Towns and Services

Note

Written. Milestone M5 is complete and this chapter covers it: WLD-10 to WLD-12, WLD-14 to WLD-18, and WLD-16a to WLD-16c.

One requirement is deliberately outstanding. WLD-16d makes quest-giving a property any building may carry rather than a building type of its own; it is designed and nothing here forecloses it, but there are no quests to give until milestone M6, so there is nothing yet to describe.

The world holds a dozen places, not one. They differ in how much ground they cover, how many trades they keep, and which trades those are, so that walking to a town you have not seen before is worth the road.

Where places stand

A town needs settled country. The world map carries a population and a law value for every block of it, and places are sited where both run high and the ground is dry – never in water, never on a mountain, and never within twelve blocks of another town. Lawless country is where the ruins and the monsters are, and it is mostly empty of towns for that reason.

The size bands

Four sizes, keyed on the population of the country around them:

Band	Size	What it is
Village	66 x 22	A hamlet. Three or four trades, no more.
Town	88 x 26	Five or six trades, and always more than the village you started in.
City	110 x 30	Six or seven. The magic shop is usually here.
Great city	132 x 34	Seven or eight. The black market, when there is one, is here.

The village you begin in is the smallest place in the world, deliberately. It is the reference the others are larger than.

Which shops a place keeps

Not every place carries all eight shops. How many it keeps follows from its size band; which ones it keeps follows from the country around it:

• the armoury and the weaponsmith follow people and order;

• the bookseller gathers where it is safe to gather, so lawless country sometimes has none at all;

• the alchemist follows population;

• the magic shop wants both people and law, which is why it is a city trade;

• the black market keeps out of the light, and appears where law is thin and people are many – which is rare, and worth the walk.

Two towns of the same size need not hold the same shops. The choice is made once, when the world is generated, from the world seed and the town’s own position, so a given world always has the same places in it however you reach them.

How good a shop is

A shop is not only a trade, it is a trade at a standard, and the standard is on the sign: a plain Weapon Smiths, or an Advanced, Expert or Arcane one. Three rungs above plain, and they mean something —

• the goods are drawn from the deeper end of what that trade sells;

• there is better magic on them, which is where the real difference lies: an arcane shop’s shelves carry roughly three times the plusses of a plain one’s;

• and the shelves are fuller, so there is more to choose from.

Which rung a shop gets comes from the country the town stands in, scored once when the world is made. Magic is what mostly decides it — for a magic shop or a bookseller almost entirely, and for arms and armour it is people and order first with magic behind them, since the top of that ladder is enchanted steel. A general store climbs on people alone; there is no arcane bread.

It is deliberately rare. Measured across a great many worlds, seven shops in ten are plain and one in fifty is arcane, so the top of the ladder is somewhere you travel to rather than something your nearest city happens to have.

Two exceptions. The black market has no rung, because it is already the top of every ladder — it will sell you anything, pitched at how deep you have been. And your home village is plain, whatever the country around it says: a character who happened to start next to an arcane weaponsmith would be playing a different game, and would not have chosen it.

One consequence worth knowing: a trade’s shelves are restocked when you carry your custom to a different town, at that town’s standard. Walking out of a shop and back in does not change what is in it.

Your home village

The village you start in is the one exception (WLD-12). Its shops are fixed rather than drawn: a general store, an alchemist, a bookseller and your home. That is what nobody can begin without – food and light, a potion of cure light wounds, somewhere to leave what will not fit in your pack, and a spellbook, since no class starts with one.

It has no armoury and no weaponsmith. Those are in the next town along, and finding them is the first thing the world asks of you.

Your house

There is one house, and every town’s front door opens onto it. Every town in the world keeps a home, whatever else it does or does not carry — but they are all the same house. Leave a sword in your village, walk four days to a great city, open the door there, and the sword is on the shelf.

This is deliberate, and it is the one place where a shop and your house behave differently. A shop’s shelves are restocked when you carry your custom to another town, because a weaponsmith in another town is another weaponsmith. Your house is not another house. The alternative — a house per town — would strand your spare gear in whichever village you happened to be standing in when you outgrew it, days of walking away, with nothing in the game to remind you which village it was.

So the house travels with you, and the only cost of walking away from it is the walk back.

What they are called

Every town has a name, and the status line shows it while you are inside its walls — where Angband showed Town, which here was wrong nearly everywhere it appeared: depth zero is the whole world, so it said the same thing a thousand grids out in open country as it did in a market square. Outside a town it now says wilderness; inside one it says the name.

The name tells you something. A place in governed country takes its name from one list, a place that has fallen or stands empty from another — so Sawall is not somewhere to go shopping. No two towns in a world share a name, and a world always calls its towns the same thing, since the names come from its seed rather than from the savefile.

Note

On the names themselves. Zangband generated them: an elvish name from Angband’s syllable tables with a size suffix hung on it — -ville for a hamlet, then Dun, -ton, -ford. That is a name generator for Middle-earth, and DEC-30 points this game at Amber, so the names are curated in lib/gamedata/town.txt instead.

The sourcing is recorded honestly in that file. The agreed reference for the setting yields almost no place names — Amber, Castle Amber, Tir-na Nog’th, the Forest of Arden, Avalon, the Courts of Chaos, and four of those are already dungeons. So only Avalon is confirmed from it. The rest are believed to be Zelazny’s, from the Chronicles, but have not been checked against the books. Nothing in the list is invented. If one of them is wrong it is wrong in that one file, and deleting the line is the whole fix.

Who lives there

A town is not always people.

Inhabitants	How often	What you find
Villagers	about 3 in 5	Beggars, drunks, merchants, mercenaries, the odd rogue. An ordinary town.
Beasts	about 1 in 4	Emptied once, and the animals moved back in. The shops still stand.
Monsters	about 1 in 10	Taken, and still held. Fewer of them than a town has people, and dangerous in proportion to the country around it.
Abandoned	about 1 in 20	Nobody at all. The streets and the shops are exactly as they were.

Law decides it, mostly — a town in country nobody polices has more often than not been taken — with population second: land that can barely support a town is land the animals get back. A larger town holds out longer, so a great city is much less likely to have fallen than a hamlet, which is both the obvious reading and the one that costs you least: a village of four trades is a nuisance to lose, the only great city within reach takes the magic shop and the black market with it.

Your home village always has people in it. That is fixed rather than rolled: the opening should not depend on luck.

The sidebar tells you. Under the place’s name it says what kind of place it is — village, town, city, great city — and if it has fallen it says so in red: city, taken, town, wild, village, empty. Worth reading before you walk the streets looking for an inn that was never there.

A town that has been taken still trades. Its shops are doors in walls rather than shopkeepers, so you can walk in past whatever is holding the place — which is either a convenience or an oddity depending on how you look at it.

Services

Buildings with something behind the door, as against shops, which sell things. There are six. The magetower is a 9; the other five are each a + in a colour of its own. All of them charge.

Building	Found in	What it does
Magetower	town and up	Carries you to somewhere you already know. See below.
Inn	town and up	A bed until morning, for 25 gold. Only sells you one at night — the innkeeper will tell you to travel while it is light otherwise. And you may dream. See below.
Healer	town and up	Binds wounds (4 gold a hit point), cures poison, cuts, stunning, blindness and confusion (60), restores drained stats (400), restores lost levels (400). Only offers what you actually need.
Magesmith	city and up	Puts magic on a weapon or a suit of armour, 250 gold a go. Asks which first: a weapon gets both its to-hit and its to-damage, which is why it costs twice what a scroll of one or the other does.
Recharger	city and up	Puts charges back in a wand or a staff, 120 gold, at the same strength as a scroll of Recharging. It can still fail and destroy the item — that is the ordinary recharging risk, not a swindle.
Chaos tower	great city only	Takes one mutation off you, 2500 gold, and you choose which. The rarest service in the game and deliberately so: it is the only way to pick, where a potion of New Life takes the lot. See Mutations.

Work

Some buildings hand out work. Walk into an inn that is hiring and you are offered a job before you are offered a bed: kill so many of a creature, come back, and be paid.

Quest-giving is a property a building carries, not a building of its own. Nothing in the game has a “quest giver’s hut”; the inn simply has the property at the moment, and it could as easily be the magetower commissioning a retrieval. That is deliberate — it means new sources of work cost a line rather than a new building.

The inn has it for a reason worth knowing: it is where people who have been somewhere else are sitting. And since a town that has fallen keeps no services at all, the work dries up exactly where you would expect it to, without any rule needing to say so. About half the towns in a world are hiring.

You can carry several jobs at once. Any building that hires will tell you how far along you are, or pay you when you are done.

What you dream at the inn

A bed is not only a way of skipping the night. Some nights you dream, and what you dream depends on where you are sleeping.

A true dream shows you a place. The nearest town or dungeon mouth you have not yet found appears on the world map, and you wake knowing its name and where it stands. This is the reason to pay for a bed on a night you could have walked through.

It shows you where the place is. It does not take you there — the magetower carries you only to places you have actually stood in, and a dream is not a visit. You still have to make the walk, but you now know which way to walk, which is the hard part.

A dark dream sets something hunting you. It will be something you have met: whatever you have seen and remember, leaning towards the worst of it. If you hold your nerve you merely remember the thing in the morning. If you do not, you wake frightened or confused, and it wears off. A character who has met nothing memorable yet has nothing to dream about.

Which you get depends on the law of the town. A lawful city is a good place to sleep and a frontier town is not:

Where you sleep	A true dream	A dark dream
A town at the edge of what is governed	about 1 night in 11	about 1 night in 4
A well-ordered city	about 1 night in 4	almost never

Most nights, in either, are just a night. And a town that has fallen has no inn at all, so the worst country never gets the chance to give you the worst dreams.

Nothing in a town is free. The prices are in constants.txt and are pitched so a character of level five feels them and one of level thirty does not, which is the same shape as the magetower’s fare: a service is a use for gold, and gold stops being scarce.

Note

On “lost levels”. Some attacks drain experience rather than hit points — undead touches, nether, a few traps. The message is “You feel your life draining away”, or “slipping away” if you have Hold Life, which halves it.

Since your level is computed from your experience, draining it can take a level off you, and with it hit points, spell points and access to spells. The game remembers the most experience you have ever had, so the loss is recoverable: the healer puts you back to your peak, as a Potion of Restore Life Levels does. What it cannot give back is experience you never earned.

A town that has fallen has none of them. Nobody is running a teleport network or an inn out of somewhere held by monsters, and there is nobody in an abandoned town to run anything.

Note

The inn earns its keep here in a way it would not in Angband. Resting duplicates a command the game already has — but daylight is what reveals the overworld, so a character who arrives somewhere at dusk either gropes about by lamplight or waits, and waiting a hundred turns at a time with R is not waiting, it is bookkeeping.

Zangband’s inn also carried a nightmare vision, and the dream described above is what became of it — deliberately not Zangband’s own. What that one actually did was a sanity blast: draining wits, inflicting amnesia, sometimes granting a mutation, in service of the game’s Lovecraft material, which this one is moving away from. The idea was worth keeping and the machinery behind it was not (DEC-32, DEC-33).

The magetower

Some towns keep a tower of the mages, drawn 9. Walk into it and they will carry you to somewhere you already know, for a fee.

Where they are. Anything above a village keeps one, unless it has fallen — nobody runs a teleport network out of somewhere held by monsters, and there is nobody in an abandoned town to run one. So: towns, cities and great cities yes; other villages no.

Your home village always has one whatever its size, because every journey begins at home and a network you cannot leave from has one node fewer than it needs.

In practice that is most of the world’s towns — eleven of twelve on a world measured, the twelfth being abandoned.

Note

This was scored on population and law at first, in the same style as the trades, and the scoring was worse than useless because it was not legible. Measured on a real world, every one of its band-one towns scored just under the threshold, so a town never had a tower and only cities did — and nothing told the player that. Walking into two towns in a row and finding no tower in either is how it was reported.

A rule you can hold in your head is worth more than variation you cannot see the shape of. What is lost is the sense that a magetower is a city’s privilege; what is gained is being able to plan a journey.

Where it will take you. Your home village always counts, from the first turn. Beyond that, two different bars, deliberately:

• a town has to have been stood in. Seeing it across a field is not having been there, and the first crossing of the world should stay worth making.

• a dungeon mouth only has to have been seen. It is a staircase in a field with nothing to be inside of.

What it costs. Gold, by the distance: wild:travel-cost in constants.txt is the fare per block, 15 by default. A twenty-block hop is 300 gold, which is real money at level five and nothing at level thirty — which is the right shape. The network is a convenience you grow into, not a way past the early game. You cannot travel on credit; if you are short, the mages tell you the price and you walk.

You have to be standing in a tower to use one, so a village with no tower is a place you walk out of. Getting back from a dungeon mouth is your problem — that is what Word of Recall is for.

Walls and gates

Every place is walled, with gates no more than two grids wide. A gate has a door on each grid; you open it to pass through, and it swings shut behind you after a while. Monsters do not walk in through an open gate as a matter of course, but a gate you leave standing open is a gate.

Roads

The towns are joined by roads, and following one is how you find the next place.

A road is routed rather than drawn: it takes the cheapest way across the country, so it runs down the valleys, keeps out of the swamp and goes round a mountain instead of over it. It keeps to the land, too – if two towns end up on either side of an inland sea a causeway is built, but that is the exception, not a short cut across every bay.

Every town and every dungeon is on the network. The roads are laid as a spanning tree over the towns first, so there is always a road out of your home village and following it reaches every other town. Any two towns within thirty blocks of each other then get a road directly between them, so settled country ends up with a network rather than a single thread. Finally every dungeon mouth gets a spur to the nearest town.

That last part is not decoration. Measured before it existed, six of the thirteen dungeon mouths happened to sit on a road and the rest were between eleven and sixty-two blocks from one — up to a thousand grids of open country to search with nothing to follow. Better siting cannot fix it: a dungeon stands in the kind of country it belongs in, and the deep ones belong a long way from any town. So the road goes to them instead.

A road is two grids wide. That is not for looks, and it is not arbitrary either. One grid is too few: where a road turns a right angle in the block you are standing in, a single-grid corner is one square of floor at right angles to the way you are going, and the road reads as though it stopped — the first report of this was a road that “appears to end at the beach” after a long walk, when in fact it had turned. Two grids makes a corner a two-by-two block of paving, which reads as a turn. Three was tried first and looked like a motorway.

About three blocks in a hundred have a road through them.

If you are lost, find a road and walk along it. It goes somewhere — a town, or a way down.

Finding your way

Press M on the surface for the world map. It shows only the country you have travelled near, and colours each place by its band – village, town, city, great city – so you can tell from across the map which way to walk for a magic shop. Roads you have seen are drawn on it too.

What you have explored is remembered while you are down in the dungeon, so coming back up puts you in a town you know rather than one you have to learn again.