Monsters#
ZangbandTK’s bestiary is Angband’s, plus 389 creatures drawn from Zangband. There are 1013 in total, and the additions are not evenly spread: shallow levels are much as you remember them, while the deep dungeon holds a great deal you will not.
Where the new monsters come from#
Angband’s monsters are Tolkien’s. Zangband layered three further sources on top, and those are what ZangbandTK imports.
Amber. The scions of Roger Zelazny’s Amber — Corwin, Julian, Fiona, Bleys, Gerard, Benedict and their kin — appear as deep uniques, along with their servants and creatures. They are among the most dangerous things in the game and are meant to be met late.
The Cthulhu Mythos. Nyarlathotep, Hastur, Shub-Niggurath and Tsathoggua dwell at the bottom of the dungeon, attended by formless spawn and dark young.
Chaos. Creatures of raw chaos, unstable and unpredictable, scattered throughout the depths.
Monsters that are not what they appear#
Zangband is fond of monsters that impersonate scenery, and ZangbandTK keeps them. A weapon lying on the floor may be a death sword; a cloak may be a cloaker; a door may be a door mimic; a patch of floor may be something considerably worse. Two of these classes are new to this game and display as Angband has no symbol for them:
#— wall monsters: sentient stone, drifting mists, and things that live inside the dungeon’s structure|— animated weapons, which hunt rather than wait
The rest borrow Angband’s own symbols where its bestiary already had a suitable class: floating spheres display as vortices, ents as trees, standing water as elementals.
How dangerous are they?#
Every monster in the game — Angband’s and Zangband’s alike — carries 73% of its Angband hit points and 50% of its armour class. See How Balance Differs for why, and for how to change it.
Imported monsters were placed on Angband’s own difficulty curve rather than keeping Zangband’s numbers, so a Zangband monster at depth 40 should be a reasonable match for an Angband monster at depth 40. Where Zangband’s version was unusually tough or unusually fragile for its depth, that relationship was preserved.
This is the least-tested part of the game. If something at a given depth feels badly out of place, that is worth reporting.
Rooms full of them#
Angband gathers monsters of a kind into pits and nests, and ZangbandTK’s imports make three more of those possible:
Forests — ents, huorns and the older things of the wood
The living dungeon — sentient walls and the mists that drift between them
Elemental — spirits and elementals of the four elements
Not yet implemented#
Some imported monsters carry abilities that are recorded but not yet active: resistance to teleportation, reflecting bolt spells, damaging auras, and the ability to taunt you. Monsters possessing them behave as though they do not.
A further group of abilities depends on the wilderness, which does not exist yet: which terrain a monster prefers, which dungeons it inhabits, and whether it can fly or swim.