No, PosBand has nothing whatsoever to do with Pos Band.

I provide the sources, which can be compiled for any supported OS, and the Windows version. Unfortunately I cannot compile PosBand for any other system (other than Linux) myself. If you can help, please contact me.

All the monsters need major rework for PosBand. This rework is only about 25-30% complete now. I have very little time now (I will enter the university next year, and I must study a lot). Also, many bugs keep popping up.

Nonetheless, PosBand is quite playable even now. Some people do enjoy it.

NPPAngband is a variant of Angband, on which PosBand is based. NPP means "No Pet Peeves"; NPPAngband incorporates many minor changes which proved popular among players, but were not included in "Vanilla" Angband.

NPPAngband is actively maintained by Jeff Greene <nppangband@comcast.net>. Its home page is "http://home.comcast.net/~nppangband/".

No. The current version is based on NPPAngband 0.3.4. While Jeff is doing great work on version 0.4.0, I think that the changes are too big to use them in PosBand.

Just select a "Monster", "Soul" race. You will begin your quest as a lost soul, a pretty impotent creature. The first thing you should do is to zap a townsman with your Wand of Magic Missile, then seize his body (stand on his corpse, then press 'N' and select it). You will need to play as a weak warrior for some time — until you find a better corpse to possess. You can press 'N' again to leave your body, but beware — it will instantly decay! Do that only if you already have a nice corpse.

Not all monsters drop their corpses; specifically, Ainur don't. Many monsters have undefined corpse information in this version. They won't drop any corpses as well.

Possessing a monster is very similar to playing a real monster race — you get all the powers, etc. — but your body will never grow or evolve.

Sorry, no :-). This is not NetHack or ADoM. Corpses are generally useless for non-possessors, though there are exceptions (e.g. Skeletons can heal themselves with bones of the slayed creatures).

You can turn off corpse generation with item squelch menu. Press '=', then 'i' to get to the menu, then press 'C' to turn it on or off (This is Shift+C).

That's right, many unique monsters have their own artifacts. You will always get this artifact if the unique was the king of your race. Otherwise, the chance is pretty slim, but you should find two or three during the game.

King uniques are kings of your race. For example, if you play a Spider, then Shelob will be your king. You will get a message whenever you meet your king. If you manage to slay him/her/it, you will become a king yourself: you will get permanent blessing, heroism and king's artifact.

Press 'U' (Shift+U) to open the menu. Powers are much like the spells, but you gain them automagically, and they can depend on any stat, not just INT or WIS. (Your power-casting stat will be marked with '*' on character screen 'C'. Your mana and failure rates will depend on it.)

If your body happens to have no weapon slot (that is, you have no arms, claws or tentacles capable of holding the weapon), you will fight with your innate attacks, displayed on 'C' screen. Your attacks will deal fixed base damage, possibly magical, with stat and equipment bonuses, if you have them.

Some very pathetic (Shrieker mushrooms) or very powerful (Quylthulg) creatures have no means of physically attacking their enemies at all, and have to fight only by careful usage of their powers.

PosBand has two kinds of mages: the usual mage class, which is available only to normal races, and the "monster" mage, which is actually a race. The latter casts his spells as powers, and doesn't use any spellbooks. You can play a normal mage if you want; the normal races are in no way limited.

The same applies for other classical character classes (Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Ranger, Paladin).

Because you cannot do that! Really, stepping in the lava means certain death for any creature (although certain Jedi Knight comes to mind... ;-). If you are not immune to fire, the game won't let you step in the lava.

The same applies to the abyss; you need levitation (ex-feather falling) to get over it.

Monsters will also get disadvantages on some kinds of terrain, so you can get rid of that Fire elemental by putting it to water (although it won't enter it willingly!)

The new monsters, of course. Most (all?) of them were added for some reason, not just to have even more monsters. I invented most of them myself, some are inspired by Tolkien writings or AD&D. Feel free to criticize them or to use them in your own works.

Ordinary pets won't do that. You have to ask it to become your companion, via 'y' menu. The number of companions you can have is limited and depends on your charisma.

The monsters are always summoned from your current dungeon level. So, for example, you can summon only the townsmen in the town, and you can't summon an ancient dragon before dl40-41, no matter how hard you try.

Unless it is associated with some unique, no, it isn't. It is a random artifact (randart), generated randomly instead of a real one. It will have random abilities, description etc. It won't show in "Artifacts Found" list, and it can't be reforged.

The birth option "Randomize some artifacts" affects the standard artifacts — the Phial, Ringil etc. You will find them turned into randomized names and abilities, but they'll remain the standard artifacts. The real randarts can be generated infinitely, and they are available regardless of that birth option.

You can reforge any standard artifact (not the randart) in the Adventurers Guild. During that process, the artifact essence is transferred into another item. You have to provide the original artifact, the "target" item, and a large (and I really mean LARGE) sum of money. The original artifact is destroyed during that process. The "target" item can be any single, wearable, non-artifact item. (The more powerful is that item itself, the less power it will acquire from the artifact!). This service is available only when you have sufficiently large fame.

It was replaced by the Silmaril of Earendil in version 0.3.0.

I have used some special chars for floors and walls for Linux (NCurses (gcu) and X11 (x11) display modules). They work on my system. If they don't show right at yours, delete file lib/pref/font-gcu.prf or lib/pref/feat-x11.prf, respectively.

The source tarball was created on Linux systems. All text files have UNIX line-endings (only 0x0a, instead of 0x0d,0x0a). If your text editor (or IDE, or whatever) doesn't understand UNIX line-endings — well, Get A Real Editor! Emacs will do fine :).

There are about 150 possible monster powers in the current version of PosBand. To simplify the maintenance and the adding of new powers, the power code is single-sourced.

powers.m4 is a real source for power code. It is meant to be preprocessed with M4 utility. M4 is a very powerful general-purpose macroprocessor, available on most of UNIX/Linux systems. (It is little known and little used, but it is pre-installed on most of Linux boxes, since it is needed for autoconf utility and sendmail configuration.) Five .inc files (meant to be #include'd in specific places of .h and .c files) are generated from powers.m4.

Since M4 is unlikely to be found on non-UNIX systems, generated .inc files are distributed with the sources. .inc rebuild rule is present only in Makefile.std.