The goal of the game is to find the potion to cure your daughter from the illness "dianthroritis" and bring it back home. Time is finite - when you return to your home, the doctor will tell you how much time is left. In NLarn, time is measured in mobuls. A mobul consists of 100 turns. You can see the number of turns elapsed in the status bar on the right, prefixed with T.
The game consists of a home town, and two dungeons: the caverns of Larn and the volcano. The potion is hidden inside the volcano, which is unfortunately populated by dragons and demons. To be able to fight the latter, you have to gain experience and wealth by fighting through the caverns. The equipment available in the DND store in town is expensive, but will help you to survive in the volcano long enough to find the potion. To earn money, you can collect gems in the caverns and sell them to the bank.
The entrance of the caverns is depicted by the letter O; the shaft leading down to the volcano by the letter I.
You can get help in the game by pressing ? or F1.
News about NLarn are posted on the NLarn website.
You can predefine some settings in the file nlarn.ini. The game writes
a default nlarn.ini to the directory ~/.nlarn on Linux, BSD and macOS,
or to the folder %LOCALAPPDATA%\nlarn on Windows, when this file doesn't
exist. Comments above the individual setting explain the possible settings.
NLarn is modeled after Larn, which was written by Noah Morgan in 1986. For an in-depth review of Larn, have a look at the @Play review of Larn.
Later in the eigthies, Phil Cordier created ULarn, an extended version of Larn. It comes with more levels, items and adds character classes to the game.
NLarn tries to maintain the atmosphere and story of the last version of Larn (12.3) while improving game-play and user experience. Only a few of the additions of Ularn have been included.
Instructions how to build NLarn on Linux, MacOS X and Windows can be found on a wiki page.
Bug reports are very welcome. You can either send me an eMail to jdegroot@web.de or create an issue on the NLarn bug tracker, where known bugs and planned tasks are tracked.
If you have ideas for changes or additions to the game, please let me know. A list of ideas is maintained on a wiki page.