Races and Classes

Angband gives you eleven races and nine classes. ZangbandTK has twenty-eight and fourteen, and the new ones are not variations on the old — they are the reason the game feels different from the first screen.

Creating a Character has the full descriptions and the tables. This page is what is different from Angband, and why.

Seventeen new races

Curated, not imported. Zangband has twenty-one races Angband does not; seventeen are in and four are turned down on the evidence — the near- duplicates. None are waiting. The rule was that a race has to add a decision rather than a line on the menu — three of Zangband’s are a Half-Troll with one resistance swapped, and those are the ones that did not make it.

Race	What it is for
Amberite	Of Amber’s own blood. Better than a human at nearly everything, heals unnaturally fast, and dear: 225 per cent experience. The game is named after these people.
Draconian	Breathes. The second most expensive thing you can be, and it grows into its scales — fire at 5, cold at 10, acid at 15, lightning at 20 and poison at 35.
Vampire	Drinks blood to heal, from level 5 — the earliest power in the game. Immune to darkness, and burnt by the sun: anywhere on the surface in daylight you take a point a turn and cannot heal — so it carries scrolls of Darkness instead of torches, and is the only character who can put out daylight to shelter in it. Food is nearly useless to it, at a tenth of the good it does anyone else, and it begins the game just after midnight.
Mindflayer	Enormous intelligence and wisdom, a feeble body, and it attacks minds directly. Sees the invisible at 15 and reads minds at 30.
Golem	Made, not born. Very strong, very stupid, and can turn its skin to stone. Twenty points of armour before it wears anything at all, and a point more every fifth level; immune to poison, and gets almost nothing out of food.
Barbarian	Resists fear from birth, which no other race does, and can work itself into a berserk frenzy.
Klackon	An insect that works: acid-proof, confusion-proof, spits acid, and gets faster as it grows.
Nibelung	The only race that resists disenchantment from birth.
Imp	A minor demon. Throws fire, and the cheapest race worth being.
Skeleton	Bones. Cannot eat at all and digests normally, which is the hardest bargain of the four undead; recovers lost experience.
Zombie	Immensely strong, very nearly mindless, thirteen hit dice.
Spectre	Barely there: the best stealth in the game, saves and devices matched by nothing but a High-Elf and a Mindflayer, and seven hit dice. Walks through walls and mountain ranges, at a hit point a turn and no healing while inside.
Ghoul	Its bare hands paralyse what they hit.
Sprite	Flies, and the only race that gets faster as it grows: a point of speed at level 10 and another every tenth after. Fragile, and puts things to sleep.
Half-Titan	The most expensive thing you can be, at 255 per cent.
Yeek	Immune to acid above 19, and otherwise feeble, cowardly, and cheap — it levels as fast as a human, which is the only kindness it is shown.
Beastman	Chaos-touched and born wrong, and the one race that mutates without being made to: one mutation at birth and a one-in-five chance at every level after.

Experience cost is a real dial here. Angband flattened it — nearly every race costs 120 per cent and the field barely matters. Zangband ran it from 100 to 255 and used it to price what a race can do, and ZangbandTK keeps Zangband’s figures. So a Half-Titan is slow to level because it is a Half-Titan, and a Yeek is not because it is a Yeek. Read the XP column in Creating a Character as part of the race, not as a footnote.

Racial powers

New mechanism. Angband has no such thing: a race there is a set of adjustments and flags, and everything a character does comes from a spell, an object or a shape.

Twenty-two of the twenty-eight races can do something no class will ever teach — press N for the list. An Amberite shifts into shadow and, thirty levels later, walks the Pattern. A Draconian breathes, a Golem turns to stone, a Yeek screams, a Half-Titan sizes up what it is looking at.

Powers cost mana where there is any and hit points where there is not, which is what keeps them worth having whatever class you chose. The levels, costs and failure rates are Zangband’s own numbers. See Racial powers.

The Monk, and martial arts

The first of Zangband’s five classes, and the one that needed a mechanism Angband does not have.

In Angband, fighting bare-handed is a punishment: one point of damage a blow, criticals skipped outright. A Monk turns that on its head. It carries no weapon because it does not need one, and unarmed it climbs a ladder of seventeen techniques — a punch at level 1 up to a crushing blow at 48 — throwing two strikes a turn at the start and eight by the end, which is more than a Warrior gets out of any weapon in the game.

Which technique lands is decided fresh on every swing, so a Grand Master usually — but never reliably — throws something from the top of the ladder. Some strikes stun; a knee doubles a male opponent up; a kick to the ankle leaves anything that walks limping.

And it is the one class in the game that is punished for wearing armour. Over the weight limit and the strikes halve and every bonus withdraws; under it, each empty armour slot is worth armour class in its own right. See Martial arts.

Two more things hang off that limit. A Monk speeds up from level 10, by one point for every ten levels, and cannot be held from level 25 — and both of them go away the moment it is carrying too much armour, along with the blows and the armour class. Nothing else in the game gates an intrinsic on what you are wearing. It is the clearest statement of what the class is: a Monk’s advantages are all things that stop being true when it puts something on.

What a class grows into

Four classes gain something on reaching a level, the way many races do, and nothing tells you it is coming:

Class	Gains	Level
Mindcrafter	resistance to fear	10
Monk	speed, while unencumbered	10
Mindcrafter	sustained wisdom	20
Monk	free action, while unencumbered	25
Chaos-Warrior	resistance to chaos	30
Mindcrafter	resistance to confusion	30
Chaos-Warrior	resistance to fear	40
Mindcrafter	telepathy	40
Paladin	resistance to fear	40

A Warrior’s immunity to fear at 30 is Angband’s own and works the same way. The four above are Zangband’s, and were missing until 3.118.1.

The Mindcrafter, and psionics

The second of Zangband’s classes, and the opposite kind of thing to the Monk.

A Mindcrafter has no spellbooks and will never find any. Its craft is twelve powers that arrive as it levels — and they are deliberately not a realm of magic: nothing to study, nothing to choose at birth, nothing that can be taken away. That distinction is the whole requirement, not a detail of how it was built.

Most of the twelve grow into something else as the character does, which is worth knowing because it is unlike anything in Angband. See what is coming spots monsters at level 2, finds traps and doors at 5, sees invisibility at 15, maps the level at 20, grants telepathy from 25, detects everything at 30 and lights the whole level at 45 — one power, one key, for a whole career.

And psionic force is a new kind of damage. Every damaging type Angband has is an element, resisted with a flag or with armour. This one asks whether there is a mind there to hurt: a golem, a mould or an animated weapon is completely unaffected however hard it is hit, and a strange or feeble mind takes a third. Against anything else, nothing resists it. See Psionics.

The Chaos-Warrior, and who owns it

The third of Zangband’s classes, and the only one in the game that belongs to somebody.

At birth a Chaos-Warrior is sworn to one of nine Lords of the Courts of Chaos. It does not choose which, it cannot leave, and every time it gains a level its Lord looks up and decides how it feels about the servant it has. Usually that is a gift — a healing, a raised stat, experience, an object out of nothing. Sometimes it is a cursed weapon, a ruined stat, monsters dropped on top of you, or the level destroyed around you. The class fights nearly as well as a Warrior, and the relationship is the class.

It also casts. A Chaos-Warrior learns Chaos magic from level 2 — all thirty-two spells, and it is the only class in the game with exactly one realm and no choice about it. Zangband is blunt on the point: they are “not interested in any other form of magic”. Until the Chaos realm existed there was nothing to give them and the class shipped unable to hold spell points at all.

And thirteen is an unlucky level. The odds of the cruel end of the repertoire are normally about one in six; on reaching level 13 they are one in two. Every other thirteenth level is one in three, and every fourteenth is one in twelve — the safest a Chaos-Warrior ever gets. It is nowhere in the interface and a player can only learn it by living through it.

The nine Lords are Zelazny’s. This is the clearest case in the game of the drift this project exists to undo. Zangband’s sixteen patrons were Moorcock’s Elric gods — Slortar, Arioch, Xiombarg, Mabelode — with Khorne, Slaanesh, Nurgle and Tzeentch from Warhammer among them, and not one had any connection to Amber. They are replaced by Swayvill the King of Chaos, Suhuy who keeps the Logrus, Mandor, Dara, Gramble, Jurt, Despil, Borel and Gilva. Four of them are already walking around in the bestiary, so you can be gifted by a Lord you later meet.

What every class costs

Some classes learn more slowly than others, and in this game that is a real price rather than a formality. A Warrior needs the least experience of anyone to reach a level; a Warrior-Mage needs half again as much.

The arrangement is Zangband’s and it is not the one most people expect. It is not that casters are expensive — the pure casters are among the cheapest after the Warrior, because a Mage is already paying in hit points and strength. What costs is having two things at once. The Warrior-Mage fights and casts, and pays 150 per cent. The Monk fights unarmed and casts, and pays 140. The Paladin and the Chaos-Warrior pay 135. The Priest, who only prays, pays 120.

Ten of the eleven classes Zangband has pay something. Only the Warrior is free, and that is the whole of what a Warrior gets for having no magic at all.

Still to come

All twenty-one of Zangband’s races have now been considered: seventeen are in, four were turned down as near-duplicates of races already present. Nothing is outstanding — the Spectre’s pass-wall, the last piece, is built (DEC-74).