The Let's Play Archive

Angband

by TooMuchAbstraction

Part 9: Equip SCUBA and Dive

Update 9: Equip SCUBA and Dive



Last time, Freude found a vault in the dungeon that he wasn't quite strong enough to crack. But we got a bunch of new toys, which makes it even more imperative that we start getting down to the depths where the normal monsters are challenging.

That in mind, I picked up a stack of Scrolls of Detect Doors/Stairs; they ought to help us dive faster.

You enter a maze of down staircases. (to 1600')

Back in the old days, gain-stat potions were "native" to 1600' -- that is, this is where they stopped having to pass special out-of-depth checks in order to be generated. As a result, the conventional wisdom was that once you could handle, oh, about 1000', you dove straight to 1600' and stayed there until you'd hit the stat cap for the stats you cared about.

That's boring, so we aren't going to do it. Anyway, stat potions are more spread out now; we've already found three. We'll get our stats up as we dive.



Right, down staircase to our west. That's where we're headed.



Fire Hounds, a Fire Giant, and a Baby Gold Dragon (who breathes sound, remember). Let's just head to the exit and leave these guys alone.





A ghost! And we saw it without having to lose experience or get our INT or WIS drained! Huzzah for See Invisible. Ghosts can do all that, and they pass through walls, but like most G enemies they're quite fragile. This one dies in three hits.

You enter a maze of down staircases. (to 1650')



Okay, fine, I guess we can explore another vault. This one is called "Pac-Man"

The brown walls are permanent rock. You'll notice that there's no easy access; we have to dig our way in. Unfortunately, our current weapon and STR score aren't really up to tunneling through granite (not without our old Ring of Digging, anyway), so if we want to get in, we'll have to explore a bit and hope for some help -- a digging tool like a shovel or pick, or a Wand of Stone to Mud, or a Ring of Digging, or in a pinch just a heavier weapon.

Exploring the room to our north nets us a new scroll: Aggravate Monster. This does the same thing as those Shrieking Mushroom Patches did back in the day, so they're total junk.

The Barrow wight misses you. The Barrow wight hits you. The Barrow wight touches you. You feel your life draining away!


Barrow wights show up in groups. Otherwise they're every bit as fragile and generally harmless as the other wights. Most of the really nasty W enemies are wraiths (like that Nether Wraith last update).

One of them drops a Chromium wand, of Disarming. These will fire a ray that disarms all traps along a line; occasionally helpful, since some vaults are chock-full of traps. Another one drops a scroll of Protection from Evil. This gives you a temporary anti-evil repulsive field, which has a chance of preventing evil monsters from hitting you in melee. Problem is, it only affects monsters whose level is less than your own. Considering that the player's max level is 50, while monsters range all the way up to 100, you can see the problem with this spell.

In a corridor, we find a Wicker Shield which pseudos as excellent; about a hundred turns later, it fully-IDs as a Shield of Resistance, which grants resistance to the basic four elements. Excellent, if wholly redundant as long as we're wearing Hithlomir. However, we now have considerably more flexibility in what armor we wear.



In this room we find a Lucerne Hammer, which weighs 12 pounds. Maybe it can help us break into the vault?



800 turns? I don't think Freude's stomach would hold out that long



This is an Algroth, backed by some Ghouls. Algroths are mostly notable for having a poisonous claw attack, and for being ripped from David Eddings instead of Tolkein or D&D. Behind the Ghouls are some Cave Trolls, which makes me suspicious so I break out the Staff of Detect Evil...

You sense the presence of evil creatures! You have 21 charges remaining.


For a moment I thought we'd found Bert, Bill, and Tom, the three Stone Trolls, but alas, it's just a random group of three Stone Trolls, some Cave Trolls, and the Algroth we already killed. How strange. It's just as well; Freude isn't strong enough to tackle the brothers yet. Individually they're a bit weaker than Lokkak, but between the three of them they have a hell of a lot more health.



This is a multi-hued dragon; a young one, in this case. Multi-hued dragons have access to all four basic elements (acid, fire, lightning, and cold), as well as poison. They also tend to be stronger than the "pure" dragons -- more hitpoints and nastier melee. And of course they resist all basic elements. This one isn't especially dangerous, but Ancient Multi-Hued Dragons are a serious threat.

It drops a Lance, which can dig through granite in 80 turns! That's thanks to its colossal 30-pound weight. I...don't think any of the Angband devs is especially familiar with medieval weaponry. Anyway, that's good enough for us to break into the vault.

You sense the presence of evil creatures! You have 20 charges remaining.


Here's a useful command: if you hit [, then you get a list of all monsters you are aware of.



It's sorted by the monsters' levels, and calls out the ones that it thinks are unusually nasty (though I'm not clear what rules it uses; Ethereal Drakes are more dangerous than Water Trolls). The main thing to watch out for here is the Death Knight, a fast enemy with strong melee and a few nasty spells.

You tunnel into the granite wall. <122x> You have finished the tunnel.
You tunnel into the granite wall. <64x> You have finished the tunnel.

That "80 turns" thing is an average, by the way. Anyway, that was enough to get us into the vault:



And this is just about a perfect setup. Only one monster can get into LOS of us at a time, but we can see what the next monster we fight will be. We should be able to clear the vault of everything dangerous from right here, assuming we don't have to run away.

After going through a few chump enemies, we take out a Dark Elven Lords without even getting hit It's always nice to see concrete evidence that your character is getting stronger.



Aw geeze. Behind the Ethereal Drake we are currently pounding into the dirt, there's a Colbran. Colbrans (Colbrani? Colbrun?) are a pain. Fast, durable (like all golems), and they love to spam electricity attacks and spells at you. Electrical attacks can destroy wands and some rods, including our Rod of Trap Location. I'm just going to go ahead and drop it -- items on the ground can be destroyed, but only by area-of-effect attacks. Colbrans only have a lightning bolt spell, so the rod should be safe.

Oh, and Colbrans resist poison

Still, this one only manages to take off 100 HP or so before dying. I guess they are only native to 1350'.

And then I nearly had a heart attack.



You see a Clear hound (unhurt).

Oh, phew.

Light blue hounds are normally nasty pieces of work; this Clear Hound just faked me out. I'll tell you all about them when we meet them for real

During a break in the fighting (well, "break"; a Dark Elven Mage is futilely trying to hit us), I stop to ID some of our loot: a Wand of Acid Balls, a Wand of Fire Balls, a Wand of Lightning Bolts, an Amulet of Regeneration, and a Ring of Light <+2, +1>. The ball attack wands are pretty strong -- 125 and 144 damage, respectively. Lightning bolts aren't so hot, but the player version of the spell always beams (i.e. fires a piercing projectile that hits multiple targets), so they can be useful for softening up groups in corridors. Freude's magic device skill is too terrible to use any attack wands reliably, though, and the ball wands would destroy a lot of items on the floor. The ring is junk; it improves our searching and light radius, but we have plenty of the latter and no need of the former. And the amulet is redundant with Freude's natural regeneration, of course.



That Death Knight isn't moving towards us. How aggravating. He's awake; maybe there's something non-evil in the way that isn't. Oh, and check out those traps. Remember how I said Wands of Disarming could be useful? Yeah, if you're in a fight and surrounded by traps, you don't want to waste turns on trying to disarm them, and you may not want to risk activating them either. Especially that light blue one -- that's a "strange rune", which could either be Teleport or Summon Monsters. That latter option is especially nasty.

There is a bright flash of light! You have 4 charges remaining. (on our Wand of Disarming)

No sense taking chances.



This is a Shardstorm, a vortex of shards. Shards, as an element, shatters potions and causes wounds (grazes, light cuts, etc; they deal damage over time until they heal).

The Shardstorm breathes shards. The Smoky Potion of Nimbleness shatters! You have been given a graze.



You poison the Shardstorm (35). You poison the Shardstorm (23). You poison the Shardstorm (17). You have destroyed the Shardstorm. Welcome to level 28.

Wait, why would a whirlwind of pottery be vulnerable to poison



Moving into the vault, I discover one possible reason why the Death Knight has been immobile. These Zephyr Hounds (green: Air Hound, poison; grey: Water Hound, acid; white: Clear Hound, harmless) won't pursue us until we enter a room; meanwhile they'll just stand around clogging up the corridors in the vault.

Sure enough, after a few turns of hound slaughter, Mr. Knight shows up.



This isn't the greatest possible setup to fight him in; let's pop a Phase Door.



You may be wondering why we didn't try to Phase Door into the vault instead of digging our way in. There's two good reasons for that. The first is that randomly teleporting into a sealed room full of nasty monsters is a bad idea. The second is that you aren't allowed to teleport into vaults, period.

As a useful consequence, any time you try to teleport when already in a vault, you are guaranteed to land outside. Phase Door becomes "drop me by the entrance", which can be pretty handy. We retreat to here:



From here, the Zephyr Hounds should be willing to chase us, since we're in the moat of a moated room; the Death Knight should appear shortly thereafter.



Exactly as planned.

You poison the Death knight (29). You poison the Death knight (23). You poison the Death knight (35). You poison the Death knight (23). You poison the Death knight (35). The Death knight misses you. The Death knight hits you. The Death knight hits you. The Death knight misses you. The Death knight hits you. The Death knight hits you.

If the entire rest of the fight goes this way, this will be easy. Famous last words.

As it turns out, the Death Knight can just about beat us in a damage race. More annoyingly, he manages to land a Fear spell, so we phase away to drink Heroism and heal up a bit.



The Death knight hits you. The Death knight hits you. The Death knight misses you. The Death knight summons some friends.



Clockwise from our right: a White Wraith, the Death Knight, a Raven, a Hairy Mold (stationary; poisonous melee), a Nether Worm Mass (slow; breeds; experience-draining melee), and a Xaren (fast; walks through walls). Fortunately, the Death Knight is almost dead; we finish him off the next round. Then, phase away again:



This is fine positioning; the Xaren will get to us first as it's fast, and by the time the others catch up, with any luck we'll have killed it.

Sure enough, it goes down in a couple of rounds of melee, and the rest of the summons drop easily from there. The vault's clear (barring some non-evil menace that we couldn't detect); time to loot it! We find:
That's that for that. Onwards!

You enter a maze of down staircases. (to 1700')



Down staircase located to our southwest. Kind of far away though. Especially when the corridor we're in is taking us in completely the wrong direction



Pictured: about half the corridor we had to travel down. But I don't mind; check this out!

In your pack: a Platinum Ring of Damage (+0,+8).

Rings of Damage are a warrior mainstay: they directly increase your melee damage output. This one isn't very big, but they can get up to +15 if you're lucky. Wearing this instead of our Ring of Dexterity increases our damage by about 6 points/round. That's maybe not worth the loss of 6 DEX and the DEX sustain, but eventually we'll find a bigger ring that is worth it. Or an innate source of See Invisible, freeing up the other ring slot.



Also in the room, now lit thanks to the Phial's activation, is a Vampire. In Angband, vampiric drain manifests as experience loss, like basically every other high-level undead. It doesn't heal them or anything. Basic vampires are weak; later ones are annoyingly durable. This one still drains 3k experience before dying



Never mind that staircase from before! I have a much better one. In the sense that it's closer.



But first, we have to deal with this Fire Elemental. There's elementals for most elements, of course (the Ooze Elemental earlier was basically an acid elemental). This one burns our Staff of Detect Evil before expiring In the center of the spiral, a bit past the staircase, is this:



The problem with all these high-powered ego items is that they tend to only show up after they stop being useful. Westernesse, for example, would have been fantastic if we'd found one back when we were still struggling with orcs and trolls, but nowadays it's junk. Gondolin is only marginally better.

Picking it up, I notice a change on our sidebar:



Freude has been slowed by his load! I'm amazed we managed it. He's carrying around a whopping 183 pounds of stuff (counting his equipment), and that's apparently enough to put him under a slight burden. Weaker races and classes run into weight restrictions rather more often; mages in particular are lucky if they can manage to carry all of their spellbooks without getting burdened, and often spend the entire early game butt-naked to cut down on equipment weight.

Anyway, ditching the bastard sword and that lochaber axe gets us out of the danger zone. Down! Again!

You enter a maze of down staircases. (to 1750')



No staircases in sight. There's some kind of weird anti-staircase to our south, but Freude doesn't understand how to climb those.

Also, it's at this point that I realize that Magic Mapping also reveals stairs, so I haven't needed those Scrolls of Door/Stair Location I bought



Ah ha! Slaughter a Blubbering Icky Thing, and

You enter a maze of down staircases. (to 1800')



And a worthy fight! Or at least a fight against guys with names. Here we have Sangahyando and Angamaite of Umbar (and a Dark Elven Mage). These guys are twins -- their stats are identical. 4x 4d6 melee strikes per turn, 800 hitpoints, and they can cast Confuse and Slow.



Freude sneaks up to Sangahyando and starts beating his face in, while Angamaite slumbers peacefully. By the time Angamaite wakes up, Sangahyando is already half dead. Also the mage woke up and got splatted for his trouble.



We're winning the damage race against one of them, but two of them at the same time seems ill-advised. Phase away!



And chug Cure Light Wounds! 8 potions later, we're back to full health. Cure Light Wounds is much better than you might think for rapid in-fight recovery.



Annoyingly, Angamaite is the first to make it to the corridor. He turns out to be oddly fond of casting Confuse, but every turn he casts it is a turn he doesn't spend attacking, and we can clear it with a single Cure Light Wounds. Which isn't to say I wouldn't mind Freude actually resisting from time to time.



Oh yeah.

If we were playing a Priest, right now our save would probably be around 60%. The big thing is to start improving our WIS score. Warriors will never max out their saving throws, but they can get them to be fairly reliable.

You poison Angamaite of Umbar (35). You have slain Angamaite of Umbar.

Scratch one! And three turns later...

You poison Sangahyando of Umbar (23). You miss Sangahyando of Umbar. You poison Sangahyando of Umbar (32). You have slain Sangahyando of Umbar.

Total loot: a magical Lead-Filled Mace, a magical Great Hammer, an Elven Cloak (yes!), and the Short Bow of Amras ().



This cloak is as bad as Elven Cloaks can get, but it replaced a [1,-1] Cloak so who cares? The speed bonus is also effectively a 10% bonus to everything we do (remember, +10 speed is double normal speed), which is always welcome.



Amras is a pretty great bow. See that "+1 to shooting speed"? That means we get 2 shots per turn with this baby, effectively doubling its damage output. With our (+0,+0) bog-standard arrows, we can now deal 106 damage per round (53/shot), which is comparable to what we can do in melee. Thank you, Angamaite!

Our gear is in pretty nice shape now! Every slot has either an ego item or an artifact, and we have all of the really important abilities covered. I can't help but feel that the game is being unaccountably generous...but that's how it goes sometimes. I still expect the RNG to drop a freight train on us when we least expect it.

While resting up from beating the Brothers of Umbar, this joker shows up:



This is a Five-Headed Hydra, and they're a nasty improvement over the quadracephalic kind. Fast, damaging, poisonous, and with far too many hitpoints, they can easily beat us in a melee damage race. Fortunately, we have a new bow!

Your Arrow (1d4) (+0,+0) hits the 5-headed hydra (54). The Arrow breaks. You have 32 Arrows (1d4) (+0,+0). The 5-headed hydra grunts in pain.



Repeat a few times, and the hapless hydra (whose only ranged attack is Stinking Cloud, for a mere 24 damage apiece) falls down.



That should about do it for 1800'.

You enter a maze of down staircases. (to 1850')



I see a staircase to our southeast, and feel no particular inclination to stop diving yet. The potion to our east is a stack of 2 Potions of Intellect, which drain a random stat and boost INT. Freude doesn't need INT!

Though I'm reminded that I still haven't drunk that Potion of Nimbleness.

You feel very weak. You feel very dextrous! You have no more Smoky Potions of Nimbleness.

Ah well, you win some, you lose some. We'll get that STR back soon enough. Nothing else of note happens en route to the staircase.

You enter a maze of down staircases. (to 1900')



Bah, a bit sparse. We'll actually have to explore. Yeugh.



Whoop that's an Emperor Wight. These are actually a bit dangerous. Like all wights they're horribly fragile, but they're fast, drain experience in melee (of course), and can cast a few nasty spells. I open fire with Amras, and he responds with a Nether Bolt and Cause Critical Wounds; by the time we hit melee range he's had rather the worse of it

You hit the Emperor Wight (22). You hit the Emperor Wight (21). You hit the Emperor Wight (21). You hit the Emperor Wight (21). You have destroyed the Emperor Wight.



A followup White Wraith drops a Hard Leather Cap of Wisdom <+2>. It improves our saving throw by 1%! Ehh, we'll get there someday. And it's not like we needed the regeneration our old hat was giving us.

The Time vortex breathes time. You feel your life force slipping away!





Remember those light blue hounds? Light blue is the color of Time, and it is a bastard. Time attacks can do one of three things: drain a crapton of experience (this is the best option), heavily drain a single stat, or drain all of your stats. What's worse, time attacks bypass stat sustains!

Fortunately we're just facing a Time Vortex. Time Hounds show up in groups and are way more durable. They are definitely a "leave the level if you see them" kind of threat.

There's no Time-based melee attack, so the Time Vortex just drains your experience when it hits you, which it does, once, before we melee it to death. It's worth 1080 experience for us, which goes some way to restoring the damage it did to our experience total.



Up next: a Maia, and Lorgan, Chief of the Easterlings. Lorgan is a problem. He's fast, he has a whopping 1800 hitpoints, his melee hurts, and he can cast Summon Monsters and Teleport To (which teleports you to a space adjacent to him). In what must be some kind of cruel joke, he's native to 1800', when most characters won't want to consider fighting him until 2500' or so.

Even Freude can't take Lorgan now, especially not without some source of temporary speed. Time to bail.

You have 4 charges remaining. (on our Staff of Teleportation)



This, though, we can handle. The dark blue O is an Ogre Chieftan; they're fast, but that's about it. The light green ones are Ogre Shamans, but they only cast spells 20% of the time. Way to play to your strengths, guys. And the light blue E is an Air Elemental; too fragile to be very dangerous.

And then a Spectre comes out of the walls.



Spectres are slightly upgraded Ghosts. Fast, and their melee attacks cause fear, drain experience, and drain WIS, in that order. The main difference is that they have nearly three times as many hitpoints, so they're liable to actually land attacks.

You hit the Spectre (16). You hit the Spectre (18). You hit the Spectre (16). You hit the Spectre (18). You hit the Spectre (17). The Spectre wails at you. You are terrified! The Spectre touches you. You feel your life draining away! The Spectre misses you.

And now we can't use melee. We're down to one potion of Heroism left -- the Death Knight and his entourage caused fear a bunch of times -- and I'd rather save it for emergencies. Instead (since the Spectre unwisely moved out of the wall into open space), a couple of arrows puts it first to flight, and then to death, or whatever passes for it among the undead. Being able to deal 50 damage with a single arrow is a massive improvement over our previous efforts.

The Grey wraith points at you and incants terribly. *** LOW HITPOINT WARNING! ***


Unfortunately, the fear takes a long time to clear up, and in the meantime a bunch of undead have shown up -- two Grey Wraiths, a White Wraith, and a couple of low-level skeletons that we shot down. And we're about out of arrows. Let's make some distance.

You have 7 Scrolls titled "propera" of Phase Door.



This is not an improvement! That's another Death Knight next to us (and a sleeping Priest down the corridor). We definitely need to clear that fear now.

You feel better. You feel bolder now. You feel bold. You feel like a hero! You have no more Light Green Potions of Heroism. The Death knight hits you. The Death knight misses you. The Death knight misses you. The Death knight misses you. The Death knight misses you.

Clearly a Stormtrooper in training. Despite that we started this fight half-dead, we can still win the damage race (we're wearing that Dwarven armor now, and its STR bonus gives us an extra blow in combat). But there's going to be another fight after this one:



That's a Bat of Gorgoroth that just showed up. They're fast group monsters, annoyingly durable, and can breathe darkness and poison. Again, we could take them, but only if they were the only thing we were fighting. Annoyingly, we'll have to retreat again -- there's just too many monsters out for our blood here.

You have 3 charges remaining. (on our Staff of Teleportation)



Good, a fresh bit of dungeon. While resting up, we get interrupted by a Bandit, then a Killer Slicer Beetle (despite the name, just a generic melee enemy), and then a Cloud Giant:



His boulder took off over 60 HP! Fortunately our ranged attacks are even better; by the time he reaches melee range he's already half-dead, and we chop him to bits.

Then his buddy shows up, and now we're out of arrows.



Uh, what other ranged attacks do we have?

You activate it. Your Set of Gauntlets are covered in sparks... The Cloud giant resists a lot.

Oh yeah. Cloud giants resist electricity. Fortunately, this one is bizarrely slow; we get two unanswered rounds of melee in, and then he tries to flee and gets cut down.

Monsters have somewhat random variations in their speed. I believe they can be anywhere from -2 to +2 speed away from their base speed. Cloud giants have a base speed of 0; between the +2 speed we get from our cloak and Amras, and up to -2 speed from the Cloud Giant, we could be getting almost 50% more turns than it does.

Finally, we manage to rest back to full health. Let's get some revenge!

The room to our northwest contains a Ghast and his Ghoul escorts. Ghasts are top-tier zombie enemies, with paralyzing and CON-draining melee attacks. He takes a point of CON off us, but we're near leveling, so I'm not too annoyed. There's also a couple of mature dragons, blue and red (lightning and fire). At this point, they're mostly interesting for the experience they give and the quantity of loot they drop, though there's nothing useful this time.

The Trapper misses you. The Trapper misses you. The Trapper misses you. The Trapper misses you. The Trapper misses you. The Trapper hits you. The Trapper misses you. The Trapper misses you.



Remember that Tiger way back when that had some stationary invisible monster blocking it from reaching us? That was probably a Lurker; this is the Lurker's older brother. Trappers are fast and have four attacks per round, two of which can paralyze. They're invisible and look like white '.'s even if you can see them (he's standing just to our northeast in this shot). They're also totally stationary, so there's no reason for us to bother killing this one. Crappy experience reward too.



Well, we've made it back to the bats. Looks like the Death Knight was part of a moated room, too. Bats of Gorgoroth, like most "natural" group monsters, won't pursue you unless you're in a room, so they're sort of jammed up here.

The Bat of Gorgoroth conjures up scary horrors. You are terrified! The Bat of Gorgoroth conjures up scary horrors. You are more scared! Something makes scary noises. You are more scared!

So much for melee! Fear is really the warrior's worst enemy. And we still haven't picked up our arrows from the room with all the ogres. The 2 arrows in our quiver aren't gonna cut it. Instead, we just have to wait it out, chugging Cure Light Wounds occasionally, and getting badly poisoned from the bats' melee attacks and breath weapons. Finally,

You smite the Bat of Gorgoroth (25). You smite the Bat of Gorgoroth (29). You smite the Bat of Gorgoroth (27). You have slain the Bat of Gorgoroth.

Revenge! The bats, of course, resist poison, but Dagmor also slays "natural" creatures, which they qualify as.



The Death Knight is back! He's healed to 80% full (when we left him he was about half dead), but as long as we don't get frightened again we should be fine.

The Death knight points at you and incants terribly. You avoid the effects! The Death knight summons some friends.





You see an Ancient multi-hued dragon (unhurt).

Flavor text:

A huge draconic form. Many colours ripple down its massive frame. Few live to see another.

Ladies and gentlemen? RUN THE FUCK AWAY.

Really read 7 Scrolls titled "nimum ormoncto" of Teleportation {!*}?
You have 6 Scrolls titled "nimum ormoncto" of Teleportation {!*}.



Back on the other side of Lorgan. I think we're done with this dungeon level; there's simply too many threats, and our supplies are too low. And there's no way in hell we're taking on an Ancient Multi-Hued Dragon (a.k.a. AMHD) at this juncture. They're fast, they have powerful melee (2x 4d10 claw, 1x 7d10 bite), they're immune to every element we can use, they have over 1800 HP (more than Lorgan!), and of course they can breathe all of the basic 4 elements, plus poison. Sure, if we did manage to kill one we'd get a colossal 19964 experience points, but there's simply no way that's going to happen right now.

I used the scrolls of Teleportation, because our Staff of Teleportation only has an 87% success rate. You don't want to take a 13% chance when an AMHD is in LOS. I seriously contemplated using a Scroll of Teleport Level instead, for that matter; it's entirely possible we could have landed next to Lorgan after teleporting. But we still had 100HP left, and it's unlikely Lorgan could do that much damage in a single turn. The AMHD could have though.

Monster breath attacks in Angband derive their damage from the current HP of the breather. The damage dealt is 1/3rd of the monster's health, or the damage cap, whichever is lower. AMHDs can't hit the damage cap on the basic elements (1600), but they come close to hitting the damage cap on poison -- 616 damage, compared to the cap of 800.

Let me remind you that we don't yet resist poison (well, we could wear that Elvenkind armor, but we weren't at the time). A breath of one of the basic elements would get chopped in third by our resistance, and thus is survivable if we're near full health, but a poison breath would kill us flat-out, no questions asked.

I had hoped to get us to 2000' in this session, but it looks like the game had other plans. Time to retreat back to town, restock on supplies, and be a bit more cautious. Maybe.

The air about you becomes charged... You have 3 Scrolls titled "co abitat" of Word of Recall {!*!*!*}.
You feel yourself yanked upwards!