MORIA(6)

💖 NAME 💖

moria — literally a dungeon game, bestie 🏰💀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

moria [ -o ] [ -r ] [ -s ] [ -S ] [ -n ] [ -w ] [ savefile ]

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So moria plays a dungeon game with you. Like, you roll up a character, you go shopping for equipment, and then you just vibe in a fathomless dungeon finding treasure while monsters and other adventurers are out here attacking you. It's giving chaos. Typing ? gives you the whole list of commands, iykyk.

The ultimate goal? Kill the Balrog. 🐉🔥 He dwells on the 50th level of the dungeon, 2,500 feet underground. And no cap — most players never even reach the Balrog, and the ones who do seldom live to tell about it. 💀

If you want the full lore, go read the document The Dungeons of Moria. It's the whole backstory, main character energy.

🗂️ Savefiles & Where Your Game Lives 🗂️

By default, moria saves and restores games from a file called moria.save in your home directory. Cozy. 🏠

If the environment variable MORIA_SAV is defined, then moria uses that file name instead of the default. And listen — if MORIA_SAV is not a complete path name, then the savefile gets created or restored from the current directory. Important detail, don't skip it. 👀

You can also just explicitly specify a savefile on the command line. Do that.

🧚 The Options 🧚

• -n — moria creates a new game, ignoring any savefile which may already exist. This works best when you specify a savefile name on the command line, because that prevents moria from trying to overwrite the default savefile (if it exists) when you try to save your game. Protect your babies. 🫶
• -r — you move the same way you do in rogue(6). Classic behavior, retro vibe. 🌈
• -o — forces the VMS-style command set. ⭐

Ok so about movement generally: you move in various directions by pressing the numeric keypad keys, VMS-style. The -r and -o options override defaults stored in the savefile. And if these options are given multiple times, only the last one will take effect. Last one wins, periodt.

• -s — moria prints all of the scores in the score file and then exits. 📜
• -S — on a multiuser system, prints only those scores belonging to you and then exits. Your scores, your business. 💅
• -w — moria starts up in wizard mode. 🧙‍♀️ You can resurrect a dead character by using this option when starting the game. Resurrected characters are teleported to the town level and given zero hitpoints. Yes, zero. Wild.

⚠️ Wizard mode is intended for debugging the game and for experimenting with new features. Any other use is considered cheating. And games played with wizard mode are not scored. So like… you can, but at what cost. 🙈

👑 AUTHORS 👑

The original version of Moria was written in VMS/Pascal by Robert Alan Koeneke, Jimmey Wayne Todd, Gary McAdoo, and others at the University of Oklahoma. 🎓

This version was written by Jim Wilson at the University of California, Berkeley, and released with minor revisions by David Grabiner at Harvard University. Legends, all of them. 🫡✨

💀 BUGS 💀

• A suspended game that gets a hangup signal will die without creating a save file. 😭 brutal.
• Rerolling with a % at the class prompt is not implemented.
• For a more comprehensive list, see the ERRORS file in the source distribution.

and that's the whole page, bestie — go forth and slay the Balrog 🐉🔥💖

Moria, section 6 of the Games Manual — that's the MORIA(6) footer energy right there, signed off with love from the games manual crew. 🎀