Download Larn

blahblah 2019-01-02 0 point

When you got tired of the simplicity of Rogue, you would end up playing either LARN, OMEGA or HACK (later NetHACK). I spent tons of time playing LARN, but always had to use wizard-mode, because eventually I'd get stuck.

The purpose of LARN is to go find the cure for your daughter. There's 2 dungeons, a "starter" one and a Volcano that has the cure. I think there's also a town / shop. Like other Rogue-likes, part of the trickiness is identifying potions, scrolls, items, etc.. and trying not to poison yourself or get stuck wearing cursed items while doing so.

Once you delve to the bottom of the starter dungeon, and come out feeling like a bad-a**, you head on over to the Volcano dungeon.. and proceed to get your a** handed to you by all kinds of demons and uber-powerful what-nots.

Unlike other Rogue-likes, LARN introduces a time limit.. you have X days to get the cure for your daughter before she dies. I think you can edit an options file to push this out some (and maybe even disable it), but I think it was the first rogue-like to introduce the concept of time limit. And it was something crazy, like 250 days. So, it wasn't meant to be played forever the way Omega or NetHack could be.

If you like ASCII rogue-likes, then LARN should be a standard in your library. And if you like messing around, then activating wizard mode to kill things with your +25 Lance of Death and casting disintegrate spells ad nauseum to destroy parts of dungeons is endless fun.

KC 2016-06-20 1 point

No, it's not a card game, George. A "card deck" refers to a stack of computer punch cards, each being a line of code. For more details, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

George Grace 2016-05-14 -1 point

Wait, what? A LARN CARD GAME? I can't find any information about a Larn Card Deck.. I mean, even if it has 7800 cards, I'm interested!
Please contact me to:
george.k.grace@gmail.com

A Wise Old Man 2013-02-20 2 points DOS version

Oh sweet Krishnu! Someone still has a copy of this game?? I remember when it was originally coded in either FORTRAN or PL/1, and was floating around the various college mainframes that had enough timeshared RAM to run it without memory dumping reams of crash reports! And the card deck for it was only about 7800 cards just for the program alone, too!