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As you collect experience and level up, not only will you get more health and mana, but you will gain a combat bonus, get points you can spend on increasing your stats, and even get multiple attacks per turn.   The game is a balance between survivability (health), which constitution will help with, combat (strength and dexterity), and spell casting (mana), which intelligence helps with.  You might want to spend some points on luck, as this causes improved drops from chests and monsters; wisdom, which helps with some saving throws, and charisma, which increases the number of mercenaries you can hire.

The game is turn based, with a mixture of text and lots of high-quality images.  It's pretty look at, yet still maintains the feel of a dungeon crawler like Rogue or Nethack.

There are two modes of play: Regular (dying has a penalty but death is not permanent) and Hardcore (you die, you are done!).  Regular is a good way to come up to speed on the game without the fear of losing your progress, and Hardcore is the way to go if you want the more realistic Rogue-Like experience.   Regular has a range of difficulties, from Easy to Impossible.

A note about all the numbers used in the game: a lot of players are used to integer values, so by default everything is shown in rounded up integers (e.g. Health of 9.7 appears as 10; Damage of 3.2 appears as 4).  But the game operates in fractional values, to sometimes you will see what appears to be strange results, like a monster with 10 health that doesn’t die when the game shows you have done 10 damage. This  would be because internally the monster may have had 9.8 health and the damage was 9.3 health, leaving the monster with 0.5 health – which would show as 1 health!  If you don’t mind seeing fractional numbers, you can go into the menu under File->Settings, and select “Show decimals”

Getting Started

When you first launch the game, you will be presented with a screen that lets you choose your player's race, class & name, and spend points on your player's stats (see the “Stats” section below for detailed explanation on what the various stats are useful for).  You can choose the game difficulty, plus select if the game is hardcore or not (in hardcore mode, if you die, the game ends).   You can also input a game seed, which is great if you want to repeat the same dungeon from scratch. (To locate the game seed later, look in the About dialog under the Help menu.

Once you have made your various choices, you will start in town with some basic armor, a sword, a couple of spells, a little gold and a few healing potions and keys.   In town you will see different non-player characters (NPCs) you can interact with to buy and sell items and take a variety of other actions described in the NPC section later below.

Once you are ready, you can teleport to the dungeon (‘t’) and then the fun begins!  Some basic keyboard commands you will want to know (or buttons using the mouse if you prefer):

• ‘w’,’s’,’a’,d’ [WSAD] (or 'n','s','w','e' [NSEW], you can change this in settings) will navigate the dungeon going north, south, west, east.  On each level, you will find a room with a set of stairs down to the next level. ">" will descend the stairs, and " so keep an eye on your health, and keep a well-stocked supply of healing potions that you can buy from any Priest.
• ‘M’ will drink a mana potion.  You can buy them from any Wizard.
• 'E' will let you manage your equipment (armor, weapons, jewelry), switching it out for better loot as you go, and adding/removing gems from your gear
• 't' will teleport you to town, where you can sell any loot you don’t need to an NPC, along with spend your gold on a variety of loot and help
• '?' will show help for all commands

For a full list of commands, see the "Commands" section below.

Keys are an essential resource in the game, as they open chests (most are locked) and unlock doors to certain boss fights.   Keys are fragile and break easily, but as you increase your Dexterity and