Do You Want Your Possessions Identified? Let's Play NetHack

So, a Baby Silver Dragon is a pretty good pet for the early game, right? Ah, the wonders of starting with a Wand of Polymorph and a Ring of Slow Digestion makes for a fun opening.

Unfortunately, that didn't help against the ants.

Man, I hate to go against the expected norm, but I just can't look at the pics in ASCII during this LP (I do try my best though). Count my vote for tiles (for whatever it's worth).

Yeah, my vote for tiles is definite this time. I can do ASCII well enough when I'm playing, but the tiles are easier for me to figure out when I'm looking at a static picture and don't know the context very well.

Oh, I give up. Starting Wednesday or Thursday, I'll use tiles in the thread, and provide a link to an alternate version with ASCII.

He he.. Or you could just post both side by side and let people decide which one they want to look at.

Didn't he already do that?

Yesterday, I saved the game the trouble by creating my own pit trap to take me to the next level, so desperate was I to escape the leocrotta's claws. Too many ancestors have been killed by these fearsome creatures.



Ignoring the hail of poisoned arrowfire, I struggle towards the exit, blasting a dead zone. Miraculously, the deadly poison didn't kill me.



I see a beautiful woodland unicorn. Like so many video game monsters, unicorns are color coded to tell you if they are benevolent helpful creatures (white unicorns, which I am happy to kill), neutral, aloof creatures (gray unicorns, which I can also kill and which I am facing here), or dark and sinister unicorns (black unicorns, which are my friends). As you suspected, the color is the only thing that distinguishes them.

You can actually improve your luck by throwing gems at a unicorn. Dez is apparently not a maiden, as this one refuses to come near me though. Even bouncing a magic missile around is problematic. Also, you need to be careful – unicorns are tough opponents, and meleeing them is an efficient way to die.



My problem is solved, as the unicorn, repulsed as Dez’s apparently immodest dress (she has no pants), ends up in a sleeping trap, and is paralyzed while I take potshots at him.



Success! Killing unicorns is a coup, as you get both a unicorn horn (which is also probably overpowered), and their corpse, which is very likely to grant poison resistance.

As you might expect, the corpse doesn’t give me poison resistance, and I add yet another black swan to my flock. It’s scary when a game toys with you like this.



However, there are compensations. Unicorn horns, in addition to being able to cure almost any status ailment (including blindness, confusion, stunning, sickness, etc), can also restore stats that have been cut for one reason or another. This allows me to quickly restore my strength back to where it was before the giant spider corpse fiasco.

You don have to be careful with the horns though – even when blessed (which improves their efficacy), they aren’t guaranteed to work the first time. Thus in true emergencies, you have to be careful (especially with something like sickness where you have only a few turns). Later, I’m hoping to get the cure blindness/sickness/etc spells that provide a more consistent recovery.



Unicorn horns also can’t heal wounded legs, which happen if you kick something heavy (like this loadstone, which I was trying to decide about picking up or not). This decreases your speed and carrying capacity, but wears off after a few turns.

At one point, I might just pick up a loadstone, name it, uncurse it, and drop it just so I’ll never have to kick another one.



There. This will make things safer.



The 1s are mimics, pretending to be gems or rocks. They make things irritating, but my ring makes things easier so I don’t get surprised.

The bloody stupid sculpter apparently decided that what this dungeon needed was some fungal arrangements to lighten the atmosphere a bit.



Then I’m hit with a boulder. I expect an ancient Aztec artifact for putting up with this.



I finally find a gray stone, in the doorway from southeastern area (the door that leads to nowhere.) This one, as demonstrated by the fact that it moved when I kicked it, isn’t a loadstone. More on what it does a bit later, but it’ll be enough to say right now that it’s what we came for.

This is actually the lowest level of the Gnomish Mines dungeon branch – the layout is fixed, so I knew where to look for the treasure. Now that we’ve looted it, it’s time to go back to minetown.



Remember the Leocrotta that caused me detour? Now that I can pick him off at a range, I’m slightly less scared. They’re still devastating, and I won’t be taking them lightly.

I name my gray stone the melodious appellation “stone1.” This is mostly useful when looking at the other useful gray stone.



Speaking of gray stones, I punish my poor leg again. I also pick up a dog, though pets aren’t as helpful as I’d like at this point – you can often find polymorph traps in the lower depths of the mines to make them something more powerful.



Here Dez heroically pulls his dog out of the pit that the dog wouldn’t have fallen into if he wasn’t following Dez in the first place.



We’re back in minetown for the time being, but I’m not going to do much here.



It turns out my copper wand is “turn undead,” the unloved throwaway ability of priests that has existed as long as D&D has. Turn undead can scare undead (which is pretty useless, because as always, the undead actually vulnerable to it are exactly the undead that you don’t need to bother scaring), but it also has another nifty feature which I hope to demonstrate later on.

The white Z is a human zombie, on whom I’m experimenting.



Any potions in a delicatessen (or food shop) will be either booze, fruit juice, or water. Water is always clear potions, and neither booze nor fruit juice have much inherent value. It’s nice to be able to know what they are though, so I know which potions are useless, and that I can rule them out when identifying other things. I also purchase some tins.



Continuing our sick running joke, I still don’t manage to get poison resistance. Eating scorpions ought to be worth something, shouldn’t it?



The rest of the trip upstairs passes uneventfully, though I lose the dog somewhere along the way. One of the tins I bought contains spinach, which results in increasing my strength to sixteen (the maximum for elves).

Before I continue my epic journey, let us make a trip to the altar. I have a few things I need to finish.



On our way, we find Guido the 3rd, happily having adopted to her new home on dungeon level three. I decide to leave her here without retaming her, keeping at least one of my former pets alive. It will be in very lonely company, unless of course I find a way to transform her from a kitten into something far more lovable, such as an angry black dragon.

Sacrificing in Nethack is killing a monster, dragging its corpse over to an altar before it has rotted too much, and offering it to your pagan god (no, you can’t offer partially eaten corpses. Sorry.) The benefits of sacrificing include pleasing your deity if you’ve done something really stupid, decreasing how long you have to wait until it is safe to pray again, and increasing your luck.

In this case, because the sacrificed was consumed with no other message, that means that I can pray safely, and that my deity is okay with me. That’s all I need at the moment, but there will be more.

I then go into the corner of the room and dump my inventory out (I’m having capacity problems again). I’m trying to identify the potions I can safely do without.



Another interesting feature of unicorn horns is that if you dip them into a harmful potion (such as confusion), they will purify that potion into water. This means by dipping a unicorn horn into each potion in my inventory, I’ll be left with potions that are at almost at worst, harmless.

There is a catch though – I haven’t identified potions of polymorph yet. If I dipped my unicorn horn into one of those, it’d transform the horn into some other tool, and unicorn horns are too important at the moment to risk like that. So first, I’ll dip some amethysts in my inventory into the potions to make sure I don’t have any potions of polymorphs. I know the purple gems are amethysts solely because I have six of one kind of purple gem and two of the other. Amethysts, in yet another of Nethacks wonderful special cases, also turn booze into fruit juice, which helps consolidate things further.



I then go to the fountain in the north-western part of the room (near the stairs), and engage in liberal application of pick axes. This results in a destroyed fountain and a pool of water. Not to miss an opportunity, I take off all my clothes, drop almost all my possessions, and jump in with the potions I’ve determined to be useless for a bath. The bottles are filled with water rather than booze or fruit juice, and I have nine clear potions.

In a stroke of genius, I also remember to equip my dagger after finishing my little swim.



My next step is to dump my water on my altar, and to kneel down and pray. My god is well pleased, and uncurses my amulet (I actually didn’t know it was cursed, having never bothered to take it off). More importantly, I now have nine bottles of well aged holy water.

Holy water is very important in Nethack – dipping something in holy water will cause cursed items to be uncursed, and uncursed items to be blessed. So for instance, I could dip a loadstone in holy water to uncurse it, and be allowed to drop it. Lacking one at the moment, I bless the following –

1. My bag of holding. Blessed bags of holding reduce the weight of the items inside by more than uncursed bags of holding.
2. My unicorn horn. Blessed unicorn horns have better odds of healing things faster, and this means that they’re more likely to work when you need them to.
3. My remaining magic lamp (remember this)? Having done the Gnomish Mines, this opens myself up for a wish.
4. The gray stone I found at the bottom of the mines.

I suppose it’s time to explain this stone. One kind of gray stone, guaranteed to be found at the bottom of the Gnomish Mines as a kind of prize, is a luckstone. Normally, changes in your luck will wear off after some time passes. For instance, when I broke a boulder in Sokoban, the penalty to my luck eventually wore off. An uncursed luckstone will stop the effect time has on your luck, so the alterations never wear off. (Note that while you can have both bonuses and penalties to your luck at the same time, they’re added together and evened out. Thus, you won’t have simultaneously good and bad luck.

Now, blessing my luckstone means two things. First, only bonuses to my luck don’t wear off normally – penalties will vanish over time. Secondly, you get a boost to your luck simply by having a blessed luckstone in your inventory. This is a great benefit, especially later on.

What make this even more powerful is that one of the easiest ways to increase luck is simply by sacrificing to your deity. It doesn’t take that many blood sacrifices before your luck will be maximized for as long as you hold on to your luckstone. Moreover, now I have the food supplies to be able to camp out at this altar longer than I cold before.

The section that follows is incredibly boring. Essentially, it consists of me zapping my two wands of create monster, killing the resulting monsters, and then sacrificing them to my deity. Lather, rinse, and repeat until you stop seeing the four leaf clovers that accompany sacrifices that result in a luck increase.



I prayed earlier, so my first set of sacrifices go toward reducing my prayer counter to zero. Each time you pray successfully, you start a timeout counter. Until the timeout expires, if you pray again, your god will get mad at you. You can either simply run down the clock, or sacrifice monsters. The more powerful the monster, the more it decreases the timeout until it becomes zero again. Until the timeout is zero, you won’t get the other benefits of sacrificing.



This is the point where I start getting luck bonuses, as noted by the clover appearing.

Note here that I sacrificed a Tengu, whose corpses can grant both teleportitis and teleport control. Some people are willing to take a gamble and eat their corpses (teleport control is a very powerful ability), but I’m not willing to take the risk of the endlessly irritating teleportitis at this point. So into the cauldron of despair he goes.



One of the blasts of my wand creates a giant beetle. Eating the corpse causes the game to give in, and finally, finally, finally grant me poison resistance (as indicated by the message “you feel especially healthy.”) This had degenerated to outright absurdity.

The wand of create monster can also create peaceful monsters, which is unfortunate. Even a chaotic doesn’t want to annoy them, and they can play with your inventory or block your aim. In this case, the green @ is another elf, and the “i" is a quasit. (Note that killing and sacrificing the elf would do interesting things, but I’m not going to risk that yet.)



And finally, I finish what I came for. Next time, we’ll play with my new toy. I promise, I have no intention of sacrificing much again -- boredom kills in this game. We'll see some for holy water and to be able to pray again, but I mostly have what I want from my god.

User input time – what to do with the magic lamp! I’m taking this seriously, so no wishing for iron chains or a figurine of a succubus. (If I get no feedback, I’ll go with the standby “blessed greased fixed +2 silver dragon scale mail.”)

Yeah, I love those starts. While I'm morphing my pet, I also try to transform my spellbooks too, in order to diversify my start.

Baby dragons are especially wonderful when they grow up.

Is... is that a real item? I want that to be a real item.

Well, if you really wanted to, you could wish for some of the artifacts from other classes.

Or a wand of polymorph is always fun.

But I think I'll actually vote for a Blessed Statue of an Archon. Or whatever it's called.

I'd wish for the armor so it gets my vote.
Aww...you're not going to get sacrifice to get Magicbane?

Look at the message window in the final screenshot.

Excellent, Magicbane is one of my favorite things about wizards.

Peeps are going to have to explain a) Magicbane and b) the significance of the wish.

I planned to detail both of these in the next section -- Magicbane was a sort of cliffhanger.

Wish for your GDSM.

You're going to ascend this character.

Wish for 3 cursed scrolls of genocide...
or
Blessed Figurine of the Archon

Fixed that for you. And I'd prefer silver to gray in this case -- I have a cloak of magic resistance and Magicbane already. Silver frees up my amulet slot for something interesting later on.

True enough! Although you have work to do on that cloak unless you want to get grabbed by a ;. =)

Warning -- Nethack jargon where I don't even attempt to explain anything yet.

Actually, ;s aren't a big deal. In watery levels they inhabit, if I do find an oilskin cloak, I can always use it as a swap, relying on Magicbane for my resistance. Freeing up the amulet slot also means that I can use ESP to find them early, or just wear an amulet of magical breathing to oblivate the whole bloody problem.

My experience is that because Wizards are so strong once their early game is over, they don't have big problems with aquatic creatures. They can detect them early (using detect monsters, ESP, etc), and fight at a range, especially if I get cone of cold, teleport away, etc.

Cone of Cold is so much fun on those levels. Bawhoosh! Instant icebergs!

Pretty much all characters are overpowered by the mid-game. If I have the four biggies (magic resistance, reflection, poison resistance, bag of holding) before my quest level I know I'll touch the amulet. (Providing I don't die of boredom in Gehenna.)

Oooohhhh.....so many things to wish for:

finger of death if this were later game. magic marker. but yes, the +2 B/G/F GDSM is the best option, and basically the guaranteed first wish from everyone.

....unless you two-hand, in which case Grayswandir is quite sexy, and best to wish for early before you get too many artifacts in the game otherwise.

As I promised, the ASCII version is located http://mysite.verizon.net/res10gez0/...LP07aASCII.htm for those purists among you.

The tile version is http://mysite.verizon.net/res10gez0/...LP07aTiles.htm .

Note that I'm terrible with HTML, and used Microsoft Word to generate those.



The last time we were here, we killed a lot of monsters, and sacrificed their warm corpses on the black altar to my pagan god in a blood ritual that wasn’t nearly as interesting as it sounds like it should be. I finally received my reward, the athame named Magicbane.

Artifacts in Nethack are weapons (and normal artifacts are always weapons) with special properties. Some can be found simply by naming the proper item (naming an elven dagger “Sting” actually transforms it into an artifact), these aren’t all that powerful (there are also benefits to keeping the number of artifacts generated in the game as low as possible.) On very rare occasions (though it has happened to me a few times), an artifact will simply be generated randomly in the dungeon for you to pick up. Much later in the game, some monsters will be carrying specific artifact swords if they haven’t been created yet.

Like some classes, there is a specific artifact Wizards have set for them to be their very first gift, the athame Magicbane. Athames are apparently some sort of object used in rituals, and are considered to be daggers as far as skills are concerned. Magicbane doesn’t do a whole lot of damage, but it has some properties that make it a very powerful first gift.

First off, I can engrave “Elbereth” in one turn without damaging my weapon, which acts as a safety valve (especially if you’re short on ways to burn your message into the ground.) Magicbane also does more damage per hit than conventional daggers. The artifact also provides artifact resistance when wielded – this is helpful if my cloak gets damaged or destroyed. Later on, monsters will start throwing curses at me, which Magicbane will block. Finally, when you hit monsters with this artifact, you’ll get a random magical effect (such as scaring the monster.) Getting Magicbane is quite a big step on your path to victory.

Now, some people will continue sacrificing at this point so they have one weapon for combat and then use Magicbane while exploring. I don’t have the patience to do that, so my plan is to sacrifice enough that I can pray again, and we’ll continue our quest from there.



Luckily, this conga line of giant rats will make things pretty fast, and I doubt this will take long.



See? Note that because you’re sacrificing nearly all of your corpses, you don’t want to play with altars until you have a strong food supply. Having artifacts, luck, and holy water is so attractive in the early game that I used to starve characters rather than diving.

Now, about that other magic lamp.



Players in Nethack can, under certain circumstances, get wishes. One common early source is a magic lamp. Sometimes, you’ll find genies in bottles (but this is less reliable.) If you drink fountains or sit on thrones, you also have a chance for wishes (though it’s also rather dangerous.) Of course, the most powerful source of wishes are wands of wishing, which can give you multiples.

Contrary to every expectation, Nethack doesn’t follow the D&D tradition of using wishes as a method to screw up the player in the most devious ways imaginable – they’re essentially played straight. If you wish for sliver dragon scales, you’ll get silver dragon scales, and not, say, silver dragon scales being worn by an angry silver dragon.

You can wish for nearly every item in Nethack, with surprisingly few provisos. One is that if an item has bonuses, the higher bonus you wish for, the lower your chance of actually getting it is (+2 is usually considered the best compromise.) You can wish for artifacts, but your chances of getting the artifact go down each time – my experience has been that during normal gameplay, this isn’t worth the effort (certain kinds of artifacts that you aren’t suppose to have will make this point by trying to kill you.) Generally you can’t wish for more than one or two items at a time, though there are items that (for good reason) break this rule. And no, you can’t wish for the amulet of Yendor (the item we came to this dungeon to find in the first place), nor the items critical for getting the amulet.

Early in the game, wishes can radically change your course because of the power level of the items you can get. Some of the better plays wish for tins of green dragon meat – it seems trivial, but it’s a guaranteed way to get poison resistance. Others will wish for powerful spellbooks or amulets of life saving (if you die while wearing one, it disengages and resurrects you.)

After thinking about this, I decided to go with an illustrious Nethack tradition, silver dragon scale mail. This is light armor that provides intrinsic reflection (allowing me to use another amulet when I find one) and huge bonuses to my AC, all with no penalty to spellcasting. The survivability aspect to a character class that has trouble finding usable armor is just too attractive. Other people in the thread suggested gray dragon scale mail (usually the right choice), but this just didn’t make sense to me. I already have my cloak of magic resistance and Magicbane providing me that particular ability. Silver will free up my amulet slot later on.

I considered a blessed figurine of an archon (which, when applied, would create a pet archon), and that finished in a strong second (tied with a spellbook of identify.) I decided against it for a few reasons. A big one was the chance that the archon wouldn’t be friendly, resulting in a wasted wish. It’d also make pet management trickier, since I could never afford to leave it alone – pets that don’t eat go feral very easily. Since I don’t have a magic whistle, it could result in delays while I drag my pet to the downstairs.



Note that my AC went from eight to negative three. This makes me much harder to hit, and will make meleeing much safer. I won’t have to rely on magic missile quite so much.



Before proceeding further, I store some of my unused items. I’ll certainly come back to this level later on.



The first order of business is actually to proceed upward – I want to buy the potion of gain ability now that I have holy water to make full use out of it.



I’m stronger, faster, and more beautiful than ever. I need one more point of dexterity and several more points of charisma (Dez’s lack of charisma hasn’t been keeping me up at night, but there are a few benefits. It’s not like I have to actually make a choice about which stats to increase.)



Rope golems, unlike their siblings the other golems, don’t leave anything behind when they are destroyed. Unfortunately, they’re pretty dangerous opponents – they can choke you and prevent you from running away. I resort to further missiles and reduce it to twine.

My descent continues.



I stop at the Oracle level (the spell failures in the message box are me trying to practice detect unseen – it’d be a great spell if it weren’t for my 50% failure rate) to engage in some recreational vandalism. If you destroy statues (either with the spell force bolt or my pick axe), there’s a chance (which improves the deeper you go) to find a spellbook inside. This is apparently a reference to another Roguelike titled “Larn,” and where Larn got the idea from I have no idea.



After finishing my work, I hop up the stairs for a quiet place to read. The single spellbook I found contains “jumping.” The spell of jumping allows you to jump to a visible square with an unobstructed line of sight and within a radius determined by your skill level in escape spells. This can be used to escape from sticky situations when necessary, but it’s rather unattractive with my low rate of power regeneration. It’s also good for practicing the escape spell school, which includes some very attractive high-level magic.

As you might expect, the “knight” character class has the built in ability to jump. Yes, knights jump in an L like the chess piece.

It could have been far worse.



You might remember that during our first trip here, this room contained an army of soldier ants. I’m still not willing to melee them, so I instead waited one spot northwest of the doorway for the ant to come directly southeast of me and the doorway, and thus in range of a magic missile. The spotted jelly directly in front of the doorway meant that the ants couldn’t go after me directly.

I go down further, and get hit by an orc using poisoned weapons. I’m almost tempted to just keep standing here just to show off the fact that I don’t fear him anymore. On fear of him simply pulling out a wand of death, I demure and throw some daggers.



Speaking of our old enemies, I also take the chance to zap some leocrottas and eat them. Sadly, this doesn’t confer any benefits, but it is satisfying.



This is just the game taunting me, showing me how it could have had the chest blow up and kill me. But it didn’t, and just wants to keep me on my toes. The chest contains another mysterious gray stone.

All right, I have the holy water now and I’m sick of breaking my leg every time I see one of those god forsaken rocks. Let’s tear the band-aid off, and go for it.



Yep, a loadstone. Identifying stones inside chests is very difficult, and I wanted to do this anyhow.



I dip the loadstone in holy water, allowing me to drop it. Note that if I picked it up, it would automatically curse itself again.

Later on, I might transform myself into a rock mole to eat it.



On the next floor, I see a shop closed for inventory with its door locked. This happens every now and then, and if you simply unlock the door, you’ll be fine. However, it’s very easy to miss the message on the doormat when cruising through the dungeon, and simply kick the door down. This will cause the shopkeeper to get unhappy with you. Now, if you have visible gold, they might let you “pay me for the door repairs” and let you live. Otherwise, you just have to run away. I’ve lost several characters to angry shopkeepers by not paying attention to this.



I unlock the door and waltz on in (when grocery stores are closed to inventory, they don’t react nearly so well to me picking the lock so I can buy something.) This is another potion shop. I record the price list, and buy two more blessed potions of gain ability (I was lucky in that they were blessed to begin with – no holy water necessary.) All of my stats are now maximized save for charisma.



We can now add “doors” to our list of nemeses.



I really don’t like the way that party of monsters in the southeast corner is looking. We’ll try to go around it for the time being (note my low power level.) Later on, we’ll get better crowd control spells and this will be a breeze.



I find a crested helmet on the ground. At this point, I’d normally just check to see if it’s cursed and if not, wear it to see what happens. Unfortunately, there’s one specific helmet that automatically curses itself (among other things) if you put it on, so you have to be careful. At this point, I’ll just dump it in my bag of holding until I can identify it more fully. There are a few really useful kinds of headgear, so the extra weight is worth it. However, given that I haven’t yet found a single verified scroll of identify, this could be awhile.



I encounter a yellow light, which helpful blinds me, thus activating my telepathy and showing me the wild monsters in perfect formation in the southeast. I don’t think I want to go that way yet.



The black unicorn is a welcome change (the black color coding means that it’s peaceful. I try half-heartedly to get it positioned to throw gems at, but it counters my efforts (your best bet is getting it stuck in a hallway.) If I had more magic, I’d try using the jumping spell to improve my position, but not now.



I nip around the top, careful to avoid anything that looks like a fight (this really isn’t like me at all.)

Note that seeing rocks on the ground like this is a good indication you should search hard before moving – it usually indicates the presence of a rock trap and an unfortunate monster meeting his end there.



Two sinks on one level. Don’t worry, I promise that we’ll be having fun with sinks very, very soon.

Oh god, not again. This time, rather than the themed throne room I skipped before, we got to see a whole variety pack of dangerous monsters, starting with a helping of fire ants. This room is extremely dangerous, and I really don’t want to deal with it either.

Later on, I’ll make a key for which monsters are what, but all you need to know for now is that they’re bad news.



Fortunately, the monsters start out asleep, so after dealing with the fire ants and a few other unusually alert monsters, I manage to slip away.

Unfortunately, there are no paths to the staircase that don’t involve going into that room and killing monsters.

Fortunately, I can make my own paths with my pick axe. Apparently, boring large holes in the wall isn’t enough to wake up these monsters.



Further do I descend. Maybe we’ll stop running into giant armies of monsters. Or, maybe I’ll just stop running away from them.



Remember doors, one of my new dungeon hazards?

Add floors to that list. Nethack is a veritable no-mans land.

Now that I’ve identified loadstones, land mines have also taken care of the important task of breaking my legs.



Generally the message “Vlad was here” indicates a door leading to a hole somewhere. Later, we’ll meet Vlad.

The jelly monster near me is surprisingly deadly – I’ve had powerful characters devoured by these guys. They do acid damage, which you have to wear special equipment to resist, and can engulf you to prevent you from escaping. Fighting them is also hard – meleeing them with Magicbane would expose me to the acid, and the jelly could corrode my daggers.

Luckily, there are always magic missiles. I eat the jelly and descend further.



Wait, what? I’m getting a telepathic message? From an NPC?

Nethack has NPCs?

And what’s this about a …ic transporter?

I wander around aimlessly, and receive fall into a portal (the blue one, the orange one is on the other side.)







I’m not sure I like this “place that isn’t a dungeon” in my dungeon crawling. However, I press onward. We have some random clouds and a large body of water (the red thing on the east side is the portal, it takes me between this world and the dungeon.)

The corpses were my idea.

Note that there are two little ghosts west of me. One is a harmless manes – even level one characters could eat them. The other is a lemure – a high leveled undead ghost-like thing that can take a lot of damage and drain my levels away.

(The card game Magic the Gathering was intended to include a lemure in the Ice Age set, but the artist got confused, and drew a lemur instead. Frankly, it made the card more memorable, and much more adorable. http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazin...com/arcana/340 )



The giant mass of rock to the left is actually the tower. Note that the black parts aren’t unexplored. They’re just the masses of darkness to show how evil things are.



It has a cool throne in it though. But not visible doors in it. You might think it should be opened with sheer magic, but no.



It was opened with a pick axe. Unfortunately, this involved systematically hacking at every wall to try to find one that breaks. And yes, there was just one – every other wall in the building is indestructible.



My wonderful quest leader then examines me to determine my suitability.



I measure up so badly that I was ejected from my world and told to become less worthless. I need to become level fourteen. I’m level eleven. And as I mentioned, you can’t grind for EXP to any useful extent in Nethack.

So, rather than making war, I’ll embrace the alternative. And no, it doesn’t involve ceasing to run away screaming from monsters.



I find a giant and promptly eat it. My strength has actually been maximized, so it serves no purpose. (strength at eighteen for non-elves actually works on that horrid percentile system from D&D, so characters can continue to gain until they are in the highest one percent of characters with eighteen strength. This requires a lot of giants, and I am glad to be spared the atrocity.

Moreover, I shouldn’t have tasted it -- there was a very high chance the corpse would be a problem.

Giants only occur normally in flavors – fire giants, frost giants, storm giants, stone giants, etc (I’m sure they missed an element somewhere. No wood giants?) If you see just a vanilla giant corpse, it wasn’t from a living giant – it came from undead giants, like a giant mummy. Thus, this corpse was probably a giant zombie, and eating it was probably not my best move. Somehow, I emerge unscathed.

Next time, Dez will later push her luck still further with a little something I call “cockatrice egg omelets.”

On my first ascension I had to make do with elven chain until I got to the Castle, whereupon I promptly wished up my +2 GDSM. I think I had a cloak of magic resistance but prefered to go with displacement instead, giving me displacement/magic resistance/reflection (from the amulet).

Amulets of life-saving are nice, but they aren't a substitute for playing well.

My second ascension I played a Caveman who actually found everything on his own and had no wants by the time he found the wand in the Castle. Even made his own GDSM, though he just wore the scales for a while. I think he ended up using most of his wishes on magic markers for enchant weapon/armor scrolls.

No, wait, one wish was for a T-shirt.

Secret best class.