Part 4

We set off on our quest for The Black Dwarf.



Here's our first trog mob. Troglodytes are a bit like orcs, in that they tend to spawn in huge clumps. (This isn't a vault and there are no uniques nearby.) Unlike orcs, there are two types of fairly low-level trogs which can summon. Troglodyte Beastmasters summon lesser trogs & animals, and Troglodyte Witch Doctors summon other similarly-leveled trogs... including other Witch Doctors.

We toss in a few rockets for fun, but we can't kill the witch doctors faster than they summon more enemies; especially since both Witch Doctors and Beastmasters resist earth, which is the type of damage that our rockets (weirdly?) do. (We can kill witch doctors in one round in melee, but that requires getting there!) We move on.

Shortly afterward, we run into this lady:



She's fast as hell, and if we were flesh-and-blood, she could do some serious damage to us with those stat-draining attacks!

Luckily, we're a giant robot, so we kill her and take her magic ice-resistant trousers. (Unfortunately, robots can't wear clothes, so we end up selling those once we get back to town.*)

Finally, we reach dungeon level 43, and almost immediately we see... The Black Dwarf!



We toss a rocket at him. Two. Fire the vulcan cannons. Try a round in melee.



This was the result of two rounds of melee.

We can not kill the Black Dwarf.

Thanks to an enormous amount of luck (and earlier foresight in dumping ~10 skill points into Use Magic Devices), our activation of a Worn Tool of Etheric Travel (teleportation) fires successfully, and we heal up for a while on the other side of the level. Then, uh, the Black Dwarf shows up again, and we decide to leave the level immediately.

Some time later, I check and see that we've failed the Black Dwarf quest. Not sure why it happened this time, but not when I left the level where our first quest ('kill 14 alien pseudopods') was. Is it a chance whenever we leave the level, or perhaps because it was a unique-killing quest, instead of a 'kill x' quest? In any case, still a better choice than fighting him.

Just off the stairs to Level 39, we find another unique!



He spawns surrounded by swans.



Then he dies. (Probably for the best, with that backstory.)

Shortly afterward, I discover two important abilities that I really would have liked to notice earlier.



We've been using Vulcan Cannons, which is a weak ranged attack, and FULGURATOR, which is an enormous rocket. We just unlocked Steam Drill last level; the spoilers claim it's a 'teleport level' effect. I haven't yet been desperate enough to use it. High-Yield Devastation is apparently another rocket attack; we haven't unlocked it yet.

However, there are two more skills at the bottom. Defensive Array is a nice little trick: it boosts most of our elemental resistances for a few dozen turns. Not critical yet, but it could come in handy later. Systems Cypher, though, is something else. When activated (if we get past that 17% fail chance!), it'll fully heal our HP, grant us Heroism (and later, other effects?), and give us +10 speed for a while.

If you remember from TooMuchAbstraction's Angband game, that's a +100% speed increase.

I've been dumping points into the relevant skill for a while (on the mistaken impression that it were passive), but though that wasn't doing us much good before, we now have a very powerful, very reliable buff at our disposal. Excellent!


Soon we encounter another unique:



Who gives us no trouble at all, naturally. Actually, these guys turn out to be much tougher.





Badgers resist slashing, blunt, and earth. That's... all of the elements we have at hand. They're not unkillable, and they certainly aren't very threatening, but they start a bad trend of Enemies We Can't Kill.

First, we encountered some Tunneler Worms, who also resist earth, edged & blunt.



They aren't particularly threatening in themselves, but it's the brown bears following them around who we don't want to tangle with in non one-on-one circumstances!

After a series of phase doors and at least one teleport, we end up here:







Lot 249 we could probably kill, especially one-on-one. The Vorkolak is actually a much larger threat. It resists our weapons and chews through our health pretty quickly; combined with its life-drain effect (which we mostly resist, but only 'mostly'), it is not a customer we want to party with!

We teleport out and recall. The Vorkolak actually reaches us before the recall takes effect; since it's alone, we manage to kill it just before the recall kicks in, though it takes us to dangerously low health.

Back in town, it's time to see if we can pick up some new weapons.



*Yes, I know. See the next episode for more revelations of 'I only half-remember how to play this game!'