Nethack

My first encounter with Nethack was though the isometric graphical interface Falcon's Eye included with a version of Knoppix. Under the installed games, I saw "Falcon's Eye", started it (not reading the game manual, which I never even noticed), sat through the intro about risking all to find treasure in the infamous dungeon, chose a race and class from a list of sometimes absurd possibilities (Archaeologist? Tourist??) and found myself in a diagonally skewed dungeon with walls and floors alternately bare and beautifully carpeted. With a little dog.

Clicking on the walls and floors did nothing, except maybe move me to the spot clicked on. The little dog sort of followed me around, but didn't follow me downstairs. Movement was done with the mouse (making me rush to squares I hadn't intended to go) and cursor keys (impossible in isometric view). Various other actions were bound to letter keys, for instance, Search; and this after I'd quit several games because I started in a dungeon with (apparently) no doors or downwards stairways. Before discovering that doors can be hidden, I thought this was a fault in the random dungeon generation mechanism. Just as I thought there was a fault in the saving mechanism. Each time I tried to save, I was thrown out of the game and had to start up the game again to get back to the point where I left off. And if I died, which happened surprisingly often due to the deadly killer abilities of kittens, the save game was gone, too. I looked up where this save game was kept, and tested it: yes, save file wiped. So after playing, I always copied the save file to another directory and restored it from there when needed.

I found out later that this is called "scumsaving" (or "savescumming").

I also found out that the original Nethack was composed entirely of ANSI characters: dots and lines for the dungeon, letters for the various "monsters" (both plants and animals, even the shopkeepers and the player character are "monsters") and punctuation marks like brackets and exclamation marks for the adventurer's tools: weapons, armour, rings, wands, potions, scrolls. Ever wonder about the range of colours the dragons come in? It corresponds to the range of colours in which the screen can display the capital letter "D". So the number of different species of "monster" that can populate the dungeon is limited by the number of letters times the number of colours. And even so, the player may have to put the cursor on the letter to find out what particular member of the species "a" (ants, bees, other insects) this approaching "a" is. In fact, the player has to spend much time looking up what all the cryptic ASCII signs stand for. This slows down gameplay, directs attention towards the messages window, and makes playing the game more as intended, that is: the player thinks long and hard before every move. Using the graphical interface, I tended to get killed simply from moving faster than I meant to.

In fact, I found out that nethack (the game core) existed for many different platforms precisely because all it needed was a set of ASCII characters. And that various people had tried to make the game more graphically appealing by using flat square tiles to replace the signs. And that the isometric view interface was a relatively recent development. I also found that, due to its being portable and open-source, programmers could add their own patches to the game (and, depending on platform, graphics, which made me hopeful since Falcon's Eye reused the same tile for different monsters, which is a nuisance when what you hopefully assume is a tameable horse is, in fact, a vicious rothe) and that a major patch was SLASH'EM (Super Lotsa Added Stuff - Extended Magic) and that this patch had its own isometric interface, based on Falcon's Eye, called Vulture's Claw. The history is as follows: Finnish programmer makes Falcon's Eye for the nethack core. After a while, development stops and an admirer of this interface creates an updated version of it called Vulture's Eye for the nethack core, and Vulture's Claw for the slashem core. The slashem core contains more spells, monsters, potions, foods etc. and graphically, this translates to more tiles. A dedicated fan creates most monster tiles for the Vulture's games, at least all the "missing" tiles for nethack monsters, and suddenly, the eye-candy factor is quadrupled. Not only that, but Vulture's has versions for MACOSX and Windows 9XX. I haven't installed it under Linux yet, but on the other platforms it lets me choose a player name, instead of forcing "username=playername" on me so that if I want to start a new game with a different character, I have to log in as a different user. (Update: the Eye and Claw forks are merged now, I have installed the game under openSUSE now that it's in the repositories, and it also lets me choose a player name.) Best of all: like their predecessor, the Vulture's can also show the playfield in the old ASCII style, but now you can also move the cursor on that map, so they are two playing interfaces in one, allowing the player to switch between both kinds of gaming experience at will.

(Click here and here for screenshots of Vulture's Claw in isometric and map mode. Screen caps from the Mac version, which tends not to show the number of turns.)

From the README.TXT included with SLASH'EM (maybe I should have read this before starting to play the game):

+----------------------------------------------+
| Section 3: What is the Nature of this Beast? |
+----------------------------------------------+

THE PROBLEM:  The AMULET OF YENDOR has been stolen.  Not only that but
it appears that the Wizard of Yendor (not a nice person), who took the
amulet, is hiding in the Dungeons of Doom (not a friendly place).

The SOLUTION:  Well, armies have been suggested.  Maybe hiring a superhero
or two.  Unfortunately, it seems that it is more economical to offer a
reward and let some poor adventurer with dreams of glory go and get it.
Guess who's got the enviable job of saving the day...

Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic (SLASH'EM) is a role-playing
game where you control a single character.  The interface and gameplay
are similar in style to Rogue, ADOM, Angband and, of course, Nethack.
You control the actions through the keyboard and view the world from an
overhead perspective.

Moreover, I discovered from the golden resource called "spoiler files", how well designed the game core (the bare game, no eye-candy) is. Dip a potion in water, it becomes diluted. Dip it again, and it becomes water. Dip a sword in water, and it rusts. Certain conditions can also cause a weapon or piece of armour to become cursed; if you're lucky, a text message appears to imply this by noting your item's changed appearance, if not, you discover 1000 or so turns later that it can't be unequipped. Examine an item, and the game gives some information on it, but not all; often you won't know what an item does until you use it, possibly with fatal results. After which you die. Permanently. Deleting the save file when the player dies is not a bug, it's a feature. As is the deliberate vagueness of the messages describing what happens. Although a one-person RPG, this game plays almost like a text adventure; what happens when you do stuff to other stuff is something you have to guess from deduction and experimentation, taking plenty of time to think and paying close attention to the textual hints. What the spoiler files show is that, despite its apparently haphazard nature, there is an internal logic to the game.

The game logic is the result of a collaborative effort from what is called the "devteam" (developer's team) which seems quite international, as the game not only contains many references to Western culture (the Tourist derives from the Discworld series, the Archaeologist refers to Indiana Jones) but also to Japanese mythology and martial arts. This devteam makes decisions on how the game is supposed to work from an entirely logical standpoint. For instance, despite RPGs being based on the works of Tolkien who idealized elves and would have considered them lawful, the devteam, drawing on a wider base on myth and fiction, weighs the evidence and considers elves chaotic. As logic dictates, chaotic characters will rise in their god's favour for actions that will cause lawful characters' gods to become angry with them. I didn't mention gods yet, did I? Each race has its own trio of gods (lawful, neutral, chaotic) to help the player fulfill the game's aim: find the Amulet of Yendor and sacrifice it to one's patron deity. There is a fair bit of arithmetic involved in how to raise one's luck points to exactly the right amount to get the right response from these gods when praying: toss a gem to a unicorn, break a mirror. All very logical, once you realize how it works. And SLASH'EM adds more possibilities in the same vein. In the old game, dogs and cats could be tamed with meat, and horses with vegetable food; in the extended game, monkeys can be tamed with bananas, rats with cheese, and rabbits with carrots.

Being the result of a collaboration, Nethack (as a collective name for both game cores and any interfaces) is a very democratic game. Being free, which means that the makers' motivations are more social than financial, it has a very sectarian side to it. For instance, when I found about the saving bug, I shrugged: "free software, you get what you paid for". Surfing to find out more about this game, I discovered that restoring from a save after death had been made impossible because the game was meant to be "devilishly hard"; by killing the player character completely and irrevocably, it was supposed to force the player to think before every move. Huh?? Who's telling me how to play a game? No game is ever free, it appears: commercial gamemakers want people's money, makers of "free" games want to control people. I was taught that saving often is good practice when doing anything on the computer, and now it's "scumsaving"? Because I can lazily resurrect my character after dimwittedly stumbling into a trap? That's the idea of virtual adventuring, you don't really die. Besides, I've "scumsaved", not only to restore my own character, but also each time a pet died, or when I'd had to kill a shopkeeper by mistake, even if the restore meant losing some valuable items. I would sooner say the way pets are treated in this game is scummy: they are guinea pigs and cannon fodder. To make things worse, the fact that the save file is erased each time you start the game means that if the computer blacks out, you have no save file; a utility is included to create a save file from the temporary game files, and this does not always work. Fortunately, the Vulture's have an Explore mode which does retain the save file, although I still can't save without closing the game. In Explore mode, there's no score, oh boo-hoo. I never looked at the score anyway. Another attempt at controlling people: purists say that graphical interfaces are bad because the ASCII interface forces you to use your imagination. Who is going to force me to use my imagination? If it hadn't been for the interface, I wouldn't have given the game a second look. An old-time player has remarked that Nethack is stale once all the riddles have been cracked. Stale? A game that generates a new set of dungeons each time you start a new expedition, one that is, with the right graphics added, a zoo, safari and aquarium in one? When I found out about "scumsaving", I was too disgusted to play the game for a while, but its tiles and corridors drew me back. Maybe the staleness comes from versions that have no tiles, only stupid ASCII characters? Finally, one exceptionally arrogant fan said "People who read spoiler files should be fed to the newts." Well, if I hadn't read all the spoiler files I could find, I would not appreciate the game as I do today, and would have chucked it for being, as it came across, buggy and badly written. Those spoiler files have given me as much gaming pleasure as the game itself, in the way that reading up on a foreign country before visiting it can be much more fun than just taking the first plane there and missing all the good parts of it through not knowing they existed.

What this rant boils down to: I obviously don't like RPGs, nor do I like fandoms. And I certainly don't like being told how to play.

My game experience is most like that of the gamer who preferred the Tourist because he always feels like a tourist in this game. That especially applies with a graphical interface. I don't feel like seeking out the Amulet of Yendor, because that would finish the game; I just like to walk around and collect pets and shiny things until I die, which is usually at level 5. And since learning about the sectarian side to Nethack, I don't care so much about pet survival (I never did care about my own survival) and play recklessly, if at all. My favourite race is Doppelganger; my favourite class, Priest (free uncursing) or Healer (for the stone-to-flesh spell); I almost always play in Explore mode, but let character die if it has "died" too often or lost too many pets. Like a virtual animal hoarder, I love to collect the most exotic pets, and my personal aim in the game is to tame a chameleon, as it will cycle through all those beautiful game tiles before my eyes; I've let chameleons kill me repeatedly while waiting for them to change to dogs so I could toss them a ration. So, my SLASH'EM-centric (so I can be a doppelganger) and totally useless (as I've never ascended) gameplaying tips are:

• In an ideal situation (not wearing a ring of conflict, the enemy doesn't use ranged attacks) your pet will not attack, or be attacked by, a stronger monster. So to avoid a confrontation with a stronger monster, get yourself and your pet into a narrow corridor and hide behind your pet. This won't make the monster sigh and toddle off - it just stays there waiting for a chance to get at you - but gives some breathing space.
• Pets will gain a hit point for every monster they kill, making it good practice to leave small fry for the pets. Finally putting that stethoscope to some use, I've found the HP maximum for the commonest pets: dogs, cats and horses. Dogs and cats can advance to level 9 with 72 HP. Since wolves and wargs are tougher than dogs, I think they have a higher maximum HP, but I haven't checked. I also haven't run across or tried to tame that SLASH'EM addition, the "pitbull". Horses make it to level 10 with 83 HP. At this level they are warhorses, and very fast; it's a pity they're so vulnerable. Every kill the pets make once they've reached their maximum HP is added to their MP.
• SLASH'EM adds more tameable herbivores: rabbits, goats, lambs/sheep and cows/bulls. Rabbits are useless. The sheep are unimpressive, but the goats are very quick and all have higher HP than the vanilla pets, although I haven't tested how high it will go. Herbivores can suddenly lose about two-thirds of their HP. I thought this was due to poisoning, but apparently it's caused by letting them go without food too long. The stethoscope doesn't tell me how hungry they are, but when they've been weakened like this, they will eat food rations, proof that they're starving. They recover HP by killing, getting up to 3 HP for more dangerous monsters like unicorns. One cow-pet recovered her HP spontaneously.
• If you're a low-level female character and can polymorph (through a wand and ring of polymorph control, or by playing a doppelganger) I advise changing to any kind of ant, and laying eggs. Ants are superb pets, as their speed makes them deadly and invulnerable, and they'll never lag behind; yet, if they go feral, they're not too dangerous.
• Other egg-pets: crocodiles and cockatrices, are less useful because they are slow and take forever to haul from one dungeon level to the next. Cockatrices are good for turning animals to statues, which are a good non-spoiling food supply and can be brought back to life with the stone-to-flesh spell and then killed when you're feeling peckish. Or, if they look hard to kill, they can be reduced to rubble with a pickaxe and then changed into meatballs, which don't do much to satisfy hunger, but are handy to have for taming or feeding carnivores.
• Non-egg pets: leocrottas are in the same speed category as warhorses, and can eat meat, although I haven't tried if they can be ridden. Gelatinous cubes are not only fast for blob-type animals, but proved unexpectedly helpful when dealing with vampires: one cube kept freezing a vampire so I could chop away at it without being level-drained. Another cube, a wild one, slurped up a pile of goods from a shop; I killed it outside the shop and sold everything back for extra money. No idea how to make a tame cube cough up its loot, though... Dwarves tunnel constantly, much faster than the player can, even in places where the walls are supposed to be too hard to tunnel. Unfortunately, there is no way I know to make them stop, so they will destroy your hideouts and the walls of the temple in the Gnomish Mines; hostiles will still keep out, but they can see me and shoot at me; then again, I can shoot back! I tried to replace the walls with doors using the "wizard lock" spell, but these were tunnelled away just like walls. The low initial HP of dwarves also makes them stay out of fights, which keeps them alive longer.
• Elementals, which I once received as minions, make bad pets in the Gnomish Mines or any shopkeeper level; they attack everything and, if left on another level while I shop, will go peaceful. They don't have minds, so when I walk blindfolded, relying on telepathy to see monsters, I cannon into one, and next thing I know, it's hostile. Do the gods mind if you kill their minions? Nevermind, they're slow enough to avoid.
• Pet dwarves, with all their tunnelling, drop plenty of rocks. Collect a pile, cast stone-to-flesh, and behold, a large number of meatballs to train your dog's shoplifting skills, re-tame a domestic carnivore or stop yourself from fainting. But here's another use for meatballs: pets will go up or down stairs with you if they are standing on an adjacent square. When pets crowd round you on stairs you would rather go down alone, throw a meatball and they will run after it. For large groups of pets, throw five meatballs at a time, so that they will still have a reason to run when the first pet to reach the meatballs eats the first one. Food, meatballs or otherwise, is also a good way to lure a pet out of a shop when it's harassing the shopkeeper or just hanging around: a meatball dropped in the doorway can do wonders.
• Dwarf thieves are good pets, too. Especially when they find a wand of polymorph and change themselves into, say, ogres. Using this wand on yourself when playing as a vampire changes you into a helpless vampire bat with a bad case of the jitters; fortunately, it's temporary.
• The ghoul, the standard pet for a Necromancer, has two drawbacks. It's slow, which is disastrous for a vampire master who has to eat eat EAT or die from starvation, and too powerful: like a warhorse, it will attack the mine city priest; unlike a warhorse, it will kill the mine city priest before you get a chance to buy protection, and also (slowly and uselessly) attack shopkeepers, so if one is let into a shop, it will stay there, never minding its master being mobbed by nasties just outside the shop, until it literally starves. Since ghouls can open doors to let themselves in, that means shop doors have to be locked against them, or a leash has to be found to drag them out; while searching for said leash, they have to be kept fed by chucking them a ripe corpse from time to time. On top of that, ghouls are the kind of pet that loves cursed items and hates blessed ones, so to protect a stash or Elbereth square, drop both a cursed and a blessed item on it. Because they like rotten meat, though, ghouls clean up old corpses well, preventing a rash of fungi in the adventurer's wake. And "old corpses" includes lichens if they've been dead long enough, which, as lichen corpses last forever, means that they can be collected as emergency food for both herbivorous and ghoul-type pets.
• For higher characters with polymorph ability, the best thing to change into is a xorn, which can carry much loot and phase through rock, allowing it to move very quickly from one stairway to another; being non-breathing, it will also vomit rather than choke on too much food, and it can eat metal, although munching on a plate armour or two doesn't seem to still its hunger pangs very effectively. It's also stoning-resistant. A troll is good, too; it is strong and regenerates rapidly. A marilith, with its many arms, is very good for combat, although I had a shock when instead of engraving, it scrawled "Elbereth" in blood. Mariliths can see invisible; good for spotting that invisible pixie before it nabs your artifacts. A unicorn may be good for testing potions, but is useless for carrying loot. Golems are on the strong side and have high HP, but the really indestructible ones, like the crystal golem, are too high (level 20 to 30) for a low-level character to change into; a wax golem is better, since, despite being weak, it can burn its enemies. A rope golem, with its choking move, would also be worth a try.
• Playing as a doppelganger, I found a good way of keeping a warhorse (who will attack even the temple priest) safe while shopping: get a magic whistle, polymorph into a xorn, phase through rock to one of Croesus' vaults, blow whistle. Drop a fruit and a food ration, or a pile of fruits if available, and phase back to the regular dungeon. The horse is now safe and will feed itself as necessary. And it if goes feral/peaceful, other pets won't attack it. (Don't forget to feed again when revisiting level.)
• When inscribing Elbereth in the dust, it's best to do it twice because one of the names will probably have a typo in it (because writing in the dust smudges easily). But ants and other fast animals will have hit four or more times while you're writing, so it's best to take your chances and write it only once.
• Engraving Elbereth with a precious stone or a mineral ring takes one turn per letter; and even then, it is possible to make spelling mistakes, so read the square you're standing on after every letter. If a square is engraved, you can no longer go for the quicker option of writing in the dust. When fast monsters approach, all forms of inscription are too slow, and the best thing to do is stand on a scroll of scare monster. This is also a good thing to drop on altars, which cannot be inscribed, and containers of treasure; drop a cursed item on the scroll to keep pets from picking it up (and a blessed one against pet ghouls), and it makes an "Elbereth" square that repels even the non-Elbereth-respecting hostiles and will never smudge, no matter how many peaceful monsters walk over it. Although, like a square with Elbereth inscribed, it doesn't always seem to repel hostiles when I'm not standing on it.
• Werecreatures are very hard to beat because they summon so many helpers. If they infect you, it's a good idea to summon as many helpers as you can before getting cured of lycanthropy. These expendable pets will fight for you, provide food for your other pets when dead, run into hidden doors and discover traps. Bless that jackal who triggers the rust trap before it gets a chance to ruin your expensive enchanted helmet. (However, jackals are worthless in combat with anything bigger than a grid bug, or for robbing shops.)
• When low-level, kill and store as many lichens as you can, preferably letting your pet kill them so there's a higher chance of leaving a corpse. Lichens never go off and are good food for herbivorous pets like horses, which are more likely to starve than carnivores. Also, if you eat a ration that has gone off and are left with half a ration, keep it for lobbing it at monsters that you want to pacify rather than tame; it works for both herbivores and carnivores. Iffy tins are good for this purpose too. As are very light-weight fruits/veggies like apples and carrots, to pacify those murderous puppies and kittens. A eucalyptus leaf is perfect, because when blessed, it can double as a magic whistle.
• The items most suited to my way of playing are: magic whistle; blessed bag of holding; horn of plenty; magical harp; magical flute. The spells I like most are: stone-to-flesh, and the "summon minion" spells. (Weapons? Who needs weapons? My pets protect me.)
• For vampires, replace "horn of plenty" with "spell of create monster" or "lycanthropy". Attempting to change to a less fussy eater with a wand of polymorph resulted in being a stunned vampire bat for an unpleasantly long number of turns.
• A troll is fine too. If you're a strong enough character to kill trolls with ease, their regeneration rate, sometimes curing them while they're being eaten, causes them to provide several meals. Since a vampire can't eat corpses but only drains them, from which a troll will always recover, one troll takes care of the hunger problem. I actually achieved satiety as a vampire from draining the same troll over and over.
• Trolls and other regenerating monsters like the yellow fungus can be definitely disposed of by sacrificing them on an altar. And the fun part is, a troll can be led to said altar.
• A combination of invisibility ring, ring of warning and cloak of displacement will get weak classes like healer or tourist safe and sound through the early levels. Moreso when throwing speedboots, stealth boots or the artifact Whisperfeet (for speed and stealth) into the mix.
• The near-invulnerable stone gargoyle becomes easy prey once stone-to-flesh is cast on it. (Oh, the beauty of Nethack game logic. "The devteam thinks of everything!") Update: the gargoyle is worse than the stone gargoyle without strong pets to dispose of it. And the stone gargoyle is not invulnerable to artifacts like, say, Skullcrusher, or a vampire's level-draining ability.
• If you play a gnome, the gnomes in the Gnomish Mines will be peaceful; instead, you'll be attacked by gnome mummies, leaving inedible corpses and almost no loot. (They'd make good food for a pet ghoul, though.) A look in the source code also tells me that gnome players don't get the bottom level of the Gnomish Mines, ie. no guaranteed gems or fight with the Gnome King.
• If you play a vampire, and contract lycanthropy, don't feel too pressed to cure it. Where vampires are forever in danger of starvation and depend on prayer to pull them through lean times (the message "you sense that Gothuulbe is displeased" spells certain death), weres, while in animal form, can eat everything, including rotten and/or poisonous corpses, and so acquire the poison resistance that tough characters like vampires need, in order not to be put to shame by some low-level orc hillbilly with a poisoned crude dagger. (Vampires can get intrinsics from corpses drained or monsters bitten while fighting, but it happens more rarely: I had to bloodsuck several floating eyes before getting telepathy.) They also have the same regeneration rate. Of course, since weres don't have hands, don't put essential items in bags, keep all doors open and always have a pre-inscribed Elbereth square nearby for when disaster strikes: that one saved me when I was a frightened little wererat charged by a mumak, and bought me enough time to wait until I could pray again for a cure. My times as a wererat were well-spent, though: I called in some rat helpers as meat shields, did some exploring (rats can squeeze past boulders, so with a scroll of earth I could have made myself a boulder fortress) and ate my little belly full on corpses and food rations, causing a state of satiety that stayed with me many turns after being cured of lycanthropy.
• If you play a vampire with a polymorph control ring and contract lycanthropy, don't cure it at all. As long as you're wearing the ring, just answer no each time you get asked the question if you want to change into a rat/jackal/whatever. And while I thought that wearing a ring would speed up the already fantastic hunger rate, the frequent spontaneous polymorph attempts seem to delay it. The only reason left for curing it is being, for instance, a wererat fighting a weretiger; I'd much rather be a weretiger, but it seems that to get any form of were disease, I have to be healthy first.
• Playing a vampire helps with sacrificing corpses, in three ways: 1. since vampires are always chaotic, you can convert altars to your alignment simply by sacrificing a human monster on them: that includes werecreatures, and 2. you can get double uses out of (safely edible) corpses by first draining and then sacrificing them, which also makes them lighter to carry, and 3. drained corpses seem to age less quickly than blood-filled ones, so if you've a long way to go from killsite to altar, there's a better chance the corpse will still be accepted.
• Vampires fly, although that doesn't count as levitation, and they will still erode the "Elbereth" they are standing on. This means they can't get at stuff in pits without a fishing rod or grappling hook. It also means they can fly over pits, and make a "moat" of pits around themselves for protection. Don't try that in towns, though: if watchmen get stuck in pits, they become angry and will go after you. If it happens to the watch captain, this is very bad, as watch captains tend to have silver weapons, which, in this game, hurt undead players as well as lycanthropes. Killing watchmen may result in losing intrinsics, so when they start chasing you for any reason, tame as many large dogs and cats as possible, and have them kill the attackers for you. (Hint: paralysing the guards to make the pets' job easier does not count as killing.)
• If you play a vampire with a medical kit, here's a nice cheat. Go to Minetown with a lot of money, levelling up all the way. Now, before going into the temple, drain your blood and levels to something safe and yet low enough to cheaply buy protection through donations (which must be at least 400 gold times your level). Better yet, drain your levels before even going to the Minetown level, so that the monsters generated in Minetown, whose dangerousness will depend on the dungeon level and your level combined, will be nice and safe. Non-vampire players can do the same by zapping themselves with a wand of draining. If you feel guilty about using a cheat like this, don't re-level by quaffing gain level or blessed vampire blood potions (keep the latter for lean times) but fight and kill your way back up to what you were. Of course, this won't work if your stupid pet ghoul kills the priest. (Note: "draw blood" is a technique which can only be done every so many turns, so there's a lot of time between starting to level-drain this way - vampires are immune to the wand of drain level - and being ready to chat with the priest. Also, medical kits contain a variable number of vials, from as much as 11 to as little as 3, so more than one kit may be needed.)
• Got a few spellbooks and a wand of polymorph? Put the books in piles of four or less, zap, and read. Most spells will be forgotten once you're advanced enough to use them (if ever; most classes can't learn to use all types of magic) and in SLASH'EM the spellbooks will have returned to their old form by that time unless "stabilized" by being dipped in a potion of restore ability, but now you can recognize these spellbooks in shops, and write them if you have blank spellbooks and a magic marker. Unicorn horns may polymorph into magic markers, but beware, two or more horns on one pile may polymorph into a skeleton, a nasty, hard-to-kill opponent, but susceptible to fire wands, fire spells and Firebrand.
• If you've built up a lot of credit with a shopkeeper, do the same with rings, potions and scrolls (but not wands or other things that can be recharged) and expendable tools. These can be taken to the shopkeeper for identification before they revert. Potions and scrolls can also be used up before they revert, as can some resulting tools, like candles and cans of grease.
• Rings are your friend! A vampire can be made so much more playable with a ring of slow digestion, and a werewolf with a ring of polymorph control. Rings of conflict will make that pesky swarm of killer bees take each other out while you stand smiling on an Elbereth square. And even a cursed ring of aggravate monster can, depending on the random assignment in a game, be a ring with a hard gem (e.g. "sapphire ring") so you can use that for engraving, saving your daggers and magic markers, and keeping your gems to sell for hard cash or appease unicorns.
• If at all possible, completely identify (a scroll of identify, or a touchstone) only genuine precious stones. Unidentified pieces of coloured glass can be sold for good money even by a tourist. Identified pieces of glass are worthless.
• Precious stones can be dropped in shops for credit. Have your pets steal them back. Gold pieces can be dropped for the same effect, but your pets will only pick up so many gold pieces at a time, so getting the money back can be frustrating; once the whole shop is strewn with gold pieces dropped here and there, I just wait for a group of orcs to barge in and plunder the shop, and then kill them outside.
• When you see a nymph or leprechaun, run. Let your pets kill it. Leprechauns are not interested when your gold is hidden in a bag, but nymphs will steal anything, including a whole bag of loot. Leprechauns will grab gold if it is dropped, but nymphs can't seem to steal anything you're not holding or wearing. Anyway; let the pets kill them and eat their telepatitis-inducing corpses.
• SLASH'EM seems to have some pet-related bugs. Firstly, going up levels after Minetown, I ran into two peaceful large dogs, one formerly tame, that could not be tamed with food. (Maybe it was full moon? Then it's not a bug, but a feature.) Secondly, if I have a leashed pet that is made peaceful by a koala (damn koalas!) I can no longer unleash it. There is supposedly nothing on the other side of the leash. Yet if the ex-pet and I move apart, I get messages of the ex-pet hissing or howling because the leash is strangling it. (Messages like these are especially alarming if the ex-pet is a potentially very dangerous monster, like an elemental.) What to do? Usually the leash will snap loose after a while, but being a level 10 doppelganger, I changed into a gelatinous cube and ate the leash. Problem solved.
• Being a doppelganger also helps with the Sokoban levels: if a monster gets stuck behind a boulder in a corridor, it becomes impossible to win the game without cheating (destroying the boulder and creating a new one with a scroll of earth, both diminish your luck) but a doppelganger can liquid-leap through the boulder, or polymorph into a xorn and phase through it, and kill the obstruction - the resulting corpse, if any, will not block the boulder. For other races, even though the Sokoban levels are non-teleport, a wand of teleport will move boulders and also monsters, for pacifists who don't want to break conduct. Otherwise, a wand of magic missile will kill the monster without shattering the boulder, but is a waste of wand charges when the monster is a weak one, especially if the wand misses.
• If you're playing as a lycanthrope, and in wolf form when coming up against a closed door, you can open it by kicking it down. Didn't you know wolves are expert at kickboxing?

The Vulture's are available for download as binaries again, and also as source to compile using whatever compiler is available on the system, which, under Windows, is likely to be "none". An advantage of source over binary file is that the tiles are not packed into an executable, but stored in a directory (relative path: slashem\win\vultures\gamedata\tiles). The artistically inclined may take any tile they don't like and paste a new image in it, or even add new tiles if they know how to compile them into the game.

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? And does that imp look familiar?

The tiles currently included seem to be mostly the work of two artists: one who started making graphics when the interface had no 24-bit colour and transparency, and which seem colour-reduced, and have a delicate black outline one pixel thick, and generally a shadow; and one who has either made or contributed to the "Absurd Tileset", which was made for a 2D non-isometric view, and whose images have a pasty black anti-aliased outline, and no shadow. I prefer the first type, although the second type also has its charm.

One style versus another.