangerously.


These are the jobs. Depending on the job you pick, you may have another decision to make as well:


Wizards have a choice of spellbook.


Death knights can either use necromantic magic or call on the god of undeath for their powers.


Chaos Knights get to pick one of three gods to serve.


As do priests.


Artificers get a choice of wands to blast their enemies with.


And several melee-focused classes get a choice of weapons (with the addition of claws for some races).

So there you have it. I look forward to seeing what sort of strangely-named “heroes” Talking Time will send to glory (not likely) or death (very likely). Tune in next week for the first installment!

I fully endorse the creation of a Mummy hero.

And, like any decent mummy, he should be a thief.

Ghoul stalker. Ghoul anything (everything) really.

So when does the ASCII/tiles fight start?

I want to see a demigod artificer. 'Cause it seems like an overpowered race and an underpowered class.

I also support the notion of Mummy heroes.

However we definitely need a Sludge Elf to brave these soupy dungeons. I don't know what a Stalker does, but I do know Stalker the G.I. Joe character so lets go with that: Sludge Elf Stalker.

EDIT: Since we just saw a Stalker, let's see something else. Whatever Sludge Elves are good at. Do that. Sludge Elf _____!

There will be none this time. Unlike Nethack and Angband, DCSS has tiles that look pretty great, and you actually get some extra functionality compared to the ASCII version (like seeing enemy life bars and using the mouse for inventory management). That's what I play with, and I'm not planning to switch, no matter how non-hardcore that makes me.

Also, don't forget to suggest names for your characters. Otherwise, I'll just use your screenname.

Oh good. I was about ready to smack anyone who said you should play this in ASCII. Well, talk kinda sternly at them for a post or two, anyway.

...That's cool with me.

I want to see a Sludge Elf Venom Mage somewhere down the line.

EDIT: Better make that a Deep Elf Conjurer, actually.

I see nothing wrong with this. And since I've no clue what any of these mean beyond the very basics, I'm curious to see what a Spriggan Warper could do.

Or how long it could last, after taking a quick glance at the wiki.

I want a merfolk earth elementalist named Mudeye

I vote for Stealth Armor Lenny Briscoe:



He would of course be a Human Hunter.

- Eddie

Naga Venom Mage all the way, dude.

Edit: Vote changed to Demonspawn Chaos Knight serving Xom.

Could you maybe use PNG format rather than JPG for the screenshots? Or at least for the screenshots that are text-heavy? The artifacts and the low contrast make it a bit hard to read.

Or maybe bigger screenshots.

Merfolk fire elementalist! Wait, no. Merfolk necromancer. Rise, my fishy minions, and flop mercilessly on my foes!

Damn, that makes me wish I had an RPG group to take that character concept to.

Sure, I can do both. I'm not really up on the comparative advantages of different graphic formats, and had set Photobucket to size everything to 320x240 so as not to overload people's bandwidth, but looking at the pictures they are pretty hard to read; I'll make both of those changes in future updates. And just shout out if there's anything else that could make the thread easier to follow -- this is my first LP so I'm pretty much winging it.

Oh, and Octoprime, this is what you get for not posting a portrait for your character and making me Google Image Search for "octopus mummy":

That is far more repulsive then attractive.

Mummy Wizard has my vote. Mainly due to the lack of hunger needs of a mummy. Though the lack of potion taking abilities makes it sometimes nerve racking.

Name: Mumra
Sex: Male

I kind of want to see a venom mage or transmuter, but I don't know what they do. I'm guessing debuff and enchantments, respectively.

My vote is for a Kenku Earth Elementalist named Birdo.

Venom mages, as their name would suggest, do just about everything having to do with poison. They can shoot it, they can cure it, they can apply it to their weapons, they can make a cloud of it, you name it. Transmuters do some fun stuff like turning sticks into obedient snakes, sucking the juices out of corpses and turning them into gas grenades, and changing themselves into various forms.

Spriggans are speedy little forest fairy creatures, and are one of the most survivable races early on due to their ability to run away from most threats. Warpers get a bunch of magic having to do with teleportation. Very nice for utility and survivability, but not so much for actually killing stuff, so warpers benefit from branching out and cultivating some abilities in other types of magic, or in physical combat.

Actually, one of the interesting things about Crawl is the way that it de-emphasizes the choice of class (or 'job' as it was recently renamed). It's mostly descriptive (showing your background and initial training prior to entering the dungeon) rather than prescriptive (laying out the course of your future advancement). Your job affects your starting equipment, stats, skills, and possibly deity, but once you're in the dungeon, you can develop any skill by using it, and the starting values gradually fade into irrelevance. The choice of job is most important for spellcasters, since it determines your first spellbook, and there's no way of knowing when you'll find another. By the mid-game, though, the direction your character develops may well be entirely different than what it was at the start.

Also, the first update is in progress, and should be posted within the next couple of days. Will Octoprime survive the perils of the dungeon? Spoiler: Of course not -- he's a mummy, so he's already dead! I'm so funny.

I am literally quivering with anticipation to find out!

It's a roguelike, so hopefully my inevitable defeat will be something memorable! Like, my pet Cat went feral for some reason, or something.

My first idea was to make Sprout, the Spriggan Stalker. A couple other people already suggested Stalkers, though, so my second idea is Baang, the Half-Orc Air Elementalist.

Tangentially, I know someone who was on the main dev team for Stone Soup (I think they went by Enne in that crowd), though they recently more or less retired.

How would you compare them to Centaurs?

Keeping in mind that I've never had a game get past the Orcish Mines, it seems like Centaurs get speed and strength at the cost of not getting to wear boots. What's not to like?

Centaurs are pretty solid too, but their issue is that the only skills they really excel at are ranged weapons, and if you try to rely too heavily on those in the early-to-mid game, you run out of ammo fairly quickly. They're so-so at melee combat, bad at magic, and bad at the defensive skills of dodging and armor (and they can't even wear many types of armor). Their speed advantage is also less than a spriggan's (20% faster than a human, compared to 40% faster), which means that hit-and-run/missile tactics take twice as long, with more opportunities for additional monsters to show up and spoil your fun.

They're still a perfectly viable race overall, but I've personally just had a lot more success with spriggans.

Spriggans have a few problems that are mostly related to food intake since they're vegetarians. Granted, they have an incredibly slow digestion, but until you start running into the themed dungeons with vegetation it can be hard to get really high value fruits and veggies.

And so it was that Octoprime the freshly awakened octo-mummy swam forth from R'lyeh and first set tentacle inside the soupy dungeon, intent on his squamous master's bidding: "Retrieve the Orb of Zot, or perish in the attempt."



Hooray for lucky starts! First screen of the game, and already there's a helmet lying around to grant Octoprime an extra smidgen of protection.

First, a quick tour of the info packed onto the main play screen: starting from the upper right, we have the character name and title (based on the current highest skill--in this case, dodging), followed by the level and race. You'll notice that class isn't listed, since it only determines your starting package of skills and equipment, and its role is finished now that we're in the dungeon. Health and magic are pretty self-explanatory. Armor class, Evasion, and Shield all help keep our hapless mummy safe, either by reducing damage or outright dodging attacks. Strength, Intelligence, and Dexterity do exactly what you'd expect, though don't ask me to explain the math behind how they apply. They're determined randomly, partially based on race and class, and Octoprime is pretty average in all respects. The experience pool controls skill advancement, which we'll get to a bit later, and we're on the first floor of the main dungeon. Finally, we've got the currently equipped weapon, and the type of ammo in the quiver. Right below those, you'll occasionally see text describing any status effects that are currently active, but that area's blank for the nonce.

Below that block of text is the minimap of the current dungeon level (the yellow square shows the area that's currently being viewed), and the inventory. The items with a green background are currently equipped, and we also have a hand crossbow as a backup weapon. And at the very bottom, those stone-patterned squares show the ground at our feet, and that's where any items that we might be standing on will appear.




After some uneventful wandering around the first level, Octoprime encounters his very first foe and subsequently dispatches it with a flurry of crossbow darts and a few stabs of his short sword. The items on the ground with green outlines are ones that will be automatically picked up -- the auto-pickup algorithm is pretty smart about getting only stuff that you actually want (in this case, gold and used ammo), and ignoring the rest (such as the unremarkable robe and club). The little ? on the space with the club means that there are more items in the space, probably the hobgoblin's corpse.

Even though hobgoblins are pretty minor adversaries, this one still managed to knock off half of our health, since poor Octoprime, as a mummy thief, is a good deal weaker than a typical starting character. Where most characters come out of the gate with halfway decent skills in some form of melee, ranged, or magical combat, thieves have only the most rudimentary sword skill, with most of their focus being on utility skills like stealth and trap disarming. As for mummies, well...

[Long-winded digression] Remember how I said that Crawl was developed as a response to the established major roguelikes? And how one of the perceived flaws that the development philosophy explicitly tries to avoid is rewarding players for repetitive, low-risk behaviors (like polypiling in Nethack or scumming and grinding at a safe depth in Angband)? Well, to keep players from sitting in an area and endlessly grinding, they made it so monsters spawn very slowly. Once an area has been cleared out and has no freshly-killed monsters to eat, characters are forced to constantly press deeper into the dungeon or risk starvation.

That was all well and good, but they realized that some players enjoy a slow, grinding playstyle. Even if grinding shouldn't be heavily rewarded, or become the default or optimum choice, there was no harm in allowing it as a viable option for those who like it. And so, mummies came into existence. Basically, grinding was "quarantined" in the mummy race where it couldn't infect the others. Alone among the races, mummies don't need to eat at all, and have no "clock" pushing them forward. They can sit around with the patience of the dead waiting for monsters to spawn, potentially grinding endlessly. Oh yeah, and then there's this:



That's a lot of resistances and immunities (and one weakness). Getting all of those would require a normal character to find a lot of items and take up a number of equipment slots (and one of them, immunity to torment, is both incredibly valuable and nearly impossible to get except through very lucky mutation). And not needing to eat is especially great for spellcasters, since spells use up food as well as magic when cast. So how could a race with all these advantages possibly be balanced? Well, the dead aren't known for being especially quick learners, and compared to humans, mummies take 50% more experience to advance in levels, and 40% more to improve most skills, with the only exceptions, Fighting, Spellcasting, and Necromancy, advancing at the same rate as humans. Optimal mummy play involves lots of waiting and grinding to stay on the same footing as the rest of the races. Ideally, I probably wouldn't even leave the first floor until advancing to level 5 or so. Screw ideal play. It would be boring for me to play and for you to watch, so I'll be throwing caution to the winds and moving on to the next floor as soon as each one is fully explored. Can you tell that mummies are probably my least favorite race?[/digression]

Whew! I'll try to spread out that sort of dense mechanics and sprinkle it in among the pictures where things are actually happening.



The slaying of a giant bat grants Octoprime his first level-up, and with it a few more hit points. In Crawl, your skill levels have more of an impact on your capabilities than does your character level, which mainly grants incremental hit point, magic point, and stat increases.



Ooh, our first magic item! The names of special items show up in a different color and have an adjective before them to let you know that they're worth checking out. We won't know what it does until we use an identify scroll on it or try to wield it, though. Use-ID'ing items is a viable tactic in Crawl, since remove curse scrolls are common, and the potentially negative side-effects tend toward "temporary setback/irritation" rather than "oops, you're dead." So Octoprime proudly brandishes his shiny new magic dagger!



D'oh. Stupid mummy.




After descending to the second floor, Octoprime encounters a snake, one of the first monsters that actually poses a threat to most characters. Snakes move fast, hit hard for this point in the game, and inflict poison. With poison immunity, this should be easy, right? No -- even after retreating to the stairs to keep from having to fight the goblin at the same time, this nearly spells the end of our fledgling mummy, and he scrapes through by the rotting skin of where his teeth used to be. Retreating up the stairs isn't an option, since adjacent monsters can follow, and even get a free hit in. He does get another level out of the fight, though, and boosts his dexterity by a point.



Pressing onward into the perilous expanse of floor #2, we come across a jelly taking a nap (as shown by the ?). Approaching to try to stab it in its sleep seems like a good idea...



But we're not quite stealthy enough, and the jelly wakes up. Fighting jellies in melee is a very bad idea, and this equipment corrosion is why.



So we move on to plan B -- run away like a little girl, occasionally pausing to shoot darts at the jelly. Since jellies have slow movement, we can get away, and lead it in circles around the pillar until it's finally defeated. Incidentally, there aren't three jellies here -- the ones in the greyed-out squares just show that that square contained a jelly the last time I had line of sight to it.

And that's where we'll leave Octoprime for the time being -- having withstood all that the first two floors of the dungeon could throw at him, and about to venture into the uncharted wilds of the third.

I welcome any feedback on what you like or dislike so far, so I can make adjustments to improve future updates. Anything that I passed over that you'd like to know more about? I'm aiming to put up an update of about this length once or twice per week, but could switch to longer updates or adjust the balance of the "text vs. pictures" or "serious explanation vs. snarky commentary" sliders if that would be more enjoyable to follow. Just let me know -- I'm here to entertain you.

Doin' fine so far. I was worried that MummypusPrime would die on the first floor.

And I would have been devastated.

Please keep it coming.

I've never played the tile version (since I log most of my hours on crawl.akrasiac.org), but I'm always glad to learn more about the game that has recently become my biggest time sink.

Please make sure you cover all the reasons that Crawl is The Best Roguelike Ever�, including but not limited to: auto-explore, stashes, and searching.

Also, the slurping of jellies is a constant feature of my nightmares. They give me the heebie jeebies.

Oh god, the arguements that have broken out on this forum over auto-explore...