Part 37: Doctor Rocktopus - Two

The Adventures of Johnny Eight-Aces Dr. Rocktopus

When we last left our intrepid Doctor, he was doing some deep, intense soul searching about the nature of the world, God, and the religion.



Fuck it, we’re rolling the dice, taking a chance and going for the gold! Nemelex Xobeh is a nifty God to play around with, especially with races with restricted access to groups of items. By sacrificing items to Nem, he will gift you with powerful decks of cards that can be evoke for a variety of effects. On average, this will benefit. It will also be the mostly cause for this run to fail.



I’m liking this God guy already, by worshipping him, he ID’d the amulet we we’re were wear. This Amulet of Faith will increase both the rate that we gain piety with our god and rate that we receive gifts(!!). Soon we will be drowning in decks of cards, unable to use them fast enough, eventually carpeting the dungeon floor with unused playing cards.



Worshipping Nemelex means training up evocations at least a little bit to get the most bang out of your gifts. It’s a good idea for octopodes, as they’ll generally have quite a few evocable abilities available to them through their numerous rings. Luckily, right after coming out of the Temple, Prince Rabbit comes down with a terrible case of dead and we sacrifice his corpse for piety.



And Nem takes the bait! A plain deck, nothing to write home about. We’ll be swimming in Legendary cards soon enough though.



And we get the Zom card for our first draw, which affects us with a random Zom effect. When you see the “ This card doesn’t seem to belong here” message, that’s mean s you got a card from the Deck of Oddities, a deck whose cards are only found mixed with other decks. The deck actually ends up being a Deck of Destruction, packed full of different attack spells.



And now we start mopping up the trash that dare to call themselves unqiues in this dungeon.



Crazy Yiuf
Got tentacle slammed into the roof.



Blork the Ork
Card of Flame roasted him like pork.



Pikel
Pissed me off, got sent to hell.



Ah, the good old Orcish Mines, we aren’t quite prepared to take on the spellcasters, but almost. We shall return once we got some more spells under our belt.



Speaking of which, here is the first spellbook we’ve found. Not what I would’ve asked for, but we’ll build up Charms/Air enough to use Deflect Missiles and Flight for sure. Both are incredibly handy for squishy Octo-doctors.



Here we have an Ogre taking a little nap. I want to try a new trick I recently picked up.



YES! AHAHA. Blade Hands Tentacles is a great spell that we will be using a lot in the future. Had that Axe trap not alerted him to our presence, I have no doubt it would’ve been a one hit kill rather than a two hit, which, with our rather lame stats, is pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, it still has a rather high hunger cost, so I will only be bringing it out for special occasions until it’s feasible.



Special Occasions, like Eustachio. I don’t know why this guy always gives me so much trouble, but between his wave of sometimes powerful summons and constant blinking away, he always proves difficult for me.

I hate Eustachio, I sprout some surgical swords from my tentacles. He doesn’t even get a chance to summon a single rat.



Whelp, seems like the Doctor got careless and stumbled into a shaft trap. We fall two levels to D:11 and Get plopped next to a zombie Hydra, no time for that though! There’s a labyrinth on this level and the countdown has begun.



Simple level design makes it a farce to find. However, we are low on food, already hungry and fairly underleveled to take on the minotaur at the end.

Let’s show Nemelex what it means to gamble with the big boys.



Speaking of which, I should probably talk about some of our god given abilities while I navigate this boring, samey labyrinth.

All of Nemelex’s abilities have to do with manipulating the decks he gifts you, and frankly, I don’t like them and won’t be using them very much with the exception of his “Draw One” ability, which simply allows me to draw cards without wielding a deck. This is mostly out of laziness as a Transmuter, we don’t really carry a weapon that we have to switch in and out.

Personally, I feel evoking from inventory should really just come standard with the cards, but oh well.

Back at the Ranch….



We poach a steer pretty easily. Note, most of the damage I sustained during this fight were from miscast effects. We collect a ton of books and.. wait, what’s this?



This Bronze Gong is an unrandart shield.




A very tempting shield at first glance, good resists, nice +6 bonus and the first couple hits you sustain will be absorbed by your mana pool. However, it should be noted that this thing makes noise and I mean a LOT of noise. Every time you block, you ring the gong, which is a noise effect louder than shouting and just about everything else you can do. You WILL attract enemies directly to you while fighting with this shield. This makes it very dangerous for just about any character using it and we should probably just avoid making much use of it.



Did I mention that Dr. Rocktopus is a very talented percussionist?
Next time on the Adventures of Dr. Rocktopus, we bring down the aROCKalypse to the Orcish mines!