Larn is an old roguelike computer game that was originally written by Noah Morgan in 1986.

Game

Larn was the first roguelike game to have a constant home level for the player - in this case, a town. The town in Larn had a bank, a shop, a trading post, a school, a tax administration office (called the LRS), entrances to both parts of the dungeon, and home.

The purpose of Larn was to travel to the end of the dungeon to obtain a potion of cure dianthroritis for his ailing daughter. The quest was time-limited, measured in 'mobuls'. The dungeon itself was composed of two parts - the main dungeon, with 10 levels, and down the volcano shaft, with three levels.

The dungeon levels were consistently 67 characters wide by 17 characters long. Some levels were randomly generated, while others could be configured or created by editing the maps file.

Versions

Larn is no longer maintained in its original form, although it might still be possible to find version 12.3 in the original DOS executable format. In 1992, Phil Cordier edited the source code to create a version that could be played on the Unix operating system. He dubbed it "Ultra-Larn", commonly known as ULarn, and added some features, including more levels, more weapons, and actual character classes.

Since the game is open-source, there are many ULarn variants on the internet, ported to such operating systems as Solaris, Amiga, and Windows.

External Links

• Phil Cordier's site
• The Larn Home Page
• ULarn.org
• The ULarn 1.6 Home Page
• Moby Games review