MAGE Against Generic Enchantmnets

MAGE Against Generic Enchantments was written in seven days, as part of the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge.  Its home on the web is http://www.zincland.com/7drl/mage

Setting

You were a mage enrolled in the prestigious MAGE academy.  This academy's     recursive acronym is Mage Against Generic Enchantment.  The founding principle is a rejection of boring magic that can be tamed by orthogonal rules.  Each spell should have its own unique charm unrelated to other magic.

It didn't take long to discover the academy was a scam.  The same boring rules underlie their magic as the rest of the multiverse, except they've hidden the connections behind thick layers of obfuscation.

Escape is not so easy, however, for they've placed the academy on the top of a tall tower.  The lower levels are all inhabited by monsters that make short work of students that try to leave without a gate spell.

Details

Many consider a grid based map part of the definition of a roguelike.  And I wouldn't argue the point.  But does the map have to be visible?

MAGE eliminates the use of text-as-graphics and instead communicates with you solely with a message stream.  On Windows you can use the built-in Text To Speech and play without a monitor!  But the intent is to not build a MUD - underneath is a very traditional grid-based roguelike with all the tactical positioning you are used to.

And if it proves too much, you turn the map back on again.