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Ancient Domains of Mystery, also known as ADOM, is a "Roguelike" game developed by Thomas Biskup, aka. "The Creator". The first version was released in 1994 and development continued until 2003 when Biskup stopped work on the game. As the game is closed source, unlike its contempories such as Angband and NetHack no further development occurred for nine years. The advent of crowdfunding inspired Biskup to launch a Indie Go Go campaign to restart development on the game. This was wildly successful and new versions, both free and paid for, are now available with many enhancements. The current version as of January 2019 is 3.3.3

The game is characterized by:

  • Permanent character death. When you die, that's it. Your saved game is deleted and your player-character (PC) ceases to exist (unless you copy the save file to another folder). Story mode (exclusive to the paid version) averts this, allowing saving and reloading of the game at any time.
  • Randomly-generated locations and encounters (though there are certain fixed locations, most dungeon levels are randomly generated).
  • Turn-based movement (overlaying a more complicated system where the amount of time an action by any character takes is determined by the character's speed and the energy cost of that action, so a "turn" as perceived by the player is just the amount of in-game time it takes for the Player Character to perform their latest action).
  • Extensive customization. The different races and classes, the sheer variety of equipment you can find, and the ways that you can use them.
  • Persistent levels — aside from the "Infinite Dungeon", dungeon levels are fixed in design once generated, unlike Angband but like NetHack.
  • A large overworld. Unlike many Roguelikes, the game takes place in a large wilderness area with many entrances to towns, cities and dungeons scattered around the world.
  • A mix of elements familiar from Dungeons & Dragons (monsters, etc.), Warhammer (the forces of Chaos) and more original ones built on top of and beyond these.

The game used to use ASCII display graphics but after a successful crowdfunding, even the free version now uses proper tiled graphics. Players can still opt to use the classic ASCII look if they wish.

Unusually for roguelikes, ADOM features a fair amount of story in the form of a manual and a detailed world to explore. The game takes place in the world of Ancardia, which is being invaded from another dimension by beings known as the Forces of Chaos. Their inherent wrongess has a corrupting effect on the world, turning people and animals into monsters, screwing up the weather, etc. A sage named Khelavaster has discovered that the source of Chaos' invasion of Ancardia is in a remote mountain range, the Drakalor Chain. Determined to stop The End of the World as We Know It, he went there to stop the invasion and never came back, followed by hundreds of other wannabe heroes. The player is one of them.

A major feature is The Corruption, which grants the player various mutations that can be either beneficial or downright harmful. Another feature setting it apart from other roguelikes is the Karma Meter, which determines several NPCs' reactions and which of the Multiple Endings are available. Find it here.

A sequel called ADOM II: Legends of Ancardia has been released, and can be found here, but it's still a work in progress. In addition, a crowd-funded campaign to give more updates to ADOM I was very successful so has received updates in the near future, and a release on Steam. In early 2019, Biskup ran a kickstarter for a tabletop roleplaying adaptation which the fans backed in less than 24 hours. Its website can be found here.

A sequel, Ultimate ADOM Caverns of Chaos, went into Early Access on Feb 18th, 2021, and left Early Access on Aug 25th of the same year.


Trope examples

  • AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle: FoLlOwErS oF ChAoS sPeAk LiKe ThIs.note 
  • Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: The guidebook has all kinds of abbreviations that make it downright illegible unless you read the compiled list of acronyms and abbreviations. The lists of characteristics for the various pieces of equipment in the appendices are detailed only in shorthand.
  • Action Bomb: All the flavours of vortices attack by exploding into a massive ball of acid/fire/etc, if their target is in melee range. This is as unhealthy as it sounds. They can't explode in the dark in 1.1.1.
  • Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Yes and no. Shops have finite inventories (randomly generated), and if you change your mind after selling them something, you can buy it back... provided you have enough extra cash to meet their higher sell price.
  • Advice Backfire: A fortune cookie message says "Dragons want items made from their hide back." Whether or not they technically "want" the items back, dragons don't want you to give them these items: they'll destroy the item and turn enraged. Fortune cookie messages as a whole range from useful to harmful to jokes or useless.
  • Almost Dead Guy: Khelavaster is found on the downstairs of D:16, surrounded by chaos servants and beaten to within an inch of his life. He will stay there until you talk to him, even if you leave and come back months later which comes in handy if you're looking for an amulet of life saving.
  • Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The Chaos dimension, along with the top level of the Tower of Eternal Flames, level 66 of the Infinite Dungeon, and bottom of the Scintillating Cave.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: So long as your health is sufficiently high and aren't doomed, a trap that would normally kill you will simply reduce you to 1 HP, though it may leave you confused, and there's a higher chance of items breaking.
  • The Archmage: Yulgash the Master Summoner and Nuurag-Vaarn the Chaos Archmage are described as such. Khelavaster and Andor Drakon count too, but aren't described as such. Among the fanbase, a character who can bookcast the Wish Spell indefinitely is considered an Archmage; naturally, this is in an incredible feat.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack: There is a weapon called a phase dagger that completely ignores the armour of the target. The downside is that on each hit, the game throws at you a message about you easily cutting through the armour, which requires you to press [more] much more often. And the dagger itself doesn't do much damage anyway, making it useful only against heavily armored mooks.
  • Artifact of Doom:
    • Several artifacts corrupt, curse, or doom the player, and some weapons can be generated that automatically doom the player as well.
    • The Chaos Orbs can be used for various powerful magical effects, but doing so causes significant corruption.
  • Artifact Title: Sort of averted. When it initially had only one dungeon, ADOM stood for Advanced Dungeons of Mystery, and a couple of versions later for Ancient Dungeons of Mystery. In version 0.9.0, where the overworld was implemented, the title was changed to the current Ancient Domains of Mystery. (Considering how many different dungeons there are accessible from the overworld after the big restart of development, "Dungeons" would also make sense again.)
  • Artificial Gill: Several items, most commonly helmets of water breathing and the autocursing ring of the fish (although you need two unless you bless one). As of version 1.2.0, also provided by a corruption.
  • The Atoner: Avatars of Order or Balance must have been Chaotic at one point to get the Medal and Crown of Chaos. Then they have to change alignment to their chosen state and get the Trident of the Red Rooster.
  • Auto-Revive: Amulets of life saving will automatically revive you if you're killed while wearing one (with some exceptions). They work better when blessed. The Amulet of Resurrection is even better, functioning as an indestructible, infinite use amulet of life saving, but it's only available one day of the year at an immense price. You could always steal it, but make sure you don't get caught.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Quite a few class powers sound powerful but are really nerfed by other costs. The Wish spell also counts, due to it taking so long to learn and cast that the PC will often starve to death in the attempt. Said spell normally takes at least 3000PP to cast — even level 50 wizards can't cast it without grinding stats and flat-out abusing the game mechanics. Oh, and casting it drains a random stat by 10. One Self-Imposed Challenge is to raise a character that can cast it at will.
    • Moloch armor gives a massive bonus to your PV as well as fire immunity, but it weighs so much that most players won't even be able to lift it without Strength of Atlas or some other extreme strength boost. In addition, it massively cuts your DV, Dexterity, and speed, meaning that while you might be able to smash through hordes of ancient red dragons and wyrms, any creature with armour piercing attacks, even a single claw bug, could rip you to shreds before you can react.
  • Balance Between Good and Evil:
    • Order and Chaos, in this case, but the principle still applies. The Neutral God actively works to maintain the Balance between Law and Chaos, which is a force in its own right, and protect the world from the danger of extremes.
    • Interestingly, the God of Law also worked to maintain this balance in the past by turning the last Hero of Law into the Eternal Guardian, preventing him from defeating Chaos completely and instead setting him to defend the lower reaches of the Caverns of Chaos.
    • And this point really gets hammered home in the nihilist ultra ending, where you eliminate Andor Drakon with a Scroll of Entropy. Reality starts falling apart, forcing you to very quickly ascend out of the Caverns of Chaos (17 turns per level, and that includes time closing the chaos gate to allow ascent as well as getting through the slippy slidey level 49), only to see reality dissolve into nothing. Chaos is part of the universe, and reality cannot exist without it. But it's still an ultra ending and you get a decent score.
  • Bare-Fisted Monk: You can play monks as the standard, unencumbered fast-moving fighter, but there's more than one way to play a fighter in this game. Beastfighters are similar, but more restrictive.
  • Beauty Equals Goodness: To a certain degree of good. As of version 1.2.0, having an appearance score above 10 increases the amount of corruption required to gain another corruption. Because most of the corruptions penalize appearance, this means that corruptions cause a cumulative acceleration of how quickly the character gets corruptions.
  • Bizarre Beverage Use: A "potion of uselessness" may spawn. True to its name, it has no effect on you or other beings, but throwing it while on an icy level will propel you in the opposite direction. A god, impressed by the player's cleverness in finding this use, will grant them a reward.
  • Blackout Basement: The Gremlin Cave, which has water traps. You've seen the film, so you can imagine the problems. However, anyone who knows the Light spell can have fun.
  • Bloodbath Villain Origin: One of the backstories for the chaos knight PC has them burn down their entire village, cementing them as a Villain Protagonist.
  • Body Horror: The protagonist gets ~18 corruption stages, while NPCs transform into hideous chaos mutants without warning.
  • Bonus Dungeon: Quite a few of them. There are several that you are required to visit for special endings, but are otherwise optional and present goodies. Always-optional dungeons include the Gremlin Cave, the Pyramid, and the Minotaur Maze.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • The Farmer doesn't have the cool powers of the other classes, but carrying more stuff, needing to eat less, picking better herbs, gaining marks in polearms (the most balanced weapon class) faster than anyone else and making their own rations are all at least somewhat useful. Downplayed, however, as an early-game food source makes the food-related abilities less useful, and if carrying too many items is a problem, you can clear the limited monsters from a fairly early location to make it a safe storage locker. Farmer is generally considered a less powerful and more difficult class.
    • The Monk's class powers tend towards this. Reduced movement energy cost, the ability to smash walls by kicking them, and the ability to swap positions with any monster instantly aren't flashy, but are extraordinarily useful.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: Great Wyrms are ancient and extremely powerful dragons. They can cast spells (unlike lesser dragons), and are immune to their respective element (ice, acid, lighting or cold). Special mention goes to Great Karmic Wyrms, which are immune to all four elements, making most magic useless against them. Plus, they are karmic beings, meaning that hitting them in melee makes the player unluckier with each hit.
  • Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous: Chaos is the adversary in the game, out to overwhelm Ancardia and mutate everyone into writhing masses of primal chaos. The Avatar of Order ending, however, leads to an Ancardia that never undergoes significant change, and exists in peace, tranquility and boredom forever. The world is a lot happier under an Avatar of Balance, who protects the world from the forces of Order and Chaos and otherwise lets Ancardia determine its own destiny.
  • Bragging Rights Reward:
    • True Strength, the best artifact girdle in the game, can only be gotten by reaching the fiftieth level of the main dungeon without ever committing an unlawful act. Not only is this ridiculously hard for normal endings and nigh-impossible for the others, but it's past a Point of No Return so you can't use it for anything else, and chances are that if you've made it this far, you're ready for the horrors of D:50. Also, if you commit a chaotic act while wearing the girdle, it will squeeze you to death.
    • The Scroll of Omnipotence is finally obtainable in the most recent release, dropped by an extremely well hidden Optional Boss that requires a very, very long quest chain to access. At the moment, nobody knows how to read or use it.
  • Broken Record: The magic missile bounces! You are hit by the magic missile! The magic missile bounces! You are hit by the magic missile! The magic missile bounces! more... 
  • Brutal Bonus Level: There's several.
    • The first one, the Pyramid, is only accessible to characters between levels 13 and 16, and sees you trying to defeat the mummy lord Rehetep for his ankh and wrappings. By ADOM standards, it's fairly tame.
    • The Bug-Infested Temple is a big step up from the Pyramid. It's packed with Lightning Bruiser greater claw bugs and killer bugs, both of which are tremendously fast, always punch through armor, and dish out huge numbers of attacks per turn.
    • The Minotaur Maze is a seven-level maze complex packed with traps, false walls, extremely powerful minotaurs, and false levels. Most players skip it, as it's unusually challenging even by ADOM standards.
    • Finally, there's the Quickling Tree. It requires two specific corruptions to enter, and puts an extremely harsh weight limit on your inventory. Very few people ever bother with it, as the main reward is the Boots of Great Speed, an artifact that gives you a massive speed boost, but also dooms, curses, and corrupts.
    • The newer versions add the Ultimate Dungeon. Entering it requires you to close the Chaos Gate (read: win the game) while also completing a very long quest line, including completing the Minotaur Maze, luring an NPC halfway across the game world, and intentionally screwing up the Rolf quest. At the bottom lies the Ultimate Balor, who drops the Scroll of Omnipotence...which nobody knows how to read or use.
  • The Cameo: You can meet Hawkslayer from Bard's Tale III and recruit him as your companion if your PC knows the secret password.
  • Cast from Hit Points: If you run out of PP, you can cast with HP instead, although it heavily abuses several of your stats and is likely to result in permanent stat loss. A propestive archmage, might abuse this, however.
  • Chest Monster: The perennial mimic. Annoyingly, for whatever reason, there tends to be one in the shop on the Dwarven City level of the Caverns of Chaos — many player characters have died in what one would normally believe to be a safe zone.
  • Commonplace Rare: Hang on to any potions of water you find: you'll need them to bless items and make blank scrolls for magical writing sets.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Bosses tend to be immune to the simplest methods of incapacitating them, like Death Ray, paralysis, confusion, petrification, altar sacrificing, the Calm Monster spell, and hiding in darkness or invisibility. Updates have enforced this; for example, the ancient karmic wyrm Sharad-Waador could formerly not see invisible. Downplayed as well. Other options like blinding, thrown potions of cure corruption, weapons and ammunition of (creature) slaying, and poison often work. Weaker bosses, like the Fungoid Overlord and "boss monsters", often have fewer immunities.
  • Convection, Schmonvection: Averted by the Tower of Eternal Flames; a low-level PC who wanders in unwittingly is liable to be rapidly cooked by the extreme temperatures. Played half-straight with magma: levitating over it causes damage, but not standing next to it.
  • The Corruption: The encroaching Chaos is warping and corrupting the creatures in the lower levels of the dungeons. As the Player Character dives into them, it starts to affect them too, manifesting as "Corruptions". Some of the corruptions make the game more difficult, some are useful, and having too many results in a rather nasty death.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Foes such as Diamond Golems, Molochs, and the named Chaos Knight are immensely powerful in melee, with the first two always penetrating armor and the latter hitting with 8 (poisoning!) attacks each turn. Their total reliance on melee, however, leaves them vulnerable to being whittled down with ranged attacks. Don't rely on this weakness for Titans and Greater Titans, though, who can turn the tables with deadly eternium bolts.
  • Critical Encumbrance Failure: Played with. Player characters have a carrying capacity based on Strength, and exceeding that causes you to become Burdened, Strained, or Strained!, each of which come with movement speed and stat penalties. Above Strained! is Overburdened, which prevents you from moving until you drop some of your items. At a certain point above Overburdened, you will be crushed to death by your inventory. Thankfully, this only happens if your carrying capacity is suddenly reduced - for instance, if that green hag you're facing curses your girdle of greed...
  • Cryptic Conversation: Yggaz the Fool and the Mad Minstrel do this. Also the fortune cookies, which may or may not be flat-out lying to you. (Also, many quest hints you get in conversation are pretty cryptic too.)
  • Cursed with Awesome: Getting corrupted is generally undesirable, but some of the corruptions can make your character significantly more powerful. For instance, acidic breath gives you a penalty to charisma, but lets you spit acid - which very few monsters resist.
  • Cycle of Hurting:
    • One of the most useful spells is Magic Missile. It's very cheap to cast, spellbooks for it are very common, it can kill many enemies at once, its range increases when trained, and it bounces off walls (so you can kill monsters in positions that other spells and throwable weapons can't reach). However, it's common for a player to make a typo and cast the spell towards a wall at a 180-degree angle in a narrow corridor. The spell will then hit the player and bounce off the opposite wall, hit the player again and bounce off the first wall again... Essentially, the spell will bounce and rebounce, always hitting the player inbetween, until it has reached its maximum range — at this point, the character is usually dead. He's forced to watch a long cycle of messages about the Magic Missile rebouncing and hitting him, his HP steadily sinking, unable to do anything about it.
    • Similarly, getting paralyzed by a monster results in an endless series of messages of the monster hitting you, and the player can't control his character. On the other hand paralyzation is much less likely to result in death if the character is strong. Apparently, it's not too hard to protect yourself from being hit while paralyzed.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: One horrible example within the game itself: saving the game and quitting the game are "shift+s" and "shift+q" respectively, and have the same "y/n" prompt after. Late at night, when cognitive functions take a backseat, players may lose very promising characters for no reason other than their own carelessness. Which is really no different from anything else in the game.
  • Degraded Boss: Played with. The skeletal king guarding an item in the Tomb of the High Kings is actually also a rare monster spawn. It only appears randomly late in the game though, so the player is likely to see the guaranteed boss one first.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: "You start to eat the gnoll corpse (rotten). You have finished eating the gnoll corpse (rotten). This meat tastes rotten."
  • Developer's Foresight: Has its own page from the sheer prevalence of this trope.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Required for the Special endings. Even a regular ending gives you plenty of opportunity to shine against some pretty horrifying stuff.
  • Dodge the Bullet: Archers somehow have the ability to dodge missiles; instead of dropping at your feet when they miss, they fly on past.
  • Doomy Doomsof Doom: The javelin of doom and ring of doom, which give you the Doomed intrinsic when equipped. The javelin is rather dubious but has situational benefits and can be dropped without consequence. The ring of doom decreases your defenses and gives you Cursed, in addition to Doomed. It's also autocursing. Wearing it will promptly kill most early-game characters: think hard about trying on unknown rings.
  • Dragon Hoard:
    • There's an underwater one, guarded by a female water dragon. Trying to pick up an item there will make her warn you, and ignoring her will result in her trying to kill you.
    • Dragons also carry gold and a bunch of other items on them — even hatchlings will typically drop about 1000 gp, and often something else besides, though the "something else" for them tends to be something fairly useless like a pile of rocks.
  • Dual Wielding: The Two Weapon Combat skill lets you do this effectively, although the inability to use shields is a deterrent. Dual wielding the artifact daggers Sting and Needle greatly increases the damage and accuracy of each.
  • Early-Bird Boss: Keethrax, the evil druid, one of the two options for your first quest. He's high level, corrupts by hit, immune to fire, ice, and lightning, and a druid, at that. His level adjusts to that of the PC, but as higher-level PCs are generally better-equipped and have more HP, one will have an easier time at level 12 than level 8.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: Version 0.2.0 is fascinating to play. There is no overworld, only the main dungeon exists, there are no colours, and the way rooms and corridors are drawn resembles NetHack.
  • Easter Egg: Press '&' to open the monster memory, and type in "Thomas Biskup".
  • Eldritch Abomination: The Chaos creatures that are invading Ancardia. These range from living blobs of pure Chaos and corrupted animals to big powerful demons like the Orb Guardians and Balors. Shifting features, reality distortion and Body Horror are commonly mentioned in their descriptions.
  • Elemental Punch: The Burning Hands spell (Baptism of Fire for religious classes) is essentially a fire-elemental melee attack… that never misses. It also gets stronger and slightly cheaper to cast as you use it.
  • Enemy Scan: Inverted by the Insight spell, as well as potions of insight, which reveals hidden information about the player character. This actually makes sense because the player can gain new abilities from various sources, such as corpses, pools, and items, without knowing it.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: Let's see: Swimming? Drowns you in four turns unless you have the right item or skill. Walking in the forest or mountains? Random Encounters, plus starvation. Doors? Trapped. Any wild animal, including rodents? Will fight you to the death, even while ignoring other human NPCs such as swordsmen. Merely walking around in dungeons? Gradually turns you into a twisted mockery of yourself.
    • "Suddenly a stone block falls on your head. You die." Thankfully, this tends to only be lethal early in the game.
    • You can be killed by "trying too hard to become a great writer" (using a magical writing set).
    • Doing alchemy incorrectly will kill you (and doing it correctly will still probably kill you), even with completely mundane ingredients. Mixing a potion of carrot juice with a potion of water (or two potions of water) can result in a huge explosion.
    • When walking around the wilderness, rain can rust your equipment and drench any scrolls or spellbooks you own. It'll even make you sick if you don't have a hood/hooded cloak.
    • Even the date you're playing the game on can be lethal.
  • Evil Sorcerer: YOU can also be an Evil Sorcerer if you want. If you really want to be evil, you can kick the cute puppy to death and then laugh at the girl who just wants her dog back (after eating the puppy's corpse as she watches, no less). And then fry everyone in the village with lightning bolts.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Tower of Eternal Flames. Also the Infinite Dungeon.
  • Explosive Breeder:
    • Worms of any kind and jellies should be killed before they have the chance to multiply.
    • There are also gremlins, which are not very dangerous but spawn explosively when they (or their furballs) touch water. Naturally, there is a cave of them that’s also filled with water traps. Even worse than the gremlins, though, are the battle bunnies; they only appear on one level, but they reproduce faster than anything else in the game as long as Bugs the Bunny Master is alive. They're also immune to scrolls of vermin control.
  • Extremely Dusty Home: The Dusty Dungeon Level (DDL) and the level below it, Very Dusty Dungeon Level (VDDL). They are pretty much Informed Attribute, however, as the description doesn't affect gameplay.
  • Extreme Omnivore: By the end of the game, your PC will have munched his way through half of Ancardia's human, humanoid, and animal population for the various resistances, the stat boosts, or just because they were hungry. Usually raw corpses, if they don't have the cooking skill. You can even eat your own clone (in the form of a doppelganger), if you're hungry enough. Some races are pickier than others. Trolls are the least picky; they will eat anything, at any time.
  • Fallen Hero: The Ultimate Chaos God ending requires you to be Lawful or Neutral, to get the Trident of the Red Rooster, but to finish the game with fully Chaotic alignment.
  • Fauxshadow: The Red Rooster Inn, where you can find the Scroll of Omnipotence was first referenced in-game six or seven years before Word of God finally admitted that it was a Red Herring.
  • Fragile Speedster: Quicklings sport extreme Speed and DV, but pathetic defense makes them fall quickly once a strong attack (often magic) lands. Quickling Queens make matters much worse by poisoning on successful melee hits. Stacks of poison, no less.
  • From a Certain Point of View: Gauntlets of peace make it a lot harder to hit things. And autocurse.
  • From Bad to Worse: The first three levels of the Tower of Eternal Flames are hard enough, what with the constant fire damage, melting equipment, and monsters that are hard to take out in melee. You thought THAT was bad? The fourth level is hotter, blocks teleportation, and requires you to dig through a lot of solid wall to reach a horde of resilient fire elementals and demons, and THEN you can fight the boss, who sees through invisibility and uses corrupting attacks, confusion, stat drain, high-intensity beam attacks, and has a ton of hit points and huge melee damage output.
  • Full-Frontal Assault: True berserk, a slightly hidden game mechanic. Not wearing any armor (except of rage) while berserk increases damage and hit chance even further! It also removes the warning about accidentally attacking friendlies.
  • Game-Favored Gender: Female characters have an advantage, for a few reasons, such as having access to an extra Side Quest, receiving cheaper keys from a certain merchant and in general having an easier time with stores due to relying on Appearance instead of Charisma for shop prices; Gray Elves for example start with a Charisma score of 8 and Appearance of 18 and increasing Charisma is far more difficult overall. That said, male characters do have an extra option to deal with the very lethal Banshee, and unlike female characters, the massive Appearance penalties caused by most corruptions doesn't affect them much.
  • Gladiator Subquest: The fights in The Arena are this. Beating the reigning champion in the 20th fight gives you the Golden Gladius, which isn't spectacular as a weapon but can be traded for the desired Tactics skill.
  • A God Is You: If you dare, if you've solved all the (optional) puzzles to gain the right equipment, and if your character is sufficiently badass.
  • Go Mad from the Revelation: Downplayed. Just standing in front of the Chaos Gate and catching a glimpse of the Chaos dimension can make you heavily confused (the closest thing to being insane in this game). Played somewhat straighter with the IBM manuals, which will permanently confuse anyone who reads them.
  • Gratuitous Latin: A fortune cookie message states "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur."
  • Grimy Water: The red lake at the bottom of the Tomb of the High Kings. It's packed with chaos piranhas that will rip you to shreds if you try swimming it. You'll have to find another way to cross, and no, teleportation does not work here. Make sure you watch out for confusion, as well...
  • Guide Dang It!: If you aren't spoiled, it's twice as rewarding and three times as frustrating. This also applies to nearly all of the side quests; read the ADOM Guidebook's appendix on them for the sake of your blood pressure.
    • One example: do you remember the first monster you killed? No? No Ultra Ending for you, then!note 
    • And figuring out what to do with a certain dying sage…
  • Healing Factor:
    • PCs born in the month of Candle already inherently heal faster than Healing at 100 would let you. Trolls heal the fastest of all races. Being a healer has self-explanatory benefits. What happens when you roll up a Candle-born Trollish Healer? Near Wolverine-class Healing Factor! Especially since healers double, then triple their HP recovery at level 6 and 12.
    • You can wear a crown of regeneration, the artifact amulet Preserver, bracers of regeneration, two rings of regeneration on your hands and one in the missile slot and wield two knives of endurance. That's eight HP healed per turn through items alone.
    • One of the corruptions grants another layer of Healing Factor. Don't forget to actually kill your enemies, though.
  • Heavily Armored Mook: Some of the monsters have so high armor that they can be barely scratched with normal attacks.
  • Hell Gate: The Chaos Gate, which allows the forces of chaos to invade Ancardia. Closing it is the main goal for most player characters.
  • Herd-Hitting Attack:
    • The various "[element] ball" spells target the area around you, which is useful when in the middle of a group of enemies. (Be warned though that getting surrounded is in most cases a bad idea.)
    • Likewise, the monk's circular kick attacks all those around you.
    • Another type of spell useful for hitting multiple enemies are the bolts, which go in a straight line potentially damaging anybody in its path.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • Shooting a Magic Missile in a narrow corridor? Bad idea. Chances are, a typo makes you cast it straight at the wall, so it constantly rebounds at you and hits you again and again and again until you're dead.
    • There is a spell called Death Ray. It also bounces off walls.
  • Humanoid Abomination: In the Steam version, Andor Drakon is shown as a fairly young Evil Sorcerer with glowing purple eyes… and tentacles instead of feet.
  • Humiliation Conga: The Doomed intrinsic makes spawned monsters stronger, prayers more likely to fail, monster status effects more effective, and item destruction more acute, among other effects. Some very nasty items doom you and are autocursed, making them difficult to remove. Humiliation congas often ensue. You could try on a seemingly normal ring, fail to remove it, notice it's a Ring of Doom, barely escape past normally-weak monsters, lose most of your items to a floor trap, get rejected on healing prayers, slowly succumb to a ghul's paralyzing touch, and die, all in short order.
  • Implacable Man: There is an Eternal Guardian guarding a staircase somewhere in the middle of the main dungeon, preventing progress until completing a certain task. If you try to lure him from the stairs by attacking him, or even manage to kill him, an even stronger version of him will instantly materialise on the stairs. Screw up and you have multiple copies fighting against you.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: Angry shopkeepers can one-shot-kill players with a single coin.
  • Improvised Weapon: You can use anything as a melee or projectile weapon, including clothes and scrolls. There are challenges, for example, to get through the game wielding a rock or an anvil.
  • Infinite Flashlight: The very rare everburning torch never runs out of fuel unlike normal torches.
  • Infinity -1 Sword: Lots.
    • The Rune-Covered Trident has good damage stats, comes with several useful intrinsics, and returns when thrown. The only downside is that unless you have a specific birthsign, you won't get it until level 36.
    • The Axe of the Minotaur Emperor is the most powerful weapon in the game, outdamaging even the mighty Trident of the Red Rooster. On the downside, it's incredibly heavy and tends to induce nasty defensive penalties.
  • Infinity +1 Element:
    • Magic Missile can be useful in ways that the elemental bolt spells aren't. It's cheap to use. There is no elemental immunity to it. It doesn't destroy loot that has been dropped on the ground. It bounces off walls, letting you shoot people around corners. It won't make you unlucky if you attack a nonhostile or Karmic enemy.
    • Acid. Nothing is weak to acid, but very few things resist/are immune to it, and acid spells have the highest damage.
  • Infinity +1 Sword: The Trident of the Red Rooster is easily the best artifact in the game. It gives immunity to all four elements, does extra damage to undead and demons, has great defensive bonuses and incredible damage, and gives a huge boost to Mana. Getting it, though, is easier said than done.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: Time runs far faster when you travel in the overworld because it's a zoomed-out representation of a large area. (And you do need to keep track of the time or date for several quests: ctrl-E tells you how much time has (E)lapsed since you first set out. Though it's easier to use Alt-q or "@" to check character details.)
  • Item Crafting: You can make your own crossbow bolts or arrows, and improve metal armour and weapons, with the right skills and the raw materials.
  • Joke Character:
    • The Chaos Knight. You start out corrupted, most NPCs range from unhelpful to hostile whenever you play to type (forcing you to murder your way past most of the quests), and if you convert from Chaos to another alignment, you lose all class powers and suffer from a burning gut until you die or fall back to Chaos. To drive the point home, you can't get a normal ending either, unless you're redeemed; if you close the ChAoS Gate, you're immediately zorched for being a moron. If you are redeemed, you still perish, but at least it's a Heroic Sacrifice.
    • Merchants count as well; while they don't have the unique disadvantages of Chaos Knights, they also don't have their great starting equipment, stats, or class powers. Merchants start out dismally underpowered, with lousy equipment and class powers focused mostly around non-combat use.
  • Joke Item:
    • Potion of Stun Recovery, Scroll of Cure Blindness and the potion of uselessness which has a single real use, for which your god rewards you.
    • And then there's the Scroll of Literacy Check. "If you can read this, you must be pretty good!" (If your Literacy skill is not above 90, it'll read "f u ...")
    • The Black Tome of Alsophocus can let you learn any spell in the game, including Wish! The downside is, it constantly causes corruption when carried, corrupts heavily when used, and you can't choose what spell you learn. Getting any halfway decent spells out of it is likely to cause several corruptions, which is seldom a worthwhile trade.
    • The Boots of Great Speed give you a whopping +100 speed boost. That's the only good thing about them; they curse and doom you when you put them on, and wearing or even carrying them corrupts you rapidly. Being located at the end of the Quickling Tree doesn't help them at all.
  • Kaizo Trap: So, you switched the Trident of the Red Rooster to another weapon in order to kill the True Final Boss more easily — and he drops dead. Think you've won? Wrong. The Amazing Technicolor Battlefield swarms you and turns you into a miserable chaos wretch on the spot.
  • Karma Meter: This is how the Character Alignment works, essentially removing the "does/doesn't play by rules" axes on the graph. Some quests can only be accepted if you're Lawful/Chaotic.
  • Karmic Death: Don't eat the corpses of cute little helpless things (eg dwarven children, the tiny girl's puppy). Also, think very hard about attacking obviously good (Lawful) people. Some of them are very, very good at defending themselves. Or have extremely nasty friends who will kick your ass.
  • Kill It with Ice: Naturally, the easiest way to get through the Tower of Eternal Flames. Still not very easy, though.
  • Kill It with Fire: Remember these words when you find the Temple of Elemental Water.
  • Kill It with Water: Specifically, holy water. Use it on the undead for a One-Hit Kill.
  • King Mook: MaLaKaI, the Chaos Knight guarding the Scepter of Chaos appears to just be an ordinary chaos knight, but he always generates with an extremely high level. Thankfully, he can only attack in melee and he isn't fast, but woe unto anyone who doesn't realize who they're dealing with and tries to just mash him to death.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: Almost anything can be useful, so it makes sense to pick up different things. Even a "scroll of cure blindness" (which can be turned into a blank scroll by dipping it in water) or a "potion of uselessness" (which can be thrown to propel yourself on the icy level of the Caverns of Chaos, resulting in an impressed deity giving you an artifact.)
  • Last Chance Hit Point: While ADOM generally doesn't care a whole lot about mercy, depending on your luck and mana stat, you may occasionally find yourself surviving an overwhelmingly lethal blow with a single hit point.
  • The Legions of Hell: The Forces of Chaos are pretty much this game's version of them.
  • Lethal Lava Land: The Tower of Eternal Flames.
  • Lethal Joke Character: Bards don't have a set skill sheet — every time you roll up a bard, they get a random selection of skills. If you have the patience to roll and re-roll a Bard, you can create a fantastic set of skills. Combine that with excellent class powers and a great Heir gift, and you have a potentially devastating class.
  • Lethal Joke Item: The potion of Uselessness. Really. If you apply the rules for Conservation of Momentum near the end of the game, the gods reward you with a free artifact for your cleverness.
  • Level Drain: Well, Stat Drain. Certain enemies and bosses can permanently reduce your attributes with their melee attacks.
  • Level Grinding: There are useful benefits to gaining a level. You're still not safe (you're never safe), but you're less likely to die without warning. The game tries to avert this by refusing to give experience for killing more than a certain number of a creature, and by making creatures more powerful the more of them you kill. And just don't go to the small dungeon near the start at more than a few levels, because it gets harder as you get tougher, except much faster. (Although with enough resources at a sufficiently high level, particularly the ability to teleport when and where you like, it can become bearable again to at least run through.)
  • Level Scaling: The more of a single creature you kill the more powerful that type of creature gets. Gets fun when dealing with enemy summoners.
  • Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Played straight, but... Since any spells you learn are completely dependent upon you finding their (very fragile) spell books, a wizard may be forced to become a Magic Knight. Yes, a wizard with a few elemental bolt spells will be able to fry legions of Mooks with one hand tied behind his back, but he'd do better to save those spells and use the mooks for training his weapon skill in anticipation of an artifact. Elementalists are similar in that a lot of later monsters are immune to fire and ice.
  • Locked Door: Plenty to go around. Kicking them down is the simplest way to get through, but watch out for traps...
  • Long-Lived: Several races have longer-than-human lifespans. Elves live for centuries before reaching adulthood, and Mist Elves will have lived for many Elven lifetimes before even reaching adulthood.
  • Look Over There: The Ventriloquism skill.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Drinking from pools. You might get wishes or good intrinsics like death ray resistance or teleport control, or you might just get cursed, doomed, or sprayed with water and snakes.
  • MacGuffin Guardian: Sometimes there's a random artifact guarded by a tougher-than-normal named monster in an otherwise completely normal level.
  • Made from Real Girl Scouts: Are hurthling cakes made by hurthlings or from hurthlings? Sometimes it's one, sometimes the other.
  • Magic Knight:
    • Any magic-using class will eventually have to start doing this but the Paladin, with their good weapon skills and decent casting abilities, especially excels at this.
    • The Troll Wizard, and other troll spellcasters. Trolls just aren't very good at spellcasting, but whatever their class, they're good at the magic of club-to-face. A Troll Wizard can win the game without casting a single spell, or they can use their spells to give them a little edge when they need it.
  • Magikarp Power: Monks gain the (undocumented) power to kick down walls at level 13. Not that useful in combat, but there's plenty of uses for a never-breaking, no-weight intrinsic pickaxe, including making smithing more practical.
  • Make a Wish: Can be attained through rings of djinni summoning, magical pools or wands of wishing. You can wish for any non-unique item or monster, or even for abstract things like friends and wealth.
  • The Many Deaths of You: Overlaps with Developer's Foresight. Kicking a stairway can cause the entire level to collapse, resulting in instant death. Kicking an empty space or wall causes damage to the PC, and this damage can kill you if you're trying hard enough to do it. Doomed PCs have something on the order of a 1-in-50 chance per turn of being eaten by a grue if they're in a dark space. The list goes on, and on, and on. A particularly rockstar one — choking to death on your own vomit. Suffer an attack of fever whilst Sick and Paralyzed. There's also a death by exploding frog...
  • Melee Disarming: Ratling fencers and duelists tend to be notorious for disarming the player's current weapon, especially in an item shop where disarmed weapons are considered donations. On the plus side, the disarm maneuver used by enemies allows getting rid of cursed weapons.
  • Mercy Rewarded:
    • Leading the Brainwashed and Crazy village carpenter to a healer benefits you far more than killing him, including learning the essential Healing skill.
    • Finding the baby water dragon's mother nets you an excellent artifact weapon...eventually.
  • Metal Slime: Giant boars. No, they don't give great experience or drop piles of gold. They drop giant boar skulls, one of which is required for Chaos God or Ultra endings.
  • Mighty Glacier: Molochs, Greater Molochs, and the Emperor Moloch compensate for their poor speeds with extremely powerful, penetrating melee attacks. Their regenerative abilities don't help matters.
  • The Minion Master: This is the main skill of necromancers; bards can be played like this too, although having too many followers at once may result in them jealously attacking one another.
  • Min-Maxing: Apart from the Troll healer above, there are few moderately game-breaking min-max builds. Some race/class combinations do give you advantages because their abilities and stats stack, but it's less "OMG cheat" and more "give your PC the best start". Besides, stats are usually assigned randomly or semi-randomly.
  • Monster Compendium: And with colorful descriptions to boot. Just hit &. Here is a list of all monster descriptions in the game.
  • Mooks Ate My Equipment: What, your favourite gear wasn't destroyed by that fireball/acid/exploding rune trap? Oh don't worry, annihilators and eyes of destruction will take care of that for you.
  • Multiple Endings: There are many ways to win — some have a better outcome than others. Even the regular ending has quite a few variations depending on your alignment and amount of corruptions.
  • Mundane Utility: Drakelings and characters with a specific corruption can spit acid, which costs satiation. This is a useful ranged attack, but it can also be used to lower a character's satiation level so they can eat more stat-boosting corpses.
  • Mutagenic Food: Some monster corpses confer abilities, such as eating a fire beetle corpse for fire resistance.
  • Mutually Exclusive Magic: Downplayed. Mindcrafters are the only class that can use mindcraft, and they have trouble learning conventional magic. They can learn spells from spellbooks, but it's extremely difficult and they're more likely to kill themselves by a mishap than get anywhere.
  • Nintendo Hard: In NetHack, there's an endless debate over being able to identify items by their unique weight because it makes the game easier. In ADOM, it's an almost necessary survival tactic. Unfair Game-Breaker debates start at far worse.
  • No Fair Cheating: By all means, try and change something in a saved game via hex editing. All enemies will suddenly max out in levels, and your equipment will randomly disappear for the rest of the game; which is not going to be very long.
    • There's more than one way to skin a cat; at least up until the latest version. Instead of the saved game, modify the temp files.
      • Or go obtain a value editor and mod the game as you play it.
  • Nominal Importance: If you ever meet a hostile named monster, or anything referred to as "the", run away with your precious life. It's almost definitely a Boss in Mook Clothing (and possibly guarding a random artifact).
  • Nonstandard Game Over: Many, including being turned into a chaos beast.
  • Non-Standard Skill Learning: The game is unique in regards to this trope. You only improve your existing skills by levelling up and the usual way to learn new ones is from NPCs and wishes. However, mindcrafters and elementalists learn new Mindcrafting powers and new spells, respectively, upon level up.
  • Noob Cave: Played straight with the Village Dungeon and Druid Dungeon, averted with the Puppy Cave, and enforced with the Small Cave. The last one scales with your level; a level 1 character will find somewhat strong enemies, while a level 10 character will be overwhelmed with monsters he can barely scratch.
  • No Points for Neutrality: Averted; neutral characters can be of extreme alignment (N=), crowned champion of their alignment, and win with an ultra ending.
  • NPC Roadblock: Used by shopkeepers and one or two important NPCs. This can be turned to your advantage when you're low on health — run into a shop, pick up something, then walk around until you heal.
  • Offerings to the Gods: There are altars to good, neutral, and evil gods scattered through the game. If you sacrifice enough items to please your god, you can ask them for favors or even become their chosen Champion. All three gods of every race each have their preferences, but can also be angered very easily by sacrificing the wrong thing. Repeatedly sacrificing neutral animals is usually a good way to incur the wrath of a vengeful god, but there are loopholes if you sacrifice in darkness, where nobody can actually see what is being offered.
  • One Curse Limit: Played With. The Cursed intrinsic does not stack with itself; however, it does stack with the Doomed intrinsic, which is much worse and often fatal. Further, when you are already Cursed, striking a karmic creature in melee gives you Doomed instead of Cursed.
  • One-Hit Kill: A few monk and assassin class powers grant a very low chance to do this.
    • Another important example is Death magic. The good news is, players can actually obtain the Death Ray spell and use it on enemies. The bad news is, death rays usually miss except against the weakest of foes. The very bad news? Enemy spellcasters can do it too. You better hold on to that amulet of death ray resistance.
  • One Hit Poly Kill: The final class skill for Archers is the ability to hit several enemies with a single projectile.
  • Our Banshees Are Louder: Banshees have the ability to insta-kill the player and other mooks with her deadly wail. Encounter one unprepared and you may not have any time to prepare at all.
  • Our Elves Are Different: Four varieties.
    • High Elves are close to the Wood Elf model; natural fighters and mages, long-lived, beautiful and agile but a bit frail, and while they're naturally Lawful, they get rather arrogant and are disliked by most other races.
    • Gray Elves fit the High Elf mold; even more beautiful, arrogant, frail and magical than their High cousins, they are not really strong enough to be fighters but are incredibly powerful mages, and are racially neutral.
    • Dark Elves are the standard drow model; agile, sneaky, even more magically-adept than the Gray Elves, with a knack for sneaking and naturally chaotic. They make some of the best agility-based fighting types (such as Archers) in the game. They can have a little trouble as Wizards, though, because their Learning is not the best.
    • And then there's Mist Elves, who are a fairly alien version. Born of mist at the beginning of time, their lifespans are as long compared to Gray Elves as Gray Elves are compared to humans, and they're practically made of magic to the point where touching iron is painful to them. They also practice a unique form of necromancy that allows them to awaken magical constructs instead of raising the dead.
  • Our Orcs Are Different: Tolkienesque variety. The main difference is that, while dumb, they're actually fairly agile and cunning, which helps differentiate them from trolls. They're the only race with natural Backstabbing skill.
  • Outside-the-Box Tactic: The aforementioned banshee can One-Hit Kill almost anything in the game with her deadly wail. However, if you use beeswax to plug your ears, you will be immune to the wail. Luring the banshee (or burning a wish) can clear out difficult levels with ease.
  • Outlaw Town: Lawenilothehl.
  • Painting the Medium:
    • tHe WaY cHaOs CrEaTuReS sPeAk, AlSo KnOwN aS "cHaOsPeAk".
    • What the Chaos Dimension looks like. It's an entire screen filled with ASCII garbage, looking not unlike the Kill Screen in Pac-Man. Fitting for an ASCII game.
  • Permadeath: "Do you want to [g] generate a new character?" ...*sigh* Yes.
  • Permanently Missable Content:
    • Put off entering the Pyramid or the Minotaur Maze until you have better gear? Oops, they close up once you reach a certain level. Talked to a certain NPC who immediately died? No Ultra Ending for you! An even crueler example resides at the end of a particularly painful sidequest. After you defeat a nasty Superboss, you get a unique scroll to take to a NPC to get the Infinity +1 Sword. The scroll can be destroyed like any other inventory item. If you read it, you can use a rare item to rewrite it. If you didn't… goodbye, Ultra Ending.
    • The Sceptre of Chaos, required for Ordinary Chaos God endings, is found in the Infinite Dungeon's SIL — a one-time level that disappears when left. This is referenced in-game, as failing to obtain it generates a special message: "You feel you leave an essential part of Chaos behind...forever".
    • In the Infinite Dungeon, finding Filk the bard and leaving him alive but hostile prevents the player from ever completing the quest to kill him, essential for an Ultra ending.
  • Phlebotinum-Handling Equipment: The Chaos Orbs are fairly corrupting to use (especially the Chaos Orb of Elemental Mana). Wearing the Elemental Gauntlets allows you to use them for half corruption, which is significantly safer.
  • Piranha Problem: Chaos piranha are the deadliest creatures in Ancardia, able to instantly shred you if you swim in their pool.
  • Planet Heck: Features in the Ultra endings.
  • Plot Coupon That Does Something: Go ahead, use one of the Chaos Orbs (needed to win the game) in your tool slot. We DARE you.
  • Point of No Return: Once you put all five Chaos Orbs into their respective anomalies, you can't leave the bottom three floors until the ChAoS gAtE is closed.
  • Poison Mushroom: Treat every unidentified scroll, herb and potion with caution.
  • Poisonous Person: You, if you get the "Poison drips from your hands" chaos mutation. It's not all it's cracked up to be.
  • Poor Communication Kills: Despite what your fortune cookie tells you, don't eat the corpse of an annis hag. Or a harpy.
    • And then there's the IBM guild manuals, which take this to the logical extreme: reading one makes you permanently confused. The only thing you can do at this point is pray.
  • Power-Up Letdown: Beastfighters can summon bears and/or silver wolves at level 25. Sounds cool, but most of the monsters you meet will be stronger than your companions by then.
    • Mindcrafters gain the ability to sense the number of enemies on a level. They later get 'Eyes of the Mind' which finally shows where they are, but only the monsters with a mind. Undead and golems (two of the nastiest classes of enemy) don't show up at all.
    • Most classes have one or two class powers at higher levels that are quite useless. The strongest classes tend to be those that don't.
    • You can get a random artifact if you pray to your god at a sufficiently high piety. You might get one of the good ones, or you might get something terrible like the Black Tome of Alsophocus or Celestrix.
  • Press Start to Game Over: New characters generated on a (real-life) Monday will enter the game a few hitpoints short of their total. ("You feel slightly exhausted today.") Poor character design and bad luck can result in a very low hitpoint total. Put them together, and you might just be done before you started.
  • Psychic Powers: The Mindcrafter class.
    • Also, some of the more powerful NPCs have confusion mindcraft of their own, which they will try to use on you.
  • Random Drop: Go see this game's entry there. That's all I'm saying. On the bright side, you can also find artifacts this way, though it is rare.
  • Randomized Transformation: Corruption is one of the central themes during your adventure to save the lands from an ultimate evil. Your character will experience corruptions on your journey, usually in the form of random physical deformities. Certain corrupting artifacts are needed to get the better endings of the game, so just carrying or using them will guarantee some form of corruption. Very rarely will players ever be given a chance to undo these random transformations, usually in the form of a Genie or a blessed potion.
  • Rat Men: Ratlings are a playable race, and can be encountered as enemies or NPCs.
  • Reality-Breaking Paradox: Reading a scroll of entropy next to Andor Drakon kills him and destroys the universe. It's a sort of victory...
  • Red Filter of Doom
    • In the top level of the Tower of Eternal Flames, everything is tinted bright red. It's a very effective effect, and really makes the place seem VERY hot.
    • In ADOM II, going to dangerously low HP values tints the screen red.
  • Revive Kills Zombie: Yes; yes it does.
    • Using a healing or bless spell on the undead will hurt them, as does holy water. (Though in the case of one particular quest, it's more effective to pour holy water on the undead's grave.
    • Throwing potions of cure corruption also dramatically weakens the chaos beings.
  • Savage Setpiece: NPCs in Villages are simply passive, only there for flavor, but can be attacked to turn them hostile. In older versions of the game, some of them were disproportionately powerful for their description.
  • Saving the World: The ultimate goal of the game, assuming you don't have ideas of your own. It can be accomplished several ways, though make sure that the Chaos Gate can't be re-opened if you choose to close it.
  • Schmuck Bait: Oooooh boy. Combined with Everything Trying to Kill You, the bait is endless. A few non-spoilery examples:
    • Not only are some items cursed, a few particularly nasty items are auto-cursing. They will scan as benign, but turn cursed as soon as you put them on. Only Greater Identify or the equivalent scroll reveals this.
    • Dungeons vary in difficulty, and lethal high-level ones rarely come with a warning label (other than Beef Gate). Naive (or reckless) players may walk right in.
    • Some artifacts give you nice bonuses, tempting you to equip them, but they also quietly add to your corruption counter, slowly turning you into a mutant freak.
    • Some gravestones read "Great treasures lie buried here." Dig one up at your own risk.
      • It doesn't say that the treasure won't be guarded.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: There is a trainer who can train your stats beyond the normal 20-25 points, but he requires obscene amounts of gold pieces. Combined with the casino which allows for you to easily make obscene amounts of gold pieces, you can easily raise your stats to very high levels. Theoretically, if you win money at the casino you're forced to spend it — and quite a bit more besides — at the hugely overpriced casino store if you want to progress, but that can be bypassed by teleporting the guard blocking the way.
    • And the "Heir" talent, a hard-to-qualify-for 1st level talent that starts you off with a magic item dependent on your class. These range from specialized armor and awesome wands to the near-essential Sprint Shoes: Seven League Boots. Very very useful for getting places before Bad Things Happen.
    • Did you deeply offend your deity by committing sacrilege against the very principles of your faith? Sacrifice a couple hundred grand and you're his bestest friend again.
      • Subverted with champion crowning, however. You only get that once per game, no matter how many gods you impress.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: If the Raider Lord is still alive by the time you reach level 6, he and his gang wisely decide to flee the area rather than risk facing you.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: Nearly every aspect of the game has been played to death, so there are quite a few of these. One of the most extreme was playing (and winning) with a weight limit of 100s. A normal player would finish the game holding 30-50 times that much in inventory, never mind their equipment. In addition, several artifacts that are needed to complete the game each weigh 100s, so the PC had to be naked and carrying nothing else (including food, armor or weapons) while moving them to the bottom of the dungeon.
    • One player nearly won the entire game with a completely blind character. The only reason it wasn't finished was because there is a particular endgame action that cannot be done while blind.
  • Shoplift and Die: Stealing from a shop angers the shopkeeper into summoning thugs... and going after you himself. Thrown gold pieces hurt.
    • More like, "Gold pieces are lethal." You will only ever underestimate the Casino Shopkeeper once.
  • Shout-Out: Many. Notably, you can find phase daggers, moss of marelion and morgia root, which originally appeared in Beyond Zork, Infocom's oddball text adventure/RPG hybrid.)
    • "They say that at times, things can get zorky."
    • It is also possible to find Sting, though it doesn't shine blue if goblins are near.
    • Hurthlings always start the game wearing a cursed ring.
      • There are many, many, references to Lord of the Rings. Non-hostile orcs will ask you about the one ring, and black hurthlings (hobbits) will ask about their precious, and can be tamed with fish, as some other examples.
    • The Song of the Mad Minstrel is actually one of Robert E. Howard's poems.
    • One of the random artifacts is The Black Tome of Alsophocus.
  • Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Spiked boots don't work. It's also not friendly to reptiles. Thankfully, it's possible to dig your way through part of it.
  • Spell Book: These can be found randomly in the dungeons, and teach a limited amount of castings upon reading. Once they have been read enough times, they disappear into thin air.
  • Square Race, Round Class: All classes are open to characters of all races, which means there are exactly 264 possible combinations. Troll thieves are just the beginning. In fact, some of the stranger combinations (notably Troll healers) are so unexpectedly powerful that they are canonical pairings. Even combinations whose stats are directly at odds (Troll wizards or Hurthling barbarians) can be strategically sound choices, since versatility is hard to acquire while the lack of power will eventually be compensated by experience.
  • Standard Fantasy Races: Stock humans, dwarves, orcs and hurthlings, but there are also gnomes, four flavours of elves and the ability to play as a drakeling, troll, or ratling. They all have unique specialities, and playing Drakelings and Trolls in particular present significant gameplay differences.
  • Superpower Russian Roulette: Most of the Chaos have tremendous downside. Poisoning everything you touch is great for combat, but not as good when you are trying to eat lunch. On the other hand, a few of the corruptions have minor drawbacks, such as becoming horrendously ugly — which, of course, is subjective. Several non-corruption character traits are also double-edged — randomly teleporting is overrated, and even invisibility has its (minor) downsides.
  • Tactical Door Use: Closing doors will stop many enemies, allowing for a breather or an easy escape. Exceptions include anything smart enough to operate a door (locking it works though) and creatures that can pass through walls, most commonly ghosts. Particularly strong creatures can smash them outright though.
  • Take Your Time: Inverted by The Corruption, which will corrupt your soul faster after 90 in-game days have passed. Played straight by Khelavaster, whom you find surrounded by chaos spawn, within an inch of death... and yet if you turn back and take a few months to find an amulet of life saving, he's still standing on that same staircase, waiting for you to talk to him so he can die already. Protip: don't talk to him before giving him the amulet.
    • One way of completing both the puppy and the bandit sidequest relies on triggering this: dive down to the bottom of the Puppy Cave, dodging monsters as you go. Pop down and straight back up the bottommost staircase. This counts as getting there in time & generates a living cute dog that won't die as you're trudging around the forest in the overworld. Now all you have to do is get back out without reaching lvl. 6...
  • A Taste of the Lash: Self-inflicted version. Whipping yourself is a way to redeem your sins and build Lawful alignment. Be careful, because you can flagellate yourself to death. Doing so and resurrecting yourself with an amulet of life saving builds massive law. This is Awesome, but Impractical, though, since amulets of life saving are rare and valuable, there's better uses for them, and there's much less silly ways to climb to Lawful.
  • Teleport Spam: Blink dogs teleport and will summon more of their kind for help. This results in a large group of blink dogs that all teleport around the level all the time.
  • Temple of Doom: The Minotaur Maze. Often skipped, due to being Nintendo Hard even compared to the rest of the game.
  • Time Abyss: A Mist Elf PC begins at several thousand years old; they are considered young adults by the standards of their race. Their elders were born at the dawn of Ancardia, and death of age will only happen after around sixty to seventy thousand years.
  • Tome of Eldritch Lore:
  • Too Awesome to Use: Almost all magical items can only be used once. Some of these are both extremely useful and extremely rare. Saving them as "last resort" commonly leads to Yet Another Stupid Death.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Closing the Chaos Gate as a chaotic Chaos Knight snuffs out your existence as a reward for your betrayal. The guidebook refers to it as the "Most Stupid Follower of ChAoS" ending.
  • Training from Hell: Strength can be trained by walking around everywhere while heavily burdened. It's nearly required for beefing up weak starting characters. Repeatedly using certain skills also trains them.
  • Try Everything: As in, "try using everything in your backpack to save yourself from a messy death".
  • Turned Against Their Masters: If the slaves of your necromancer ever get burnt by you, even indirectly, they will get angry and try to kill you. Watch out for any fireball traps while your quickling king lich is around.
  • Unidentified Items: The game has Scrolls of Identify and an Identify spell. However, whether these tools are cursed or blessed makes a world of difference. A normal scroll of identify will only identify one type of items at a time. A blessed scroll of identify will identify your entire inventory and show what items are blessed or cursed. A cursed scroll identifies a single item. There's also the Scroll of Amnesia, which will remove knowledge of most inventory items instead.
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable: The Pyramid and Minotaur Maze both close up once you reach a certain level (17 for the Pyramid, 31 for the maze). Anything inside is Permanently Missable once they close. If you drop one of the Chaos Orbs, leave, and then gain that level, the orb will be irretrievable. However, this is nigh-impossible to do unintentionally.
  • Useless Useful Spell: Played straight by the Death Ray and Petrification spells. Most of the strongest enemies are resistant, and the spells are too expensive to use on normal monsters.
    • The Wish spell is a nice example of this. By the time your character has the capacity to cast it, you almost certainly have everything you need to finish the game anyway, and there are few things that you can wish for that are worth the loss of 10 stat points the spell also inflicts on you.
  • Vancian Magic: When you learn spells, you get a limited number of castings for said spell. On the other hand, your character usually learns a hundred castings or so per spell reading. Unintelligent characters learn fewer or not at all.
    • Also, casters have Power Points, which ALSO limit how often they can cast spells. When you run out of power points, you either stop using magic or start casting from hit points.
  • Videogame Caring Potential: Panicked enemies that run away from you can be (c)hatted with and calmed down. Doing so gives you a bit of EXP and a Lawful boost on your Karma Meter.
    • Healing injured monsters is a fast (if risky) way of gaining Lawful alignment.
    • If you don't manage to save the little girl's dog in time or protect it from monsters on the way out, you may choose to spend a day playing with her to cheer her up.
  • Videogame Cruelty Potential: Blup the baby water dragon in the first village is looking for his mother. If you find and kill her, then tell him that you've found her, he thanks you then flies off to meet her. Also in the starting village, you can get a quest to rescue a young girl's puppy from a spooky cave. It is possible to bring said puppy back to her, and then kill it and eat it while she watches. There's also a chance the puppy will become hostile, and maul her to death.
    • A more complex example: there is a special reward a player can get for avoiding killing any cats, even hostile ones. However, there isn't a rule against using a Forced Transformation to make it not a cat, leading it repeatedly over an acid trap, wearing a ring of fire resistance and placing yourself in between a cat and a fire-breathing lizard, or exposing it to The Corruption until it becomes a twisted alien being. 'Course you may want to avoid that last one.
      • Monsters killed by companions, familiars or undead minions are not on your conscience, as far as the game is concerned, which provides another simple workaround (simple at least for anyone with pets, available to any class but easiest for bards and necromancers).
      • If you have a wand of trap creation, you can aim it right at the cat and, if you get lucky, kill it instantly without penalty.
    • In another example, you can kill a beggar, poison the corpse then feed it to another beggar (which quickly kills the second beggar).
    • Bottom line in this game: you're free to attack anyone or anything if you so choose. This includes children, cowering near-dead foes, non-hostile passersby, etc.
  • Villain Protagonist: Your character is fully capable of worshipping Chaotic gods and performing quests in evil ways... and there is a specific ultra ending just for evil characters. You go to the Chaos Plane and fight the suprisingly ordinary Chaos God just like in the goody-good ultra endings... and then kick his ass. But you do not run out of power, having to build it up again slowly - this is why they never went through the Chaos gate themselves - and on taking his place immediately storm through the gate and overrun the universe.
  • Wallet of Holding: At some point you'll most likely find yourself lugging around tens of thousands of gold coins. They're light but not completely weightless, though.
    • A girdle of greed increases your carrying capacity based on how much gold you're carrying. If you bless it, it will essentially make gold weightless. Mind that it doesn't get destroyed - or worse, cursed...
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Gremlins are vulnerable to light; the Light spell is one of the easiest spells to learn. It doesn't do that much damage, but it's oh-so-satisfying to kill these otherwise annoying breeders by repeatedly turning the lights on.
    • Andor Drakon, the ElDeR cHaOs GoD, is vulnerable to stunning, confusion, paralysis, and thrown potions of cure corruption. The last one is particularly effective, as it causes him to lose several of his attacks.
  • When Trees Attack: The Animated Forest is a level packed with animated trees, most of which won't bother you. However, some of them are hostile, and there's so many trees that all you can do is slowly push through the crowd. Trying to use fire is...inadvisable, to say the least.
  • Where I Was Born and Razed: A possible backstory for the Chaos Knight PC, with them becoming a pyromaniac and eventually setting fire to their entire village.
  • Wishing for More Wishes: This can't be done directly, but there are ways to get a perpetual-motion wish machine going. Generally, the effort required to do this is greater than just winning the game normally. In later editions, the exploit used to create a djinni wish engine was patched out, though it's still possible for archmages to cast unlimited Wish spells.
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly: Goes without saying.
    • "You are starving! You are starving! You are starving! You die..."
  • World of Silence: While Lawful behavior is moral behavior on the human scale, cosmologically, the Balance exists for a reason. An Avatar of Order creates a world of peace, tranquility and boredom that never undergoes significant change.
  • Yet Another Stupid Death: You will suffer this in ADOM if you just Attack Attack Attack, but even veterans aren't immune to forgetting to equip a weapon after dropping it on an altar. Other YASDs: accidentally using Fireball on your vastly more powerful companion; fighting ghuls without paralyzation resistance; coming across a greater mimic and trying to melee it; stepping onto a chaotic altar when an intelligent chaotic monster is nearby, kicking stairs to train your strength (no, seriously) and many, many more.
  • You Cannot Grasp the True Form: The description of the True Final Boss, Andor Drakon, the ElDeR cHaOs GoD: "This beast defies any attempts to describe it."


Alternative Title(s): ADOM

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