Part 11: Upper Slith Temple

Stairs.












This is where Kane and One-Eye's mental resistances really start to break down. They have a pathetic 12% and 14% chance, respectively, to resist mental afflictions (like Daze and Fear), and slith shamans (shamen?) love to spam an area-effect fear spell. That kind of spell tends to be utterly useless in our hands due to enemy mental resistances being fairly high, but it's lethal in the hands of the enemy, as they can reliably take out your frontliners.

Basically what I'm saying is, Kane has had better days. Skull for fear, empty head for dazed, and the lasso for being immobilized by a slith combat discipline. The wolf head is War Blessing, shield is Protection, and weird blobby sail thing is Cloak of Curses (that permanent buff Byff can cast that causes our attacks to occasionally debuff our targets).
Still, we emerge victorious, just in time for Elly's spellpoints to run out and force a return to town.

...




Some steel javelins, which have better damage than the longbow One-Eye's using right now, though the longbow has +5% accuracy.










It has a Fine Robe and an Ensnaring Wand:

Could be useful.
The next room has a nasty combination of Slith Shamans, a Slith Warrior, and several Inferno Worms (like Frozen Worms, but...you know). What follows is a lengthy process of teasing out the enemy in as small of groups as possible. Everyone levels up to level 9, making us that much more effective and less prone to getting a terminal case of facestab.

Imagine where we were just standing, but covered in fire, blood, and Kane's head, and you have a pretty good idea of how Alternate Universes nos. 15-27 went.




And two more inferno worms. Fortunately, they can be pulled out one by one.





Touching any of the three pools restores 50 spellpoints to each party member. Saves us on trips back to town, anyway. They can only be used once each though.




A trap that we don't have the requisite Tool Use skill to disarm (we currently have 6 Tool Use throughout the party). If we proceed anyway...

Remember when I said last update that Kane had 80 hitpoints? Let's not go this way. Not yet anyway.




On the plus side, there's a Scroll of Return Life in there. Because no trash heap is complete without its angry vermin and random high-value treasure.

















There are various sliths patrolling around the perimeter of this room. With careful timing, we can sneak out, kill one, and then retreat back to the entry before others notice us.

...or we could get dragged into a fight, that works too.







Notice that switch on the western wall? Behind it is a closet with two slith warriors, a spellpoint-restoring pool, and chests containing an iron breastplate for Kane, and a Speed Burst scroll.






Just looks like five ordinary sliths, right? Well, and a couple of Lava Worms in the corners. But the center slith is Priestess Puruass. Things are about to get ugly.
Annoyingly, she starts out as nonhostile, and only turns hostile a) if you're close enough, and b) it's her turn. As you are unable to damage friendly units in any way, it is impossible to get the drop on her.






A lot just happened, so let's take it in stages.
1) Kane got teleported outside. That's annoying; it'll take him a couple of turns to get back into the fight.
2) Two Cave Slimes appeared next to him. Cave Slimes are utterly inconsequential (Elly can one-shot them with her bow); they literally just serve to slow Kane down.
3) One-Eye got charmed. He has a mental resistance rate of 14%, so this was basically inevitable. He'll stay charmed for 3 turns, or until he dies; we have no way of curing charming (yet).
Charming is fucking broken in this game, and not in a good way. Your melee characters will basically never have adequate mental resistances, so monsters that can charm you are always capable of turning a 4-on-1 fight into a 3-on-2. Moreover, your party members are hilariously lethal when fighting against you. Monsters have high health and defense, balanced by having relatively low damage output. Party members are the reverse. Thus, a charmed party member is very likely able to one-shot his former allies. And what are you going to do to stop him, kill him?
Eventually, we'll get a spell that can remove mental status ailments (Curing only does physical ailments). In the meantime, we're very fortunate: One-Eye somehow managed to miss Elly, and doesn't seem to understand how to use his bow.

Good.






Weirdly, with all of us clustered at the entrance to the room, Priestess Puruass shows no interest in doing much of anything; she just hides behind the altar and periodically "banishes" Kane two steps away from where he stands by the doorway. I believe we're out of range of her spells, which has confused her AI. Meanwhile we pick off her bodyguards one by one as they charge the door, which has become our own killbox.
Unfortunately, things take a turn for the worse when we try to back out of the room to drop a quicksave (you can only save when out of combat, and can't stop combat when there are hostiles around); the priestess chases us all the way around the room, terrifies One-Eye (there's that mental resistance failure again), and then roasts him to death.








Elly blesses and protects everyone, and Kane uses a Speed Burst scroll, giving everyone 5 bonus AP per turn for awhile.

Hopefully this will give us some leeway against her attack spells.



Unfortunately, we have a problem. Our accuracy is abysmal, and so is our damage. Kane and One-Eye miss about as often as they hit, and deal puny damage when they get through. Even Elly and Byff's spells are not doing a great job of things. And the priestess of course has gobs of hitpoints and no real limit on her spellcasting. One unlucky turn can let her terrify half our party -- and don't think that Byff and Elly are immune to mental effects. Worse, now that we're out in the open, if she decides to charm someone, that person is going to kill one ally per turn unless they suffer a spontaneous attack of AI stupidity. Though at least the odds of her choosing to cast Charm are quite low.
Also the priestess can do her scripted "banish and summon cave slimes" trick even if she can't see you. And there's two possible banish sites, so you can't even trick her into banishing you to where you already are. So that's fun.



This universe cancelled on account of the priestess one-shot Elly and Byff with a single spell. In fact, this happens rather often, forcing us to reload from the save we dropped right before resurrecting One-Eye.
That Spellward scroll, which reduces elemental damage for the party (much like Steelward reduces physical damage) means merely that she will probably kill someone with her AoE spells rather than certainly do so.


New universe time.
We can deal damage to her, mostly through repeated castings of Smite. It just goes very, very slowly, and there's a lot of things she can do to screw up our battle plan.



Kane eats it to a combination of a fire spell and an attack from the Escaped Experiment that the priestess summoned -- she has access to the top-tier summoning spell and they're a pain in the ass. Byff revives him with our other Scroll of Return Life, but Elly gets frightened...


Note her in the bottom-left corner: exit, pursued by a giant rat. Still, this is the closest we've gotten, in many attempts, to winning, so we press on.

One-Eye gets banished to the opposite end of the room (where the Cave Slimes and Byff's lizard are still ineffectually duking it out), and Kane eats a flamethrower to the face, but Elly's gotten over her fear! Now she just has to make it back to the rest of the party while getting gnawed on every turn.


And Elly ate a lightning bolt in the face and died.









Ha ha ha ha ha holy shit we did it.


























And thus did we do a dungeon way, way before we were supposed to. Total resources expended in that final fight alone: 8 healing potions, 1 Speed Burst scroll, 4 speed potions and/or elixirs (gives the same AP bonus as Speed Burst scrolls do, for a longer duration but for one party member only), 2 Restore Life scrolls, a Spellward scroll, 6 steel javelins, and all 3 charges of that Entangling Wand we found.










...
Yep, so that wasn't the right dungeon at all! Whoops.




Back at the temple...




Not bad, though Byff doesn't get to keep it. Kane and One-Eye can always use better resists.











Round one: four Slith Warriors and a Slith Shaman. We hole up in the temple and cut them down as they try to funnel through the doorway. It gets a bit hairy when we have to step out, as a warrior latches onto Byff and refuses to let him be, but nobody dies.






Two Slith Warriors, a Slith Flinger, a Slith Mage, and a bog-standard Slith. Wonder what that last one thinks it's doing here. We lure one of the warriors around the corner and kill him, then take the rest on as a group.



A Frozen Worm, two Sliths, and Defender Ssss'Ato, a unique slith warrior who mostly just has about four times the HP of a normal warrior. This would seem odd, but the game kind of expects you to be worn down from fighting the priestess at this point.
We blitz the worm down so it can't run away and pepper us with ranged attacks, kill the basic sliths, and then wear down Mr. Defender over a protracted battle. As a pleasant bonus, everyone levels up.


Not bad, and I'm amused that we got the +2 version of this belt before the +1 version.












Bizarrely, this fight is just a bunch of ordinary Sliths and Raider Huss'sha, another unique warrior. No magical or ranged support units to deal with, so it's cake. Like the Defender earlier, Huss'sha is just a beefier Slith Warrior.







When we started this temple, we were level 7. Now we're level 10. It's been a bit of a slog, but we should be in much better shape for tooling around the rest of the Slith lands now. The difference those few levels makes is highly noticeable -- Kane and One-Eye are far more accurate, and everyone's somewhat more durable.
Here's the lower half of the temple:

It's just a warren of tunnels. The demon councilroom (with the key to the upstairs temple) is in the northeast, and the stairs in the northwest, with the pen holding three Frozen Worms just east of it. Otherwise, there's sliths of all types scattered throughout.
Here's the upper half:

It consists of set-piece battles placed every few chambers, with far fewer basic sliths and more shamans, warriors, and flingers. And worms of course. The bits of incomplete map are blocked off by magical barriers and that lethal trap. And Priestess Puruass is (was
