It may not look like in the old days, but The Fairy's Throne is a fairly traditional roguelike at the core. The goal of the game is simple: reach the 25th level of the Fairy King's palace and locate the throne room. You can probably figure out what to do once you get there.
What makes this hard is all the denizens of the palace, some mundane, others supernatural, who block the doorways and won't let you pass unless you best them in combat (for some reason). Luckily, while you start the game weak and poorly equipped, you'll soon find better gear, supplies and magic, not to mention you'll gain experience along the way. This is where you might need a little guidance.
The actual commands you can use are listed in the built-in help and the readme file.
I won't bore you with a full account of the combat rules. Suffice to say, your character is mainly described by three attributes:
Attributes are likely the main factor in combat, but gear matters too. Weapons are described by their attack bonus, which adds to your rolls, and their damage die, which only gets rolled when and if you hit. Armor only has a protection factor, and only protects from blows that equal or exceed it; armor also takes some of that damage itself, and falls apart after a while. Don't worry, you'll find more of it. Some enemies may even drop theirs as they flee.
Speaking of rolls, your character also has a size, which determines what kind of dice you roll. In this game, you're always a d8 human, but enemies range from d4 to d20. A smaller enemy will hit you more easily than you can hit them, and the opposite is true for bigger enemies, but the impact is small.
Sooner or later you're going to run into supernatural enemies, most of which are attuned to one of three elements: sun, plant or frost. Their gear will often be as well, which is important because being hit with such a weapon can leave you burning, bleeding or freezing, respectively, with extra damage piling up the more such hits you take. Luckily, armor attuned to the same element will make you immune.
Once you do suffer from an effect, there are two ways to get rid of it. One is to make use of certain palace decorations:
However, sometimes you just won't find the right one when you need it. In that case, just recite a soothing rhyme if you have one.
Each element also has a nemesis: sun melts frost, plants shadow the sun, and frost kills plants. When matching weapons against armor, that can double or halve the damage die. You can enchant your own gear with the right spells, but beware that some gear is intrinsically elemental, and will go up in smoke if you try to change its nature.
Undead are immune to all elemental effects.
Dice can be fickle, but fairies have a sense of fairness. Every time you take a heavy blow, your next roll or two will be blessed, giving you a better chance to strike back. Unless you're fighting undead: those will curse you instead. You can remove curses, then give yourself more blessings, by reciting a blessing rhyme.
Improving your attributes is key to making progress. Better gear alone will not help enough. You can increase an attribute score by one for every 500 experience points, of which you gain 150 for every new level reached. To make up the difference, be sure to collect gold, silver and amber. Those don't serve any other purpose, and will give you less and less XP the more you have.
You can only carry so much at any one time. Building muscle increases the limit, but slowly. On the plus side, the gear you're wearing doesn't count towards the weight limit, and you can pick up any item while you're under said limit. This is why you can sometimes drop an item and not be able to pick it back up. If you're having trouble juggling them, just leave stashes lying around: it's always possible, if tedious, to revisit previous levels.
That's about it. Hope this helps!