Part 3: Barrow-Ups

Continuing on in the Barrow-Downs, Mitch II finds a princess who has been kidnapped by 12 Baby White Dragons. These guys have a frost-based breath weapon that they use rarely, as well as a fairly nasty claw-claw-bite melee attack.



Some get into melee range, and I decide to bust out an Area - Disenchantment spell we picked up awhile back. Disenchantment's only special effect is to drain the pluses from items the player has equipped, so when we use it it's just straight-up damage that very few monsters resist.

The Baby white dragon grunts with pain. <5x>
The Baby white dragon cries out in pain. <2x>

Not bad; one casting (for about 10% of our mana) has half-killed one dragon, and a followup does for it. We can't kill all the dragons in one shot, but fortunately we don't have to since most of them haven't twigged to our presence yet.

We kill a few others by stunning them with a Sound Beam and then slowly dissolving them with Acid Bolts while they lie helpless. A single hit from our 2d20 Sound Beam is enough to stun a dragon for over 10 turns, which is more than a little absurd.

One of them does hit us with a breath attack, which doesn't do much damage...until I decide to rest and recover mana.

You have been given a light cut. You have been stunned.

Turns out the dragon's breath weapon turned the tile we were standing on into ice. Ice can make you slip when you try to walk on it, but worse is that it periodically deals ice-elemental damage to you. This ordinarily comes in the form of monsters lobbing gigantic rocks of ice at you, which is why it stuns and cuts you. I guess in this case we spontaneously slipped and smashed our faces open against a frozen rock or something.

On a related note, fire attacks can turn the tiles they hit into lava. Which deals something like 2d6 fire damage to you when you step on it.



Let's try a little trick here. We picked up a hilariously expensive Inertia Ball spell recently. For half our mana, we can hit this dragon, and...

The Baby white dragon starts moving slower. The Princess gets angry! The Princess dies. It grunts with pain. It grunts with pain.

Oops. Except she's still there:



And she's still happy with us. Princesses are immortal. And the glass cages they're in apparently don't stop ball spells from hitting them. This game is weird.

Killing all of the dragons gets us to level 13 (we put the points into Temporal, getting us closer to casting Essence of Speed), and of course the Princess's reward:



We need a pick or shovel if we want to dig through things, but we can also simply blow away any rock walls with our Blast - Wall Destruction spell, so the pick is only really useful right now for chopping down trees. Cord armor could be useful, or it could be something dumb like Resist Electricity. On the other hand the Awl-Pike is almost certainly useless except for selling. So we get the armor.



Sweeeet. Elven armor provides resistances to acid, electricity, fire, and cold (the "basic") elements, plus one random other element, and a stealth bonus. As the game says, we'll need to *Identify* the armor to find out those extra attributes, but this is still a welcome upgrade to the Robe we've been wearing.

The next level has a Fumblefingers quest; his sword's been stolen by Mongbats this time. This is irritating, because Mongbats can fly through forest walls, and their AI favors running away until they're in a room, at which point they try to ambush you. This would work better for them if they weren't scattered all over the level due to the quest rules. Instead it just makes it doubly hard to corner them so they can be blasted.

We also encounter Bullroarer, the Hobbit:



He's a fast hobbit who notably invented golf by chopping an orc's head off so hard it went flying and landed in a hole in the turf. Mostly he's just a fast melee opponent.

Bullroarer the Hobbit is dazed.
Bullroarer the Hobbit cries out in pain.
Bullroarer the Hobbit cries out in pain.
Bullroarer the Hobbit is no longer stunned. Bullroarer the Hobbit hits you. Bullroarer the Hobbit hits you.
Bullroarer the Hobbit says: 'Help, ho!' Bullroarer the Hobbit dies.

That Sound Beam is really coming in handy. He doesn't drop anything interesting though, at least not compared to the loot we've been getting from princesses.

Killing the Mongbats is a little tricky, but they're worth absurd experience; we get another level and push Temporal high enough that we'll be able to cast Essence of Speed...as soon as we retrieve the spellbook from our stash on the surface.

We also find Smeagol, and blast him down with some Area - Nexus spells. Turns out that Nexus only teleports the player, so it's another source of basically-unresistable straight damage in the hands of a thaumaturge.

Smeagol says: 'Violence is no solution!' Smeagol dies.



Smeagol's drop is special: it always includes a Ring of Invisibility. I think he also has a minute chance of dropping The One Ring, but I've never seen it happen. Still, Rings of Invisibility are handy because they basically neuter the AI of many enemies, especially early on. The only problem is that if you can't see invisible yourself, then @ disappears...



You can turn on the "highlight the player with the cursor" option, as above, to still see where you are, but I'll just play without the ring on for now instead.

More Mongbats later, we hit level 15...

The Mongbat dies. Welcome to level 15. You can increase 6 more skills. The voice of Tulkas booms in your head. 'I have a task for thee. Centuries ago an ancient relic of mine was broken apart. The pieces of it have been lost in fallen temples. Thou art to find my lost temple and retrieve a piece of the relic. When thy task is done, thou art to lift it in the air and call upon my name. I shall then come and reclaim what is mine! The temple lies a long way to the south-west of Bree, and a long way to the north-west of Minas Anor, I can feel it.'

Phew. Hi there, Tulkas. Because we aren't atheists, we have a chance on each level-up to get a god quest, which involves going into a dungeon placed randomly on the overworld and searching for a relic piece. The reward for finishing this quest is 5 skillpoints' worth of ranks in the Prayer skill, which provides access to god-specific spells, and lesser access to related magical realms. Tulkas's god spells all deal with combat and thus aren't that useful for us. Most of the god spells aren't great, to be honest, unless you worship Melkor. His related magical realm is Earth, so if we invested in Prayer we could cast Earth spells at 80% of the level of our Prayer skill.

Bottom line is, this isn't really worth all that much. Especially since the god quest dungeons can be really nasty. Tulkas's temples are tiny and packed full of monsters with lots of HP and nasty melee, so we could easily get overwhelmed there. I wouldn't want to take one on unless we had a Wall Creation spell to get us some time to breathe.

Finally, finally, we kill the last Mongbat and get our reward:



Easy choice here. Combat is pointless, Summoning is pointless, Antimagic is actively harmful as having even a single rank it in prevents us from casting any spells (it's a combat-oriented skill that shuts down enemy spellcasters). So we grab some free ranks in Divination. Conveniently, this gets our Sense Hidden spell, which we've been using to detect traps, up to a high enough level that we can temporarily see invisible each time we cast it.

Next level, Fumblefingers has lost his sword again! To some Green Molds, yet another stationary enemy type. Good job, buddy!

I guess to be fair at least he isn't getting captured by the things. Lookin' at you, Princess.

Anyway, this level is wholly uninteresting, since we're massively overlevelled for it. But we do find a Compendium of Deep Thoughts!



Still have no idea why these are in the game. I think this is what passed for humor in the late 90's?

Our reward for vanquishing the mighty Green Molds:



Ehh. We'll take Symbiosis, I guess. Symbiosis allows you to form a symbiotic relationship with a friendly immobile monster; you "wear" it and gain access to some of its powers, and it'll occasionally take a hit for you or contribute some melee damage. Increasing the skill gives you better access to its powers and improves the damage-sharing/damage-contribution effects. If nothing else, later in the game we can grab some Scrolls of Summon Never-Moving Pet, go to the bottom of some deep dungeon, read them until we get a friendly Death Mold, and equip it.

Heading back to town, we grab our stashed spellbook:



This will literally make us 60% better at everything we do.

We also grab a discounted Scroll of *Identify* from the alchemist, and find that our armor of Elvenkind provides resistance to both poison and blindness. I didn't realize you could double up on resistances like that; cool! Blindness is annoying; we can't cast spells from books while blind (though we can still use thaumaturgy spells). And we can't read scrolls, see enemies, etc. of course.

The bookstore has the top-tier Conveyance spell for sale:



This is unspeakably handy for rapid controlled movement through the dungeon. We'll want it eventually. Dwarves get a similar skill as a racial ability and it's the best thing about them by a long shot. Unfortunately, right now we can't afford the book. Oh well.

Back in the dungeon...more deep thoughts!



I should really stop screenshotting these things. They're just so...dumb. And keep in mind that there's several times more "thoughts" than what's in that screenshot; the listing scrolls down.

The next level, the princess has been captured by some Clear Hounds. These guys are invisible, but you can still see them via infravision. And they're pushovers in combat, especially since there's only 6 of them. Incidentally, you can view your quest list (including the number of monsters you have to kill for random quests) by hitting ^q.

While wandering the level looking for the Princess (and by association, her captors), we find a gigantic seething throng of...kobolds.



That's Vort the Kobold Queen and her entourage (the other purple k is a Large Kobold Captain). Fortunately, if there's one thing we're good at, it's spewing damage over a wide radius. We just have to get close...



cast Area - Nexus, listen to the screams, and kill 16 kobolds.



Mopping up is similarly uneventful.

Vort the Kobold Queen says: 'Yes! Yes! YES! YES! YY... AAARRRGGGHH!' Vort the Kobold Queen dies.

Classy. Unfortunately nothing interesting drops (Just some mildly enchanted gear that's too heavy to be worth lugging back for sale). But on the plus side, just beyond the carnage is the princess!



The "guarded by 6 monsters" room splits the guards into two groups of 3, on either side of the princess' cell.



We have powerful beam spells.

The Clear hound dies. <3x>
You failed to pick the lock. <31x>
You have picked the lock.
The Clear hound dies. <3x> O Great and Noble Hero, you saved yadda yadda.

Our reward is...oh, hey.



Two really heavy weapons, or a spellbook (with somewhat dodgy grammar, but DarkGod is French so I'm willing to cut him some slack). A spellbook for a realm we can use (Temporal magic). And because every princess item is enchanted, this spellbook is guaranteed to be fireproof. Nice.

You have a Fireproof Tome of the Time.



Guess we don't need that spellbook of Essence of Speed any more! Magelock magically locks doors, which is fairly pointless, but once it hits level 30 it can place Glyphs of Warding instead, which act like the Elbereth effect in other games, preventing monsters from attacking you in melee. Slow Monster might be worth using, but I have a feeling monsters are good at resisting this version. Essence of Speed you already know.

Banishment teleports all monsters away. ToME uses "Genocide" to refer to what Vanilla Angband calls "Banishment" (presumably for political correctness reasons). Being able to cast Genocide / Mass Genocide requires you to worship Melkor. Really, Melkor is the best god to worship for any number of reasons, it's just that he's evil incarnate.

On the next level, the princess has been captured by Bandits; easily dispatched. Our reward:



For some reason, highly-enchanted arrows in ToME are hilariously expensive, which means we stand to gain a lot of money here. The smallsword is probably just Slay Orc or something; we take the arrows (Flight Arrows are just weaker arrows, and somewhat lighter). We get 16 Arrows of Frost (+6,+6) (which we'll later sell for 10k gold).

Finally, on the last level of the Barrow-Downs (level 10, 500'), a princess has been captured by 11 Tigers. This is actually somewhat dangerous, as Tigers are fast and have decently strong melee. But we can now haste ourselves as well.

Tigers also are highly-alert and will chase you down from a long ways away. Thus we encounter them first while we're mopping up a group of Snotlings (very weak orcs).



Essence of Speed now takes us to +8 speed (thanks to some skillpoints we dumped into Temporal earlier), which is nearly a match for the Tigers +10. After that, a couple of Area - Nexus spells put paid to the Tigers. The Area - Nexus spell I've been using is on the third sheet of spells, putting it probably around rank 15. I think Area spells fire 1 ball attack per rank, so that's 15 randomly-targeted 2d24 nexus balls. I think you can see why that's so good. If we ever get a wall creation spell, we'll be able to target those balls much more precisely, and that's when things start really breaking.

Pretty soon, we find out why only 3 tigers made it to us:



That's a princess in a lake of fire, with tigers stranded in the little islands in the corners. Also a bunch of Phantom Warriors, moderately powerful melee enemies that come in groups.

We just spam a View - Acid spell to hit everything with 3d19 acid damage each. Naturally this kills the princess each time we cast it, but she'll be okay, and the tigers die in short order. Our reward choice is between a Basilard, Quarterstaff, and Dagger. The dagger could possibly be one of the early artifacts, so we take it. The only problem is, how do we reach it?



Best we can do is just two steps in the lava. Oh well.

You move across the shallow lava. One of your Arrows of Frost (+6,+6) was destroyed!
You move across the deep lava.

And only 20 damage taken. We do have fire resistance, I guess, but that still seems weirdly low for lava. Lava which is in the middle of a forest. This game is weird.

The dagger's just a Dagger of Slaying, which deals a bit more damage. Oh well. Taking the down stairs leads us to...



Bree! Normally there aren't supposed to be stairs at the bottoms of dungeons, but the princess quests force them and they just take you back to wherever you last used Word of Recall.

We're done with the early game now. Let's take a look at Mitch II before we go.



Note the "Tactic" and "Explor" settings in the lower right. You can vary your tactics from "cowardly" to "berserker", which gives penalties/bonuses to your accuracy and damage, your stealth, your saving throw, and your magic device skill. As a non-combatant class there is literally no reason for us not to go cowardly. The exploration mode ranges from "slug-like" to "running". The former gives -10 speed in exchange for boosts to stealth and searching; the latter gives +4 speed at the cost of same. There's no reason to ever intentionally slow yourself down, and while I don't like the massive stealth penalties that running incurs, it can be useful to turn on from time to time. Just don't leave it on.



The rings and amulets (and the lantern) are from miscellaneous exploring. Levitation is quite handy as it gives some protection from terrain damage; regeneration is fantastic as it affects both HP and SP regeneration rates. Otherwise, we can't really afford the weight of wearing lots of armor, and besides we don't spend much time in melee range anyway.



Our inventory. Reveal Ways shows doors and stairs on your map, and is only really here to make dungeon navigation more pleasant. Disarm saves us from ever having to walk on traps, which can do nasty things like summon monsters, teleport you around, teleport your equipment around, deal massive damage, drain your stats...basically, don't ever trigger traps if you can avoid it.

The Rod of Illumination can light up darkened rooms. We could dump a couple of skillpoints into the Fire realm and get Globe of Light for the same effect, but eventually we should get spells or artifacts that will provide light for us, so I'd rather save the skillpoints. The Staff of Teleportation is a panic button: we can use it, even when blind or confused, to teleport to a random location in the dungeon. Never travel without one (unless you're immune to blindness and confusion of course).

That's all for now! Next time we go beat up some orcs.