Larn
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ASCII illustration
A short journey, with someone waiting at home.
1986: Larn 12.0 distributed on Usenet.
By Noah Morgan; ports and variants by later contributors.
Noah Morgan’s Larn belongs to the busy middle of the 1980s. Version 12.0 was distributed on Usenet in August 1986 and became the basis for many later versions. Its historical archive also records an earlier 11.0, while marking uncertainty about its precise date.
The expedition has a personal objective: find a cure for the character’s daughter. A town provides services above a relatively compact dungeon. The result is a smaller cycle of preparation, descent and return than the long campaigns of some later relatives.
Larn matters partly because a shorter game was already a deliberate possibility within the early form. A roguelike did not have to keep expanding its dungeon to offer a complete and punishing journey.
Its descendants require care when cataloguing them. Larn, the expanded Ularn branch and independent rewrites are not identical. Derek Newhall’s historical archive separates them and identifies ports whose maintainers are sometimes mistaken for the original author.
The number on a surviving download may describe that particular branch. It should not be read as a single uninterrupted sequence of releases by Morgan.
Sources
Derek Newhall: The History of Larn and Ularn
Larn’s premise and historical references