Coming from Hengband

Frox sits at the end of a line running Angband, Zangband, Chengband, Composband. Hengband is its sibling: the screen and the keys will look familiar, but Frox has several systems Hengband does not. Here they are.

The numbers first

The monster counts are close, but there are roughly twice the classes and races and more than twice the dungeons. What Frox offers is choice.

Monster races — stop being human

In Hengband your adventurer is a human, an elf, or at any rate something person-shaped. In Frox you can be the monster instead. There are 27 lines: dragons, demons, liches, vampires, trolls, giants, hounds, jellies, beholders, angels — and a ring, a sword, a suit of armour and a pumpkin.

This is not cosmetic. The body you have is the constraint you live with. A dragon is not person-shaped, so it wears no body armour, gloves or boots — but it can wear six rings, and its breath grows with it. The equipment slots themselves change with the race, which changes how the whole game is played.

Monster races grow through their own forms rather than character levels, and some evolve into greater shapes along the way.

Possession — wear the corpses

Of those 27, the Possessor is the strangest. On its own it is a harmless thing that can do nothing; it plays by climbing into the body of something it has killed and taking that body’s powers for its own.

Stats, skills, spells, resistances and innate powers all come from whichever body you are wearing. Even the stat your spells run off changes: wisdom in an apprentice priest, intelligence in an apprentice mage. So every new body means checking your racial power (U) and your magic (m) all over again.

It is a demanding way to play. Many monsters leave no corpse, and a good body is hard to come by. Leaving one strips off everything but your light source and drops you back to the helpless base form — and the corpse you left usually breaks. As your health falls the body gets harder to hold, and a heavy blow can throw you out of it.

Build your own class — the Skillmaster

Hengband’s classes are fixed shapes. Frox’s Skillmaster instead buys skills with points and builds a class out of them: five points at birth and one more every five levels, fifteen in all.

The skills fall into groups — melee, ranged, magic and so on. What you put into a group sets how good you are in that direction; what you put into a single skill sets your proficiency with that weapon and how often you attack. You cannot take a choice back, so it pays to have a plan.

Runes on your gear — the Rune-Knight

The Rune-Knight fights by carving runes of power into equipment. Each rune does something different, and the same rune does different things depending on what you carve it into (armour is generally stronger than a helmet or gloves).

One rune per item, and it cannot be removed or changed. Carving usually empties your mana, and a Rune-Knight does not recover mana the ordinary way, so there is no experimenting. The full tables are in the in-game help.

Quivers

An equipment slot Hengband does not have. You wear a quiver and keep arrows or shots in it, which carries your ammunition without eating pack slots. If your class shoots, you want one. The weaponsmith sells them.

Coffee-break mode

A short version: levels come quickly, there is no wilderness, and the dungeons are packed into a shallower range. A game finishes in one sitting, which suits both beginners and anyone without an evening to spare. Beginner mode turns it on.

What has not changed

All of this exists in Hengband too, so there is nothing to relearn.

• Proficiencies — weapons, spells, riding, martial arts. Both games.
• Dual wielding — both games.
• Beginner mode — both games.
• Towns and shops, the wilderness, quests, artefacts, ego items.