SLASH'EM is a display oriented Dungeons & Dragons(tm) - like game. The standard tty display and command
structure resemble rogue. It is an extension of SLASH which is an extension of NetHack.
Other, more graphical display options exist if you are using either a PC, or an X11 interface.
To get started you really only need to know two commands. The command ? will give you a list of the
available commands (as well as other information) and the command / will identify the things you see on
the screen.
To win the game (as opposed to merely playing to beat other people's high scores) you must locate the
Amulet of Yendor which is somewhere below the 20th level of the dungeon and get it out. Nobody has
achieved this yet; anybody who does will probably go down in history as a hero among heros.
When the game ends, whether by your dying, quitting, or escaping from the caves, SLASH'EM will give you
(a fragment of) the list of top scorers. The scoring is based on many aspects of your behavior, but a
rough estimate is obtained by taking the amount of gold you've found in the cave plus four times your
(real) experience. Precious stones may be worth a lot of gold when brought to the exit. There is a 10%
penalty for getting yourself killed.
The environment variable SLASHEMOPTIONS can be used to initialize many run-time options. The ? command
provides a description of these options and syntax. (The -dec and -ibm command line options are equiva‐
lent to the decgraphics and ibmgraphics run-time options described there, and are provided purely for
convenience on systems supporting multiple types of terminals.)
Because the option list can be very long (particularly when specifying graphics characters), options may
also be included in a configuration file. The default is located in your home directory and named
.slashemrc on Unix systems. On other systems, the default may be different, usually SLASHEM.cnf. On DOS
or Windows, the name is defaults.nh, while on the Macintosh or BeOS, it is SlashEM Defaults. The config‐
uration file's location may be specified by setting SLASHEMOPTIONS to a string consisting of an @ charac‐
ter followed by the filename.
The -uplayername option supplies the answer to the question "Who are you?". It overrides any name from
the options or configuration file, USER, LOGNAME, or getlogin(), which will otherwise be tried in order.
If none of these provides a useful name, the player will be asked for one. Player names (in conjunction
with uids) are used to identify save files, so you can have several saved games under different names.
Conversely, you must use the appropriate player name to restore a saved game.
A playername suffix can be used to specify the profession, race, alignment and/or gender of the charac‐
ter. The full syntax of the playername that includes a suffix is "name-ppp-rrr-aaa-ggg". "ppp" are at
least the first three letters of the profession (this can also be specified using a separate -pprofes‐sion option). "rrr" are at least the first three letters of the character's race (this can also be spec‐
ified using a separate -rrace option). "aaa" are at last the first three letters of the character's
alignment, and "ggg" are at least the first three letters of the character's gender. Any of the parts of
the suffix may be left out.
-pprofession can be used to determine the character role. You can specify either the male or female
name for the character role, or the first three characters of the role as an abbreviation. -p@ has been
retained to explicitly request that a random role be chosen. It may need to be quoted with a backslash
(\@) if @ is the "kill" character (see "stty") for the terminal, in order to prevent the current input
line from being cleared.
Likewise, -rrace can be used to explicitly request that a race be chosen, -ggender the gender of the
chareacter and finally -aalignment to chose the alignment of the character.
Leaving out any of these characteristics will result in you being prompted during the game startup for
the information.
Instead of chosing the above separately you can add them as suffixes to the playername: -uplayer‐name-race-gender-alignment
The -s option alone will print out the list of your scores on the current version. An immediately fol‐
lowing -v reports on all versions present in the score file. The -s may be also be followed by player
type arguments ( -p , -r , -g and -a ) to print the scores of particular types of players only. It may
also be followed by one or more player names to print the scores of the players mentioned, by 'all' to
print out all scores, or by a number to print that many top scores.
The -n option suppresses printing of any news from the game administrator.
The -D or -X option will start the game in a special non-scoring discovery mode. -D will, if the player
is the game administrator, start in debugging (wizard) mode instead.
The -d option, which must be the first argument if it appears, supplies a directory which is to serve as
the playground. It overrides the value from NETHACKDIR, HACKDIR, or the directory specified by the game
administrator during compilation (usually /usr/local/slashemdir). This option is usually only useful to
the game administrator. The playground must contain several auxiliary files such as help files, the list
of top scorers, and a subdirectory save where games are saved.
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