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

As always –

ASCII – http://mysite.verizon.net/res10gez0/...hackLP08bA.htm
Tiles -- http://mysite.verizon.net/res10gez0/...hackLP08aT.htm



I changed my mind about the making progress bit. We'll do some more polypiling. The abandoned shop being another Deathpony memento, I feel the compulsive need to zap the contents of this store a few times just for kicks.



Contrary to my expectations, something good comes out of it. I find a Hawaiian shirt in the pile after most of the armor has melted away. The shirt provides no intrinsic bonus to AC, but has its own special armor slot and can be enchanted. Some people will even wish for one, but manufacturing them is more fun (for, granted, an eccentric definition of “fun.”)



Afterward, I exit the shop and run into a baluchitherium. Monsters like this one that hit hard are still pretty dangerous to me – my armor class isn’t really that great. I can’t survive melee with it long enough to take it down without significant risk to myself.

Remember though, polymorph doesn’t just work on items.



My new friend the lemure goes down much more easily to my pathetic little dagger. Speaking of spells, here’s my current repitoire:



Lyll does lack Magic Missile, a critical spell that Dez has. However, she more than makes up to it with the sheer variety of what she can cast. Note that almost none of these spells came from polymorphing – they usually came from books dropped by monsters.

Detect monsters shows you all monsters on the map, and if you’re really good, it’ll last for multiple turns. Sleep is its usual overpowered self, and can make escapes much easier. Create monster makes camping out on the altars and trying to please your god much nicer. Detect unseen did what it did last game.

Now, the really good spells. Identify instantly identifies some or all of the items in your inventory – this means Lyll won’t have the problems Dez did trying to figure out what half of her items do. Since the eye regenerates my power so fast, I can cast it on anything I find on the ground to see if it’s worth taking.

Dig will blast a hole in any walls I point it to, almost deprecating my pick axe. Later, we’ll do a lot of digging. Remove curse uncurses my entire inventory at my skill level.



Back to Nethack, Rust Monsters are a D&Dism that are harmless in and of themselves, but inflict severe penalties on any rustable equipment you have. In my case, this means my gauntlets of power. They're most notable for their abject failure to make sense in nearly any concievable actual ecology.

The other significant dungeon feature is another portal. Note that this is one of those gold vaults we showed earlier (the hallway is homemade), but it has a special feature..



There’s a chance that any given vault will lead to a special dungeon level named “Fort Ludios” (no, I don’t know where the name came from.) This level contains a literal army of soldiers, along with other powerful monsters (including dragons.) There’s a lot of money to be made if you clear it out, along with plenty of other treasure, but it can take awhile.

My problem is compounded by the lack of magic missile – there are a lot of freaking monsters to kill off here.



And this is only scratching the surface. Soldiers aren’t that hard, but there are a freaking ton of them. I’m wary about fireballing them too, since it would destroy any spellbooks on the floor.



The duck-like things in the picture (such as the three monsters near the top) are dragons, apparently of the same variety in the Atari game adventure. Dragons are powerful monsters, but if you can kill one you can use its scales to make the same armor Dez had earlier.

This brings up another problem though – Lyll doesn’t have reflection. Each dragon has a breath weapon which can, at the very least, blast my equipment if I don’t reflect it. The big problem is the black dragon – their breath weapon is disintegration (the only way to gain the ability to resist disintegration is to eat a black dragon.)

If you’re hit with disintegration, and can’t reflect it or resist it… Say it with me now…

You die instantly.

Thus, while I can stay here a little while, trying to finish the level is too dangerous.



I stand in the doorway, impaling each solder on my little dagger.

(Soldiers have significant amounts of equipment. One of my Nethack hobbies is to kill a ton of soldiers in the same spot, and then polymorph everything in that spot over and over again.)



Even my mana isn’t limitless, and I have to exit the level for a short time to take a breather. Killing endless armies of soldiers is hard work.



My killing spree continues, but without the same energy. I think I’ll have to call it quits for now, and come back when I have magic missiles and reflection.

I do, unwisely, throw a few fireballs for good measure, just because I can.



I leave, an turn off my unmagical lamp.



I’d like to draw your attention to the wand of cancellation in my inventory.

One of the easiest ways to identify a bag is to name it “holding,” and then put a wand of cancellation inside. If nothing happens, you can remove the name and move on. If the bag explodes, destroying it and everything inside, then you can be confident that the next bag you see named “holding” is a bag of holding.

Nethack has made many people wish they were dead when the accidentally put a wand of cancellation in a bag of holding, leaving them alive but destroying most of their equipment.

Wands of cancellation do have powerful effects to tempt you to keep them in your inventory. Used on monsters, they have a high chance of removing special attacks, such as stealing items from me, breathing at me, etc. Canceled monsters are sad, sad creatures.

When used on items, they remove most magical properties of the item. The items lose any blessings, curses, or enchantment modifiers (positive or negative.) Spellbooks and scrolls become blanked, potions become non-magical (so, for instance, canceling a potion of booze or oil doesn’t do anything.) Wands or tools with magical charges loose all of their charges

This can actually be very useful. For instance, canceling a stack of different types of daggers allows me to use all the daggers in the same inventory slow. It also means that I don’t have to go swimming to get blank potions or scrolls, and gives me a simple way of removing negative enchantments.

Luckily, monsters won’t zap wands of cancellation at you in vanilla Nethack.

No, I haven’t mixed up the tiled and ASCII versions. Nethack includes a special level known as the Rogue level, which behaves as a throwback to the original Roguelike, Rogue. This means that the font and colors are all changed to match Rogue.



The map layout is also different than how Nethack does it’s dungeon levels, instead duplicating the layouts used in Rogue. You only see capital lettered monsters (like Rogue used,) and they won’t leave corpses. An absurd amount of effort was put into making this level behave as closely as possible to the original game.



We continue downward, leaving a simpler time behind us. Ogres are frankly a rather pathetic enemy, but the number of traps showing up is bothersome. I’m immune to most of them, but they can still damage me.



We see another swarm of enemies, and breaking with tradition, I start the slaughter.



Or in the case of another baluchitherium, being slaughtered.'font-size: 9.0pt;font-family:Arial'> They wipe away far too many HP for comfort.



I deal with it the same way I dealt with the last one. This time, I turn it into a spider.

Note that polymorphing monsters is a risky occupation – they sometimes resist, and can even turn into something more dangerous. However, I feel it’s the least bad option at the moment. Later on, finger of death provides a rather more reliable option. After this encounter, I take the opportunity to polymorph a bit more of my inventory, drink potions, and read scrolls.



A potion of gain level does what it says on the label. The message “you feel controlled” means that I now have teleport control (which gives me the ability to select the level or spot on the map I land whenever I teleport, rather than just being dumped randomly.) Eating nymphs has suddenly become much more attractive.



I also drink a potion of enlightenment, which tells me my characteristics. One of the easiest ways to find out what an unidentified ring does is to wear it and enlighten yourself. It should give you an extra ability on this list.

First off, being the Glory of Arioch means that I was crowned as a sort of champion of my deity, at title I’m granted by praying at an altar. This means that I’m given several abilities (such as see invisible, fire resistance, cold resistance, shock resistance, etc) and the spellbook finger of death. However, it also means that I have to wait far longer between each prayer or artifact gift– so much longer, that many people purposely avoid being crowned. It’s not a big deal in this game, but it’s often advantageous to milk your deity for all their worth.

Some people interpret being crowned as your god saying "Thanks for all the newts and gnomes, but I'd appreciate it if you'd get along with the whole "retrieving the amulet of Yendor" bit.

I’m also invisible – one of my very early wands was “make invisible.” This isn’t obvious from screenshots, but it’s actually a game changer, especially in the beginning. It means many monsters will miss you, or not even attack or chase you, which has kept me much safer. It’s almost doubtful I would have survived without this, given my equipment.

We’ve already discussed telepathy (shows me monsters while blind), warning (shows me potentially dangerous monsters without revealing the monster itself, which is useful now for mindless monsters), clairvoyance (randomly reveals the map within a certain radius to me), regeneration (speeds up HP regeneration at the cost of much higher food consumption) and teleport control. I’m very fast due to my speed boots, and the protection relates to several gifts I made to priests.

My luck actually comes from throwing gems at unicorns, rather than sacrificing. I found this to be much faster and more efficient.



I also found scrolls of enchant armor. Each scroll will assign a one or two point bonus to a piece of armor I’m wearing (if you go above five, there’s a chance the armor will just vanish.) I use these on my boots and cloak of magic resistance. With scrolls of enchant weapon this late, I’m trying to focus them on the pieces of armor I’ll be wearing for the rest of the game, rather than, say, my pointy hat or gauntlets of power.

The AC bonus is sorely needed, and puts me finally past where Dez was much earlier in the game.



I also found a spellbook of detect treasure. This is a really, really useful spell that shows me every object on the map. It’ll be especially nice for finding amulets I may have missed, which I can try to use to get reflection.



I encounter soldiers. They throw bottles at me to very little real effect. One of the nice things about telepathy is that blinding me has little effect – I can still see and attack them. Unlike the Ludios Army, this battalion has no black dragon.



On a deeper floor, I find another temple (the priest in minetown got eaten.) This provides both an opportunity to increase my AC further, and for me to get rid of all that heavy gold I was lugging around. At this stage in the game, I have very little use for gold, so the opportunity is appreciated.



Our final AC is eleven. Note that donating to priests has diminishing returns – the absolute maximum AC bonus from divine protection is twenty, but getting over ten is really hard, and as far as I’m concerned, not worth the effort.

We see a beehive, with even a queen bee. Fortunately, the hive showed up far, far past the point that I have any fear of bees. Note that queen bees only appear in hives, never “in the wild” as it were. There are no queen ants.



I also find a spellbook of cancellation. This allows me to use the ability of the wand of cancellation as a spell (and no, putting a spellbook in a bag of holding doesn’t do anything.) It’s absurdly hard to case though, and has a high power cost. By the time I can cast the spell of cancellation, I’ve almost never bothered blasting monsters with it.

It does allow me to ditch the wand of cancellation though, preventing embarrassing accidents.



Cone of Cold, another spellbook found here, works like Fireball, except with a different damage type. This is much more useful than it seems – cold damage breaks potions, but doesn’t affect scrolls or spellbooks. Fewer monsters resist cold, and I can use it as a way to cross water. We’ll have fun with this.



Clearing the beehive doesn’t yield much. Royal jelly boosts my strength, but it’s too late for me to need that (though it also heals me a bit.) There isn’t anything wonderful here, but I eat the queen bee corpse for fun.



The next level is very interesting indeed, and represents a rather dark turning point. And stony. An eel will probably grab me, grope me, and make me his own.

OH MY GOD. When I threw a wand of cancellation into a bag of holding and lost all my hot shit -- including Grayswindir, some scrolls of genocide and a fucking wand of wishing with two charges left -- it took every single ounce of willpower in my being to not quit playing then and there.

I'm glad I didn't, because with some sacrifesting I eventually bounced back and went on to ascend that character.

Also, you're fighting standing directly in a doorway! Baaad Netbrian. Stand to the side of the door and only fight the guy standing in the doorway himself, and you're much safer from thrown potions and wands. Consider your non-reflected butt lucky none of those guys had a wand of death.

Also I've wished for lots of Hawaiian shirts in my time. The extra -5 AC is definitely worth it!

I do spend most of my time outside the doorway, but I hopped in there every now and then to target fireballs or poke around for treasure.

About wands of death -- you can test this in Wizard mode. Cloaks of magic resistance will render you immune to the wand of death. A soldier with a wand of lightning did a number on some of my rings though.

You're using your cloak slot unnecessarily. i'd go for the one that makes monsters miss you more often, or eelskin on this level. About the Eye:

"Carried
Confers magic resistance and faster energy regeneration.
Half damage when attacked by spells.

Worn
Confers telepathy (normal amulet effect).

Invoked
Creates a single-use portal to the closest level of any dungeon branch you have already visited. The jump occurs immediately, and won't occur if you have the Amulet or are teleporting to or from the endgame levels."

You haven't mentioned how you can #invoke the class quest artifacts yet, for special effects (I previously mentioned you can #invoke the Bow of Diana to make randomly enchanted arrows, making life as an archer much, much happier; you can wish for a different class's artifact, but it doesn't have the full set of abilities as having it and being the correct class).

I actually planned to go over the portal ability when I actually used it, but I appreciate the information.

About the cloak slot -- I do plan to use the robe, the oilskin, and the cloak of displacement (should I find one) later on. The issue is that I'm sometimes nervous about depending on my weapon for magic resistance due to pick-axing and that sort of thing. When I ditch the gauntlets of power, I'll fiddle with this too.

I believe that's why dwolfe pointed out that just carrying the Eye gives you MR. No need to depend on Magicbane.

Yeah. You have magicbane wielded, the cloak on, AND the eye. Way redundant in a game where you desperately need to burn the castle wish on +2 fixed SDSM anyway. Whereas the cloak of displacement worn full-time will help your tiny 100hp pool greatly.

It's possible to have the eye stolen, but I can't imagine why you would stop wielding magicbane at the same time; your CHR stat is high enough it's pretty unlikely a nymph will strip you down AND have a leprechaun steal the eye on the same turn.

Finally, by not wearing the Eye for the ESP effect, you can fill that slot with a reflection or life-saving amulet; ESP is nice but I've ascended with without that or warning.

Sorry to jump in to theorycraft here, I'm pretty rusty on the actual playing.

PS: red molds have a nutrition of 30. You consume 1 unit of nutrition per turn. You hit satiated at 1000, and can only choke to death at a nutrition of 2000+. I really hope you hit the wrong button trying to eat that red mold. For those playing at home, you should never eat when satiated unless you have a good feel of what put you over the threshold (i.e. i hit satiated with a red mold, i can eat a couple more vs. i just ate a giant worth 750 nutrition, better not eat another). This was truly YASD that can happen to anyone, whether from a lack of game knowledge, being forgetful, or just hitting the wrong key. Such is rogue-likes.

Good point about the eye conferring magic resistance, I had forgotten about that. I'll probably switch to a robe and oilskin cloak until I get to the castle -- I haven't found a cloak of displacement yet. I doubt getting one will be very hard though.

I don't have any alternative to the eye in my amulet slot at the moment-- I've polypiled every amulet in the game so far, and haven't gotten anything useful. Heck, I'd equip magical breathing if it came up.

About the satiation issue -- I actually seldom eat while satiated. What happened here is that I had significantly underestimated the amount of nutrition gained from casting stone to flesh on boulders.

And yes, we all know what I'm wishing for when I get to the castle. The reflection situation is absurd.

You... you devoured a boulder made of flesh?

Hmm... is it possible to tame the Black Dragon we saw earlier? I wonder how well it would help out as a pet, being able to disintegrate stuff and all that. Plus: pet dragon. What's not to like?

You can tame a black dragon, but it takes some specialized scroll- or spellcraft. Dragons are pretty badass pets, because though they quit using their breath weapon when tamed (all to the better, really, especially if you're lacking reflection), you can equip them with a saddle and ride them. At-will flight!

Question to the other NH gurus: What's the point of wishing for "fixed" dragon scale mail? It's already rustproof and all that by virtue of its material. Is there some effect that fixing confers a benefit to resist?

The downside to boulder sized meatballs is finding large enough spaghetti.

There's no need for it, just good habit to remind yourself that most other things get rusty. The reason we go for +2 is that if you wish for +3 or more, there's a very good chance you'll get a +0 instead of the desired enchantment, which grows as you get greedier on the # you wish for.

On amulets: sorry to hear about the bad luck polypiling for a new amulet. To everyone: at this point in the game you won't starve to death so the extra hunger from wearing the amulet is well worth it for 1.) the ESP, and 2.) you WANT to be hungry so you can eat corpses giving intrinsics (hope for some tengus or nymphs; wizards get intrinsic teleportation control at a certain level, and this is wonderful to have)

Netbrian: Wasn't trying to criticize the play, you're doing great! I'm just a mechanics geek and hopefully people find this sort of talk interesting and worth hearing; I know you don't want to get into it so the LP remains fun and readable. If people don't want to hear it, just skip my posts ...But, I'm also trying to give rules-of-thumb for those that want to play at home.

Links --

ASCII -- http://mysite.verizon.net/res10gez0/Nethack/LP09aA.htm
Tiles -- http://mysite.verizon.net/res10gez0/Nethack/LP09aT.htm



In our last episode, we made an abortive siege of Fort Ludios, and eventually gave up entirely and decided to simply keep diving. We’ve now reached a special transition level. It’s marked by the fact that you can now get ravished by eels and drowned without a second though.



Our triumphant descent is marred by a titan throwing a boulder at me. Titans are very powerful monsters that I probably can’t deal with at this time. One of the advantages to playing lawfuls is that some of the most powerful monsters are peaceful, and you don’t have to deal with this nonsense.



Like this. I’m surrounded by powerful monsters, summoned in by the titan. Clockwise from the top we have a stalker, a disenchanter (they sap bonuses from your weapons and armor), and Elvenking, an Olag-Hai (southeast of the troll is a green dragon) and a fire elemental.

My AC is pretty good, but not that good. The Olag-Hai in particular is a problem – they hit really bloody hard. Moreover, I’m some distance away from the upstairs, so it won’t be easy for me to run away if I get into a jam. This looks like a potential deathtrap.



My solution is to invoke the Eye, which creates a portal to any branch of the dungeon. I chose the Gnomish mines arbitrarily.

I take the Olog-Hai and the Stalker with me, but it’s more manageable now that they’re not surrounded by all their friends.

The stalker is easy enough, but not only can the Olog-Hai do thirty damage in a single stroke, he comes back after you kill him.



So I kill the stalker and polymorph the Olog-hai into an elven zombie. Problem solved.



Now the problem is, after invoking the amulet once, I have to wait around a bit before it’ll work again. Due to popular request, I swap my currently redundant cloak for a robe. The robe improves spellcasting chances – this will help compensate for the gauntlets of power.



I pass the time by moving items into a pile and polymorphing them. I receive a helm of opposite alignment (wearing it makes chaotics temporarily lawful, lawfuls chaotic, and neutrals a randomly chosen one of the two.) There’s a somewhat unbalanced use for this in the very end of the game, but I feel it’s largely more trouble than it’s worth. We’ll see if we can get something better.



I dump myself back into the action, but away from the first set of summons, and minus the Olog-hai (the stalker was mainly a meatshield.)



I make it to the stairs (not before the Titan can helpfully summon more entries into his monster army) and burn “Elbereth” on the staircase. Note that not all monsters will respect Elbereth and run away from me, but many of them will, and it will relieve at least some of the pressure as I try and figure out how the hell to deal with this.



I start getting devoured by a purple worm, and decide to bolt upstairs to recover. The titan finally had gotten into striking distance to me, which didn’t help. Summoned swarms of enemies like this can be one of the more frustrating aspects of Nethack, especially given how limited my sources of damage are.



I recover my power and dive back down. I do manage to teleport the Titan away with one of my wands, but I’m left with this mess of summoned monsters and gremlins. As you all know, gremlins multiply when they’re exposed to water, and there’s a rather lot of water here.

Note that gremlins are peaceful to me, so I can’t just kill them all. I might need to find a pet.



In the heat of battle, I manage to fall into a hole, and wake up three levels down.

Frankly, it’s probably an improvement, since I don’t have to deal with that bloody Titan down here.



I see another freaking Olog-Hai, a shark, and an angel.

My favorite Nethack pet ever was an angel named Mique. I was genuinely sad when she died, and went to great trouble to always keep her near me.

The shark isn’t scary.



Oh this looks fun. There’s a big army of green soldiers, some black dragons (of course they had to be black disintegrating dragons) and a few other random monsters.

I hope you like seeing me take down entire armies, single-handedly and one by one, because you’ll be watching a lot of it.



This screenshot only exists because I love the phrase “shark attacks!”

Cone of cold works wonders for me here – it freezes the moat to make it easy to cross, cold isn’t commonly resisted, and it hits multiple-enemies multiples times.

Note in ADOM, if you’re carrying too much when crossing ice, it can break and you’ll fall in. I’m still paranoid about this in Nethack, despite it not working this way.



I use one of my scrolls of genocide to wipe out liches (there was a little gray lich in the army within the castle.) Liches are very dangerous opponents, especially later on. Some people keep them alive to make the endgame more interesting, but I’m not willing to take risks in an LP (I can kill myself perfectly well playing cautiously.)



I use my spell of knock to bring the bridge down. One of the most famous mistakes in Nethack is opening a drawbridge while right underneath it. What do you think happens you instantly if you do this?



I push a boulder in front of the drawbridge to recover a bit. Cone of cold has been rocking so far – the chokepoint means that everyone is clustered into a nice little group, making a wonderful target. Unlike fireball, my spellbooks will be safe.



Giant eels are very powerful and dangerous enemies. If you’re adjacent to one, they can drag you into the water, and drown you with surprising alacrity. I can pick away from them at a range, but can’t risk my daggers (and I don’t have great direct damage spells.) I won’t be able to get away with this much longer, but I relish the opportunity to turn him into a gold golem. I’ve got the (Midas) touch.



I’m running out of cold, so I decide to go upstairs. This is a maze level, and is an interesting change.

It will wear out its welcome about twenty freaking identical maze levels from now. We’ll be seeing this again, again, and again.

But wandering through twisty passages all alike does give me a chance to re-energize.



I’m one adventurer who knows where her towel is (around her head.) I was slightly worried about what I’d find upstairs.



I don’t like the angel that’s insulting me and throwing bottles at me. I want the angel to be my friend.

This is a different repetitive maze than the last repetitive maze we saw. You can tell by the dungeon level in the corner, and not much else.



I kill Medusa by flailing around (literally) blindly. I somehow don’t think eating her will be a bad idea, but she isn’t very hard. She can make me hard though. The towel around my head meant that she couldn’t look at me (with the predictable consequences.) If you have reflection or a hand mirror, you can reflect her stonegaze attack, but I don’t have either.

On one side of me is that bloody Titan, on the other side, something even worse, an Archon. Or, in keeping with the Greek theme, Scylla and Charybdis.



Remember the Titan? The Archon is worse. It has nasty spells, more summons, and equipment. He’s already making my life miserable by covering me with giant neon “PLAYER HERE EAT HIM” signs.

The gray thing southwest to me is a Mumak. It’s some sort of elephant thing, though I think the tile looks mostly like a giant mouse.



I treat Medusa’s corpse with the respect it’s deserve. It’s a lovely souvenir.



Yes, yes, here we go again. This group of monsters is much tamer now.



I resort to “finger of death.” It kills things instantly, including this irritating invisible titan. The others will go down quickly. The Archon in the corner is still scary.



Then an air elemental eats me. Air elementals are incredibly dangerous, and a genuine threat to me – they can envelope me and keep attacking. They’ll get even worse later on, and no, you can’t genocide them. We’re going to get tornadoed a lot before we’re through here.



Insta-death still works here too. Notice that it lopped of half my life single-handedly. Air elementals are bad news.

I gave up on this, and went back to my castle to continue to attack.

Yellow dragons are scary. They have an unresistable breath weapon. Luckily, the cone of cold rampage has killed most of the soldiers threatening me, so I can continue to blast away.



The acid annoys me so much that I turn him into a crocodile. A soldier caught in the cross-fire suddenly returns to his roots, and his armor breaks. I tried polymorphing the Titan, but he’s too powerful for that to work. More is the pity. The shuddering vibration is the normal sound of items being polymorphed and vanishing.

Note – this happens to you too if you polymorph. The threat of your armor breaking is not trivial.



Yes, here we go again. I put a troll on ice and keep blasting my way through. We’re almost done with this part, but trust me – the most monotonous is still to come.



After breaking in, I promptly douse myself with the fountain water. This is mainly because I’m hoping either for a wish, or for a nymph to appear so I can eat her.



I clear out one of the barracks and finger the ice troll. I promptly tin the corpse, which prevents him from coming back to life to harass me again. Tinning kits are invaluable tools against trolls, which is why I’m putting up with the weight at all.



Enemies that have sources of reflection can be really hard to take down for a Wizard – I have to resort to my daggers, which I’ve pretty much phased out. Angels can start with shields of reflection, and even artifact swords.

She’s beautiful though.



I literally laughed maniacally when I opened this chest.

It’s a wand of wishing, and it does exactly what it does on the box. I think we all know what my first wish will be for.

We'll see me have my way with it tomorrow.

You know those item scrolls someone mentioned that can tame monsters?

You should make one to tame a black dragon.

(...Well, after the reflective armor, of course.)

Hey, whatever floats your boat man.

I'll give it a shot, but it'll probably be rather later in the game, using the spell charm monsters.

Unfortunately, Wizards don't ride monsters very well -- the idea of riding a dragon is so attractive too.

ASCII -- http://mysite.verizon.net/res10gez0/Nethack/LP09bA.htm
Tiles -- http://mysite.verizon.net/res10gez0/Nethack/LP09bT.htm



It’s a wand of wishing, and it does exactly what it does on the box. I think we all know what my first wish will be for.



First, I take out my scrolls of charging. The first wish of many people is a scroll of charging (or a way to get one,) so they can recharge the wand when necessary. My polypiling means that I already have a stash.



Yes, finally! Blessed greased (and for good measure) fixed +2 silver dragon scale mail. I waited until just about the last possible moment, but I now have my first source of reflection, and for that matter, my first body armor.



-18 AC is nice.

My next wish is for a magic marker. These are very powerful tools (frankly, they’re probably overpowered) that allow you to write scrolls en masse. It comes with a certain number of charges, and the more powerful the scroll, the more charges are needed to write it. They’re great for mass producing scrolls, especially enchant armor, or even genocide.

Wizards have an additional advantage here. Unlike most classes, Wizards can (if their luck is high enough) consistently write scrolls that they haven’t identified yet. So if I hadn’t found a scroll of charging, I could still write it with a magic marker with a high chance of success. This isn’t possible for other character archetypes, where the odds are stacked against you.



This is one of the reasons I wanted that Hawaiian shirt – I’m going to wear it and gouge myself with scrolls of enchant armor. We’re going to be a star. The first round has already given me a six point boost to my AC.



One of the interesting facts about Nethack is that scrolls have different effects if you use them while confused. In the case of enchant armor, instead of increasing the bonus on the armor, if I read it while confused, it’ll rustproof a piece of armor and remove all previous damage to it. Enchant Weapon scrolls are the same, except for weapons. (Magicbane is of course already rustproof.)

Of course, this leads to the problem of how to get confused on demand (besides partial differential equations.) The most straightforward way I suppose would be to simply keep potions of confusion on hand until the crucial moment. However, there’s another option. After you read a spellbook to learn a spell, you have a certain number of turns before you forget the spell (it’s a very long number of turns.) If you read it again, the counter will reset for you. The part we’re interested in though, is the fact that if you try and cast a spell you forgot, you get confused and stunned. Wait until you get unstunned, and then read the scroll in question to never worry about rust again!



I now have a wand of wishing, and thus far more control over my inventory, and don’t have to carry quite so much around. Thus, I’m swapping out my gauntlets of power for gauntlets of dexterity. Honestly, at this point the main purpose of gauntlets of dexterity is that they don’t inhibit spellcasting and give me AC, with the bonus stats just being there because I can. They’re kind of like T-Shirts for the fist.



If that wasn’t powerful enough, you can also write spellbooks with magic markers, and still (if you’re a Wizard) with a high probability of success even for unidentified spellbooks. Thus, I can somehow write spellbooks for spells I’ve never seen before, read the spellbook, and know how to cast it. Finally, I’ll be able to do decent magical damage with missiles, and not a moment too soon.



I also wrote a spellbook of magic mapping. This gives you a complete dungeon map of nearly every level. It will make those maze levels somewhat more tolerable, if only because they won’t last as long this way. These are the two critical spellbooks for Lyll, and anything on top of that (given her already bloated repertoire) will just be like a cherry on top.



After my long-awaited silver dragon scale mail and two magic markers, I use my other scroll of charging to recharge the wand of wishing. That’s another three wishes to play with, just like that!

Yes, yes, I can only do this once (the same goes for recharging magic markers.) But it’s fun!



All these spellbooks, enchant armor, and charging scrolls is wearing out my magic markers. However, an magic marker that’s been charged once and is now empty can still be polymorphed into some other tool. Unfortunately, polymorphing things in order to get magic markers is so mind-numbingly tedious that not even I’d go for it.



I stash my wand for now – I need to see if I can polypile or otherwise find another method to get the headgear and cloak I want before wishing for it. This does give me the opportunity to show off my new magic mapping spell.

I clear out another barracks, and for the hell of it, cast detect treasure as well (the green things near the bottom of the screen are kelp fronds, and can somehow be eaten for actual nutrition.)

For good measure, I cast detect treasure before continuing, to know which little vault to go into. I also have to levitate over the hallway due to all the potholes involved. Note that the two little hallways to the east of me contain dragons. You knew it wouldn’t be that easy, didn’t you?



Okay, it was. My skill in attack spells and ditching the gauntlets mean that I can now cast finger of death reliably. One shot up and one shot down means dead dragons and a free trip through the vaults.

The only one that interests me much is the northeast armor vault. I’m going to try and polymorph the armor to get either a cloak of displacement and/or a helm of brilliance, to save myself the wish. I have plenty of food, have no use for more gems, and don’t need weapons.



Though only an idiot would die by overeating, I tin the black dragon corpse to rid myself of most of the nutrition before eating it. This preserves the intrinsics, and I now have disintegration resistance.

Now, we can finish what we started in the fort.



It’s kind of pointless now, but one of the dragons did drop scales. If you wear the scales and then read a scroll of enchant armor, you’ll receive dragon scale mail. Honestly though, I think it’s actually more common just to wish for it directly than to use the normal method of getting it. One of the problems is reliably getting the scales you want – generally by the time you’re seeing dragons, you want silver or gray scales, which probably means a wish anyhow.

Had I found scales before looting this castle, I might have forged them into scale mail as a temporary solution before I got the flavor I actually wanted, but the sequence just didn’t work out that way.

Oh, and white dragon corpses give you cold resistance. Dragon corpses are nice for this purpose, since you’re guaranteed to get the ability in question. None of the nonsense I went through last time around to get poison resistance (Lyll, by the grace of the Random Number Godhead, had a much easier time of it.)



After having fun with polymorphing a bit, I receive my helm of brilliance. Helms of brilliance don’t interfere with spellcasting, and will give me an intelligence bonus equal to the enchantment on it. This means better regeneration, improved failure rates, and more damage. Now that I have magic mapping, the ole pointy hat just isn’t cutting it for today’s modern Enchantress.



Waves of psychic energy? This is never a good sign. It means mindflayers are afoot. They can drain your intelligence with their tentacles, and cause you to forget level layouts and identified items. Moreover, if they grope too greedily and too deep, you can actually die of brainlessness.

The fact that I’m describing this here should indicate that I have no intention of actually dealing with them properly.



Sorry hobbits, dwarves, and bugbears. You had the misfortune of having the same ASCII rune as mindflayers, so you’re collateral damage in my banishment (the Angband term for this.) I’m hoping to avoid another death by stupidity (literally.)



I can continue downward, but I want to finish up some things. First off, being able to safely proceed across this level.



Speaking of stupid deaths, I have no intention to be drowned by deep-sea eels. The oilskin cloak means that monsters that try and grab me will slip off, and I’ll be safe.



I thought this might amuse you – I hope this is a beautiful statue of how she lived, rather than how she died. It did bring back memories of a simpler, more primitive time though.

Unfortunately, bringing her back to life (which we can do, ironically, with the same stone to flesh spell that lead to her death) won’t solve anything.



I make an abortive attempt to fight the Archon, and it goes very, very badly. My attempt to tame him did give me my very own owlbear, but the Archon slaughtered me. I was only barely able to teleport him away.



This time around, at least most of his summons can’t breath in water, so it’ll be a bit safer.

Unfortunately, he has a reflective shield, rendering me rather helpless.

A note about the archon’s tile – I think archons were intended to be the D&D angelic creature (because it’s an obscure monster in a fantasy game, Wikipedia will have detailed information), but the tile artist took the name archon a bit more literally, and drew a magistrate instead.

Frankly, this version has more character.



I eventually hide behind a boulder while I wait for my spellpower to return. Fortunately, the only elemental really worth fretting over after the early game are air elementals, not their pathetic little fiery cousins.

This, by the way, is why archons make so attractive pets. My only real option for damage, throwing daggers, is problematic due to his wall of meatshields.



They don’t resist cold though. Unfortunately, they fly, so my favorite trick of all time doesn’t work – I like to freeze water and then lure the monsters near me. I then cast fireball to melt the ice, promptly drowning them. I do this all the time in ADOM in particular, and it never gets old.

In this case, I have to make a strategic retreat.



Only to encounter yet another bloody freaking titan, which as far as I’m concerned, are Archon mini-mees. At least this one isn’t reflective (wouldn’t it be nice if you could get the destroy armor scroll to work on monsters? It seems very Nethackish to add in an obscure, rarely useful interaction like that.)

I finger him, and then escape upstairs.

First off, I was forgetting Polymorph. Spells like Detect Food are more useful as a means to confuse myself than as actual spellcraft, but this one I’m re-learning.



A word about my inventory –

Most of this will go into the bag soon enough, but I thought people might be interested in the end results of my powergaming spree. I still have my wand of wishing (it’ll be stashed to avoid the odd lightning bolts,) and I’m waiting to see what this adventure yields before I finish up. I still don’t have a proper cloak, but I might go back to magic resistance when I’m done with watery levels, if only because I’ve enchanted it more than the robe or the oilskin cloak. Displacement, which isn’t that uncommon, hasn’t shown up yet.

Right now, my daggers have been stashed. I plan to bust them out every now and then later (especially against reflective enemies,) but they aren’t as general purpose as they once were. The tinning kit is mostly my troll repellant, and I have various other tools (my towel lets me avoid certain sorts of gaze attacks, like the Archon’s brilliance.)

My key and touchstone are basically there because I haven’t bothered to dispose of them yet. With Knock, Identify, and Wizard Lock, they don’t serve much purpose, but weigh so little I feel silly dropping them.

I like to keep at least a few glasses of holy water out of my bag (though I put most of them away.) That makes it easier to deal with monsters that throw curses at me – cursed bags of holding will destroy items inside if you open them.

Lightning is for emergency Elbereth, and Teleportation is for emergency everything else. I keep them out at all times.

The lizard corpse is around because it can ward against cockatrice attacks and eating it helps me if I’m being slowly stoned.

Now, the battering ram of magic missile and the siege tower of my silver dragon scale mail mean that it’s time to pillage and sack Fort Ludios.



The blast of disintegration misses me of course. Had it hit me, I’d have reflected it, and even without reflection I would have resisted it. Obviously, if I had attempted this before getting reflection and/or disintegration resistance, it would have hit me unerringly.

It wasn’t until now that I realized that disintegration is composed of dis-integration. That seems rather derivative.



I continue my rampage. Magic missile has hugely boosted my damage output, and finally given me a reliable way to attack at a range. The people in the throne room above me will be next. We’ll have fun with cones of cold to extinguish them.



See? This is the first game I’ve really let myself go with this spell (due to missing magic missile early on,) and already I’m an adoring fan. The mass destruction from a safe distance just can’t be beat for dungeon clearing.



Unfortunately, the silver dragon reflects missiles and resists cold. I want to preserve spellbooks, so it’s time to storm the gates.



No scales from the silver dragon. One of the few reasons to have stormed the castle earlier was hoping to find silver dragon scales, but it was not to be. Unfortunately, you don’t get reflection from eating their corpses, much as I would have liked that to be the case.



Croesus is sitting in his throne room (he’s also the owner of all those little vaults we keep seeing), surrounded by the corpses of his frozen guards. It’s time for us to take him down, and become the new master of Ford Ludios.



Croesus actually a more powerful opponent than you’d expect from a wealthy miser-king, but even he can’t stand against a force of nature. After a few desultory rounds of combat, I am the new lord.



Again, I literally laughed manically when I found the ring of conflict. This was actually a candidate for a wish, and I’m thrilled to have found one.

Rings of conflict cause monsters near you to be hostile to their compatriots as well as to you. This means that at the very least, fewer attacks will be spent against you, giving you breathing room. Even better though, monsters will often kill each other for your benefit. It’s an almost broken piece of equipment throughout the game.

There are disadvantages to the ring. First, peaceful monsters and pets will also attack you (and you can’t hit back without incurring penalties,) so you won’t want to use it around a powerful pet or while shopping. It also increases your food consumption a great deal, so it’s a trade-off in the early game. My food needs have easily been met, so I have plans for this (for instance, that bloody Archon in the medusa level.)

It also doesn’t work at a very long range, or if the monsters aren’t in your line of sight. Thus you can’t surround yourself with boulders and wait for the monsters to fight it out. Some of the characters between Dez and Lyll started out with a ring of conflict, and still got killed.



I’m rapidly eating the bodies of any nymph I can find, in hopes of teleportitis. Now that I have teleport control, this is very attractive. Not only will I get to randomly teleport wherever I like, but it lets me teleport on demand at the cost of some energy.

It looks like the gremlin nonsense is starting here too. I’m about to erase the whole bloody race from time out of spite. However, there’s a giant room of gold that requires my undivided attention.

The total haul – 40,000 gold. Note that this would have been especially important to Dez, whom hadn’t been robbing shops right out the cradle like Lyll was. We still got some good weapons, and it was fun.



Note all the traps – at the stage in the game where you can get this far though, the traps are only a minor annoyance.

The gremlins mean that polypiling the remaining items on the ground isn’t an option right now.



This comes as a surprise to me, as I thought I had teleport control already, at level 17 (a quick look at a guide tells me I did.) I shouldn’t be getting that message.

Oh well, had I been wrong and had uncontrolled teleportitis, there’s always wishing for a ring of teleport control.

Now for my whirlwind trip downward. In operation nymph-hunt, I’ll also drink at every fountain possible.

This one boosted my stats (well, my charisma) nicely. I just like being the official best at everything.



This water demon (whom actually ended up teleporting himself into a closet, which amused me enough to leave him there) nicely demonstrates why low level characters should avoid fountains under most circumstances.



I feel like I’m wearing a cat.



After all that gold, I actually get no protection whatsoever (though I’ll have clairvoyance for a short time.) This actually isn’t disappointing – I donated it so I wouldn’t have to carry it around anymore, the last few bits of protection can be really bloody hard to get.



Medusa’s starge is still a mess (I’m in the southwest corner.) I still can’t deal with that Archon in my current state, so I mostly have to go around.



We’re going back down, and this time properly. Here I’m cleaning off the stairs so I won’t have to hunt for it again.



Another nymph that doesn’t want to go with me. Oh well.

We continue our trip through the castle now, and dive through one of the holes on the east part of the screen. For some reason, nobody bothered to put stairs to the next dungeon level.

We land near the stairs up (they must be an escalator, otherwise I don’t get how the one-way stairs thing would quite work.) We’re now in the valley of the dead, swarming with undead.



I tried to polymorph the cloak of protection into something worthwhile, but it didn’t work. As a magical cloak, my chances weren’t too bad. Cloaks of protection on their own aren’t all that great, and just give you a bit of a boost to your AC.



I take on a storm of undead. Unfortunately, all those wraiths are misleading. On levels like this one that are considered graveyards, they’re unlikely to lead a corpse. Some people (for instance, if they still haven’t done their quest) will lure them up the stairs to the castle, which doesn’t inhibit corpse generation, but I don’t feel like doing that.

Note that as always, cone of cold is killer here.



I mention the Erinys mainly because it scares me. Not because it’s particularly powerful, but because the tile looks like medusa, and I’m paranoid of being petrified.

She’s still pretty easy to blast away at though.



It’s kind of disturbing to see your own corpse staring back at you like that. The game is dropping subtle hints about the future I suppose.

It’s really too bad that you can’t revive corpses like this one and force them to be your pets. That would be wonderfully awesome.



For instance, running through the dungeon with a revive version of this corpse would be a wonderful way to finish this LP.



I keep blasting through. I found a spell of clairvoyance, which is interesting. Unlike magic mapping, it only reveals a little bit of the dungeon at a time, but it works in levels like the valley of the dead that resist being mapped by normal means. It’s not something I’d go out of my way for, but certainly not worth brushing off.



Despite my temptation to the contrary, I end up genociding disenchanters for the hell they wrack on my equipment, rather than gremlins. I can tell you right now that they’re one of the top candidates for next time.



Amazingly the priest of Moloch is peaceful (and I suffer penalties for killing him,) and I can even donate to him for divine protection. This is despite the fact that he’s the evil deity from which I’m stealing the amulet of Yendor in the first place. I’ve never quite understood this, but it’s a convenient way to get divine protection if you’ve lost it by murdering someone or some other heinous act.

By the way, I have three wishes left. My thoughts are an amulet of life saving, a blessed figurine of an archon, and another magic marker, but I’m open to suggestions.



Unspeakable cruelty and harm? Why if that was a problem, I wouldn’t be playing this game!

The Amulet of Life Saving, definitely - I'd rather not have you lose Lyll in a moment of danger because you didn't wish for one. However, I stand by my desire for a pet black dragon. Named Idoun, if you can.

As for the last wish, what does the figurine of an archon do, anyway?

Figurines, when applied, create a monster of the appropriate type. When blessed, there's an eighty percent chance the monster will be tame. In short, a blessed figurine of an Archon is very likely to give me a pet Archon, with the attendant mass destruction that entails.

This doesn't rule out a pet black dragon though -- they're much easier to tame than Archons using traditional methods. For instance, I could simply use my last magic marker to write a spellbook of charm monsters and that'd probably be enough.

A pet archon would be badass, admittedly. Yeah, that wish combination sounds fantastic to me, though that 20% chance of the archon turning on you scares me a little (though I'm sure you've already thought of that already). Godspeed, Netbrian.

Wish for nothing else. Pack the wand away for emergency situations. None of the three things you mentioned are strictly necessary and you never know what you'll find around the next corner.

I never really understood the draw of life-saving. If you have all your protections in place and play carefully, you should never need one, and if you do manage to fuck up it'll most likely be in a way you can bounce back from. Besides, isn't there a guaranteed one later on?

If you really want a powerful pet, bless a tame monster scroll and go get that purple worm you mentioned earlier.

Your HPs are kind of low. Have you considered nurse dancing?