rec.games.roguelike.adom

The group and its era

Ancient Domains of Mystery first appeared in 1994, written by Thomas Biskup and released for Linux, with MS-DOS and Windows ports in January 1996. It stayed free for the whole of that first life: ASCII display, permadeath enforced by a single save file the game erases as it loads, and a plot spine unusually firm for the genre: the Drakalor Chain of Ancardia, and a coming of Chaos whose corruption works on the body faster the longer the player takes.

ADOM talk was conducted in rec.games.roguelike.misc before the game had a room of its own. The dedicated group was created on its first proposal, by a vote of 232 to 21, and announced on 22 February 1997. The branch it joined was organised by title — angband, moria, nethack and rogue alongside misc — with a moderated announce group and, from 1998, a group for the people writing the games. The branch name had itself been argued out on the network in 1993, when the existing per-game groups, rec.games.hack and rec.games.moria among them, were put up for consolidation: rec.games.dungeon.* was proposed as the umbrella, and rec.games.roguelike.* was picked instead as the least of the available evils. The wider structure is described on the rec.* hierarchy page.

What the word meant was, for most of the group's life, local custom rather than definition. The Berlin Interpretation — the checklist of random dungeons, permadeath, turn-based grid play and resource pressure cited ever since — was not drawn up until 2008, at a developers' conference in Berlin, which took ADOM as one of its five canonical games.

What was discussed

The group's real subject was knowledge and how to handle it. A game this size could not be finished without shared findings, yet much of its pleasure lay in not knowing, so the community managed that tension rather than resolving it, in an elaborate spoiler etiquette set out at length in the group's own FAQ.

A spoiler was defined there as something not obvious and not in the manual whose knowledge bypasses the problem-solving process: that an artifact called Kinslayer exists was fair game, its powers and whereabouts were not. Posts carrying it took a [Spoily] tag, or [Major Spoilers] for a ground-breaking discovery, plus a warning inside the text and about twenty lines of spoiler space. The space had to be asterisks rather than empty lines, which some newsreaders truncated; the reasoning was that many people moved from post to post without reading subject lines and always saw the first screenful. ROT-13 was debated many times as an alternative; spoiler space kept winning.

Around this grew a shorthand for the group's standing post genres: YAVP for a victory, YASD for a stupid or sad death, YAFM for a game message somebody found funny enough to share, RFE and Pre-RFE for feature requests, and YAGBU — Yet Another Guidebook Update — for a discovery to be folded into the ADOM Guidebook, maintained by Andy Williams, which the FAQ called the definitive source of information about ADOM. Newcomers were asked to search the Guidebook and then the archive before claiming a find. Not everything settled amicably: the Improved Guidebook copied and altered the original without permission and added material obtained by disassembling the game, which Biskup had asked people not to do; the FAQ listed the resulting argument among topics to approach carefully, alongside the release of the source code and the proper use of the save feature.

Context

The author's presence changed the group's function. Biskup posted here, announcing new versions, and the official site's request-for-enhancement database was fed through the group by design: he asked that proposals be aired on the newsgroup first, so that duplicates and things already implemented could be filtered by veteran players before reaching him. A volunteer community triaging between users and a single developer, in public and on the record, is a shape early-access communities arrived at much later.

Plain text, threading and permanent archives suited the material unusually well. A spoiler file is a reference document, and a medium that quoted precisely, wrapped at seventy-two columns and kept everything retrievable hosted it better than the web forums that replaced it. The group's FAQ registers the changeover directly: a section added in a later revision opens by explaining to arrivals from the web what a newsgroup is and why messages take time to propagate.

Both conversation and game moved on. Discussion migrated to ADOM boards on the web, including the forum that links here. Development, dormant since 2002, restarted after an Indiegogo campaign that ran from July to August 2012 and raised $90,169; the revived game went commercial, reaching Steam on 16 November 2015, while the classic free version remained available. The archive remains a substantial record of how the game was worked out.