The variants of vanilla Nethack don’t, for the most part, add a lot of extra choices for character creation. Sporkhack and Nitrohack have no additional races or roles.
Unnethack lets you play as a vampire race, but has no extra roles. In Grunthack, you can play as a kobold, ogre, or giant, but otherwise seems just like vanilla.
In Sporkhack, although you have no extra roles, all races can play any role.
Slash’EM is the one variant that really throws a lot more options at you – in fact the Monk role in vanilla started out in Slash’EM. When you start a game of Slash’EM, you can pick a Flame Mage, Ice Mage, Necromancer, Undead Slayer, or Yeoman, in addition to the base 13 roles. You can then choose to play as a doppelganger, drow, lycanthorpe, hobbit, or vampire if the role allows it. In Slash’EM normal elves are only lawful or neutral – if you want to be a chaotic elf, you’re going to need to play a drow.
The Nethack wiki has this to say about the playable races in vanilla, Sporkhack, and Nitrohack: “Humans can be any alignment (subject to your chosen role allowing that alignment), but for the others, your race indirectly determines your alignment: dwarves are always lawful, gnomes are always neutral, and elves and orcs are always chaotic.
In general, dwarves are strong, elves and gnomes are smart, orcs are poison resistant, and humans are good all-rounders.”
Unique to Slash’EM is the concept of techniques. These are extra abilities each role and each race may get, that can be used every so often and improve as your character gains levels.
Here are typical starting equipment pictures for each role. These will vary somewhat but do give an idea of the sort of items that each one starts out with. Slash’EM roles are in bold, (Slash’EM races are in parentheses), and [Grunthack races are in brackets]. Unnethack vampires have the same 4 role options as Slash’EM vampires do.
Archeologist – can be human, dwarf, or gnome (or doppelganger).
Barbarian – can be human or orc (or doppelganger, drow, vampire) [or ogre, giant].
Caveman/woman – can be human, dwarf, or orc (or doppelganger) [or ogre, giant].
Flame Mage – (can be doppelganger, drow, elf, gnome, hobbit, human, orc).
Healer – can be human or gnome (or doppelganger) [or giant].
Ice Mage – (can be doppelganger, drow, elf, gnome, hobbit, human, orc, or vampire).
Knight – can be human only [or elf].
Monk – can be human (or doppelganger, hobbit) [or elf].
Necromancer – (can be doppelganger, drow, human, orc, or vampire).
Priest/ess – can be human or elf (or doppelganger, drow, or hobbit) [or giant].
Ranger – can be human, elf, gnome, or orc (or doppelganger, drow, hobbit, lycanthorpe, or vampire) [or kobold].
Rogue – can be human or orc (or doppelganger, lycanthrope, or vampire) [or kobold, ogre].
Samurai – can be human only.
Tourist – can be human only (or doppelganger, hobbit).
Undead Slayer – (can be doppelganger, drow, elf, gnome, hobbit, human, lycanthrope or orc).
Valkyrie – can be human or dwarf (or doppelganger) [or giant].
Wizard – can be human, elf, gnome or orc (or doppelganger, drow, hobbit, or vampire) [or kobold, ogre, giant].
Yeoman – (can be elf, hobbit, or human).
I was somewhat surprised to see that in Slash’EM, hobbits cannot be rogues. I guess none of the developers read The Hobbit?
I’ll go into more details about the racial benefits/drawbacks and the Slash’EM techniques in a later post.
One Day, I Will Ascend 