A Guide to the Gods!

[TwilightPhoenix]

This took a fair bit of effort, considering I started work on this back in 0.8.0, but I've now finished and am sharing it. Behold, a complete, 42 page (according to Text Edit's Print Preview) guide to all the gods in the game! This guide explains how to obtain a god, basic piety and penance mechanics, more in-depth explanations about each gods and what they're all capable of. While this is by no means definitive in every little nuance in following a god with various different builds, it should certainly cover them more than well enough to let readers make informed decisions on which god to follow on the character they are playing.

This guide is currently up to date for 0.9.x and does not pertain to any current Trunk or Development builds. There may be some errors, mistakes, or other incorrect information in here. If you find something is wrong, let me know so I can fix and update the guide appropriately. I've played a lot of Crawl, but I've by no means played every god to a win yet and exploring them in Wizard mode only says so much. It's also possible I might have neglected to include a change made in 0.9.0 over 0.8.x by mistake.

This guide is in a downloadable format, a .zip containing a single .rtf file which should be openable on any computer newer than Windows 95. I am not posting it directly for the forums because that would require multiple posts and would make future editing a pain. I'm not posting it to the Wiki because I do not want it to be a guide that anyone can edit. I'm not posting it to GameFAQs because they turned down my attempts to add DCSS to their game's list (unsurprising, but a shame, really). So, downloadable link it is. Feel free to distribute it so long as it remains unedited, you do not try to take credit for it, and you do not try to gain any sort of financial or other compensation for distributing it.

[rchandra]

Thanks, this guide looks quite useful. I have found an error in the Ashenzari section - you say remove curse only uncurses one item, it actually uncurses any number of items of your choice.

[KoboldLord]

GameFAQs won't put up a Crawl faq? I'm surprised, really. They have other roguelikes up. Did they give some sort of explanation?

I did note a couple minor errors, most of which are simply due to changes made in recent versions, but I think the biggest thing that would improve this guide is to convert it to a format that improves its readability. It's basically a humongous wall of text, and whenever something important-but-fiddly comes up there's a page-long digression to cover it right in the middle of covering some other topic. If you had it on the wiki, you could throw in a link to the subtopic, which would make the main topic readable while making the subtopic available for the reader, but I suppose .pdf format or the like could be used instead if you absolutely must not use the wiki.

I'd actually suggest you reconsider your stance against just posting it on the wiki. Sure, the thought that some idiot might mess with your guide is annoying now, but eventually there's going to be a version .11, .12, and so on, and when Crawl hits version .23 do you still want to have to come and re-edit a huge document with all the relevant changes, all by yourself?

[TwilightPhoenix]

Thanks, this guide looks quite useful. I have found an error in the Ashenzari section - you say remove curse only uncurses one item, it actually uncurses any number of items of your choice.

Fixed it. I'll wait to see if there's anything else I missed/messed up on before uploading a new version though.

GameFAQs won't put up a Crawl faq? I'm surprised, really. They have other roguelikes up. Did they give some sort of explanation?

I did note a couple minor errors, most of which are simply due to changes made in recent versions, but I think the biggest thing that would improve this guide is to convert it to a format that improves its readability. It's basically a humongous wall of text, and whenever something important-but-fiddly comes up there's a page-long digression to cover it right in the middle of covering some other topic. If you had it on the wiki, you could throw in a link to the subtopic, which would make the main topic readable while making the subtopic available for the reader, but I suppose .pdf format or the like could be used instead if you absolutely must not use the wiki.

I'd actually suggest you reconsider your stance against just posting it on the wiki. Sure, the thought that some idiot might mess with your guide is annoying now, but eventually there's going to be a version .11, .12, and so on, and when Crawl hits version .23 do you still want to have to come and re-edit a huge document with all the relevant changes, all by yourself?

GameFAQs mostly dabbles in commercial games and have very few non-comemercial ones. Because of this, they weren't willing to add DCSS to their list of games which, in turn, means no guides, reviews, codes, etc.


I use the .rtf format because it's just plain universal, with .txt being the only more universal option. If you can't open .rtf, you've been needing to upgrade for over a decade. Meanwhile, formats like .doc, .pdf, and others requires specialized software to open and view and may not display equally in said software nor may be compatible with some versions of said software. Plus, I find .pdf to be downright annoying and I loathe it. I had to use it exclusively at a job I used to work for and now that I don't have to? Never again will I create a .pdf if I can avoid it.

I provide a table of contents to assist in navigation. For example, searching for 5f. will produce only two results: Jiyva's mention in said table and his actual entry in the guide. I saw, recently, in a .txt guide for another game that used search links to ease navigation and I may implement those. For example, searching [Zin Conduct], with the brackets, would take you straight to Zin's conduct while searching [Zin Suggestions] would take you to which species/backgrounds I think work well for Zin.

Big reason for not using the wiki is I'd be forced to release the guide under whatever license the wiki uses (GNU Free Documentation or something like that I suspect) and I'm not willing to do that. It took a long time and a lot of work to write the guide as it is now, updating it will be trivial in comparison (speaking from first hand experience here). At some point in the future I decide I'm done with Crawl for good (I suspect that won't be for a very long time), I'll be happy to hand the guide over to someone else or allow people to modify or create derivatives of it, but right now I'd rather not.


Anyway, at what points do I go off on a tangent? I can fix those to make them less rambley.

[CommanderC]

Nice guide! In the Kiku section, did you forgot about the protection against mummy curses?

[Megabass]

Found another little thing in the Ash section. He no longer gives 'bonus XP', but it is still briefly mentioned in the 'advantages' section.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Fixed and fixed.

[VictorG]

Very good work, thanks!