TomeNET

(5.11) Monsters                                                                 
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All creatures in the game apart from special 'questors' and other player
characters are actually "monsters", aka your enemies. Some might exhibit rather
neutral looking movement or no movement at all, some might not even inflict
damage, but none of them is friendly towards you and all of them will or in
some way or another make your survival more difficult.
Right after creating a new character you will already encounter "monsters" of
some sort: Townspeople, denoted by the letter 't' and maybe some cats, birds or
fish (if you happen to walk nearby the lake).
Since all creatures are basically hostile, you will auto-attack them when you
move onto an adjacent grid. Killing townies is a good way to make some easy
money. Just beware of mean-looking mercenaries and battle-scarred veterans.

When you enter the training tower or the dungeon you will soon notice the
variety of monsters, for example you will probably encounter a "floating eye",
denoted by an orange 'e'. These cannot inflict any damage on you but if you get
too close they will gaze at you which will in most cases paralyze you!
If you're unlucky or your Saving Throw stat (Shift+C to check) isn't
particularly great a floating eye might even lock you in paralyzation forever,
making you easy prey for any other monster around.

To check monster information you have three ways:
Press ~2 for monsters you have killed or ~3 for a list of 'unique' monsters.
Press ~7 for the 'monster lore' search. It contains all monsters in the game
 execpt for ego-variations (see below).

There are three types of monsters:
-Basic monsters (over 1100 of those), such as "a Hill Orc" or "a Zog".
-Unique monsters (over 200), such as "Azog, King of the Uruk-Hai".
  You can recognize these by distinctly flickering (like a colour 'spike').
-Ego monsters (over 50). These are not actually monsters but modifications of
  basic monsters, for example:
  The basic monster "Hill Orc" receives the ego-power "Archer", it will become
  "a Hill Orc Archer" and instead of trying to punch you in the face will shoot
  arrows at you.
  Ego monsters can also be recognized by flickering: They receive the ego-power
  colour in addition to their base colour. For above's example that would be
  the green base colour of the hill orc and the orange colour of "Archer"
  ego-power resulting in a green orc that flickers orange.
  If the ego-power colour is actually the same as the basic monster colour the
  resulting ego monster will instead flicker in random colour spikes just like
  unique monsters do.

Some ego monsters can be extremely nasty at low and mid levels. Among the most
feared are probably the (dark-brown) melee-specific egos "Monk", "Warrior" and
"Unbeliever" and the somewhat less bad "Chieftain" and "Possessed" animals as
well as the dark-green "Archpriest" ego which moves fast, has a powerful curse
attack and can summon more monsters.

Monsters have specific loot tables, a base level (r-level, racial level of the
basic monster type in general) and an actual monster level (m-level, the real
level of a monster standing before you, which can be above its basic r-level,
because monsters can appear as levelled-up versions if you encounter them on
much deeper dungeon levels than where they usually start to appear).
See (5.7c) for loot tables, see (0.4) for details on m-level and r-level.

Some unique monsters are "dungeon bosses", which means they can only be found
on the final level of a particular dungeon and when you kill them you will
"conquer" that dungeon (press ~8 to check your dungeon info). See (4.5d) for
info about dungeon bosses.

Morgoth, the Lord of Darkness is the game boss. To actually encounter him you
first need to defeat Sauron, the Sorceror though. See (1.3b) for details.
By defeating Morgoth the player is awarded royal status. There will be two
more dungeons that can only be entered by royalty and offer further, insanely
hard challenges and new unique bosses.