Tales of Middle Earth

Tales of Middle Earth, formerly known as Troubles of Middle Earth, is a roguelike computer game created in 1998. The game is set in Arda and incorporates many elements of the mythology of Middle-earth, but separately from J.R.R. Tolkien's plot. In particular, the game merges various ages and stories together. The ultimate goal of the game is to visit Angband and kill Morgoth.
One can download the single-player game from github.com/tome2/tome2 and old versions from the independently-recreated original site t-o-m-e.net. DarkGod, its creator, released version 2.3.3 in December 2005, but soon afterwards, rewrote ToME as a new game not set in Arda/Middle-earth, and moved the website, which still has a forum for the original game set in Middle-earth. Much of ToME is under a license that restricts commercial redistribution.
One can download the multiplayer game from tomenet.eu.
ToME used to have has its own wiki containing bug reports, an editable version of the documentation, and many spoilers. The wiki is possibly saved on the Internet Archive, archive.org.
== Development history ==
ToME is actually a variant of the roguelike Game of Angband. It is based upon the source code of ZAngband 2.2.9a but now differs greatly. DarkGod originally called the games PernAngband and PernMultiplayerAngband; they were crossovers that placed characters from Anne McCaffrey's fictional world of Pern into J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. By the time of version 5.x.x, PernAngband had attracted a substantial online community. However, it came under legal threat from Anne McCaffrey and from Ubisoft, a company that had created several licensed Pern-related games. DarkGod removed the Pern elements and changed the name of the game to ToME. Currently ToME contains more elements of Middle-earth than the game of Angband did. However, ToME also contains elements of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Roger Zelazny, having inherited them from Cthangband and ZAngband.
ToME now consists of a T-Engine with an embedded Lua scripting engine. By rewriting or replacing the Lua scripts, one can create derivate games called modules. Popular modules include Theme, Gerband, Annals of Ea, and FuryMod. Notably, Theme tries to follow Middle-earth more closely, by adding, for example, more Middle-earth monsters while removing the ZAngband content. Meanwhile FuryMod has forked ToME and created a separate game called FuryBand.
ToME is under active development by people who forked (independently continued) DarkGod's final version. Report bugs to each particular fork developer, mostly on GitHub. ToME 3 was an alpha release intended to eventually include greater support for the Lua programming language and drastically change the internal handling of objects and flags. ToME 3 was never finished, and DarkGod instead created ToME 4, which isn't set in Arda/Middle-earth.
== External links ==
* ToME homepage
** ToME forums
** ToME wiki
** TomeNET homepage
* The Angband Ladder: ToME contains ranked character sheets of ToME players
* The (Not Yet) Comprehensive ToME 2.3.x Skill Spoiler
Category:Computer & video games