Dungeon Crawl (Stone Soup)
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(If you'd like to dive in and start playing Crawl right away, see readme.txt.)

What you have downloaded is *not* Linley's Dungeon Crawl. It's a parallel
effort, currently not quite a fork.

The goal of this version is to provide a stable base platform for further
Crawl development during times when Dungeon Crawl's main maintainer is not
available, and to collect experiments, patches, and ideas from the community
of Dungeon Crawl players.

Stone Soup is based on Dungeon Crawl 4.0.0 beta26, with additional changes
gathered from Brent Ross's 4.1.2 alpha release. It incorporates several
popular community patches and assorted local changes and improvements.

Please do not send bug reports for this code to the main Dungeon Crawl
maintainers -- the odds are good that the code that's causing you problems
isn't code they wrote, and they won't be able to help you.

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Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a game of dungeon exploration, combat and magic,
involving characters of diverse skills, worshipping deities of great power and
caprice. To win, you'll need to be a master of tactics and strategy, and prevail
against overwhelming odds.

The following files in your main Crawl directory are crucial:

crawl     - Starts the game.
crawl.exe

init.txt  - These files (which one depends on your OS) contains the options of 
.crawlrc    Crawl. Since the defaults are well suited for playing, don't bother 
	    with this in the beginning.
	    Note that permanent death is not an option, but a feature!
macro.txt - Playing Crawl can be made even more convenient by redefining keys 
	    and assigning macros. It is recommended that you fiddle with these 
	    only after a couple of games.

The docs directory contains the following helpful files:

crawl_manual.txt - This is the complete manual; describing all species, classes,
            types of items, etc.
crawl_options.txt - Here all the options you can give Crawl are described in
            detail; feel free to skip this until you feel comfortable with the 
            game.
crawl_macros.txt - It is wise to ignore this at first, too. (Unless you
	    experience serious problems with some keys, in which case you may 
	    want to have a look at the keymaps section.) 
	    Just remember for later that you can improve your Crawl experience 
	    by adjusting interface options and defining your own macros.
tables.txt - Unlike some other roguelike games, winning in Crawl does not
            require an exhaustive knowledge of the game's internals. However,
            here are tables which may be interesting to players. The central
            information therein can be deduced from other sources (like the 
            manual), and it is perfectly possible to win without knowing 
            these numbers.

If you have questions concerning the game, or have found a bug, do not hesitate
to inquire at the newsgroup
	rec.games.roguelike.misc 
with your problem. Since other games are discussed over there as well, it is 
polite to flag your post with -crawl-. Please read the group for a while before
posting to get a feel for the right way to post articles about Crawl.

Stone Soup's homepage is
	http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net
Look here for downloads of the most recent version (source and binaries).
Stone Soup is supported on Linux, Windows, OS/X, and DOS, and will probably
compile and run on any reasonably modern Unix.