When you start atrogue, you are at first presented with an introductory screen which allows you to set several preferences. Your screen might look like this:

atrogue 0.3.0

Preferences

-> Play: normal user-interaction
   Difficulty: 2 (normal)
   Role: rogue
   Combat: 4  Magic: 3  Features: 5  Exploration: 2
   Colors: yes
   Animation: yes
   Screen width: 80   height: 24
   Section width: 79   height: 22
   Quit

To navigate, press Cursor-Up/Down or k/j.
To edit, press Cursor-Left/Right or h/l.
To start, navigate to the "Play" line and press Return.
For information about atrogue, press V.

So this is quite self-explanatory. :-) If you don't want to change any of the preferences, you can simply press the <Return> key immediately in order to enter the dungeon. To change a single-digit value, you can simply enter a digit instead of pressing the Cursor-Left/Right keys several times. To start playing when at any preference, press "P". To quit when at any preference, press "Q". To quickly navigate to a preference, press the respective lowercase letter, e.g. "m" for "Magic".

Difficulty: the gameplay difficulty ranges from "0 (very easy)" to "5 (drive me crazy)" - and you can take the word "crazy" literally! If you play atrogue for the first time, leave the preference at "2 (normal)" and try the game; it's not intended that you can simply walk down through the dungeon and come back with the Amulet of Yendor the first time. Also, since many things in atrogue depend on chance, it's possible that the player character is killed in storey 5 during one game while you get below storey 10 quite easily the next time. If you can't get past the first few storeys, you might want to try a lower gameplay difficulty; but please note that some features are only available at higher difficulties. And you get deeper into the dungeon only if you play atrogue several times and gain some experience...

Role: the role (character class) specifies as what kind of character you want to play the game, e.g. caveman, rogue or wizard. The roles have very different characteristics, so this choice has a big influence on the gameplay. For example, the roles have different action speeds and different initial inventory packs. When you play as a wizard, a higher percentage of objects in the dungeon than usually are magic items, and more objects are enchanted or cursed, and you can handle certain magic events in better ways.

Combat (0..9): how much fighting you want to get. With a higher preference value, more enemies walk around in the dungeon, especially some creatures of rare, dangerous kinds. If you want to play a difficult "hack and slash" session, set this to 9.

Magic (0..9): the amount of magic objects and events you'd like to encounter generally.

Features (0..9): atrogue can provide many interesting features. With a higher preference value, the dungeon structure generally becomes more complex, more special effects occur, certain special object kinds exist, and it is more difficult to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. If you want to play a "traditional" session like in the oldest Rogue-like games, set this value to 0 and maybe also the "Magic" and "Exploration" values to 0.

Exploration (0..9): how much you like exploration, searching and special puzzles. With a higher preference value, more paths, objects and dungeon departments are hidden, and the dungeon is bigger and more complex.

Screen width/height: the game tries to figure out your text terminal size automatically. But this may fail, e.g. if the "curses" library doesn't provide the necessary functionality. This preference allows you to correct any problems manually (within limits) so that the map isn't drawn beyond your screen size. But please note that some texts may need more than 30 characters, especially in an inventory listing; and the statistics line may need more than 50 characters; it's a good idea to play this game on a screen which is at least 60 characters wide.

Section width/height: the maximum size of dungeon sections. All sections stay within these limits, with the exception of a few special sections which represent wide "landscapes" that are much bigger. The game never uses the rightmost column of a text terminal, because that could cause trouble on some terminals; and the two bottom lines are used for messages and statistics, not for section maps. So if you don't like scrolling maps during gameplay, make sure that the section width is lower than the screen width and the section height is at least 2 lower than the screen height.