Part 14: Mitch Makes a Mistake

Alright, this time we're going to mop up the last two optional dungeons and then get started on the endgame. For reals this time.

In our haste to skip through Moria last time, we missed a side dungeon, on level 40.


(Also shown: a posse of hybrid monsters, including some sphynxes, an owlbear, a couple of harpies, a minotaur, a chimera, a griffon, and a swamp thing)

You go into the entrance to a small water cave.



Remember the tentacle monster that almost drowned Frodo at Moria? This is its home: a short series of levels full of water. As you explore, periodically everything will take acid damage; fortunately we have some new body armor that has acid immunity on it -- and we shouldn't need the bonus HP our old armor gives us, not here anyway. The dungeon only spans from level 32 to 34.

The dungeon boss is the Watcher in the Water:


(Shown here as a purple ~)

Flavor text: "A vile creature which seems to consist mostly of tentacles, it seeks to drag people to their doom in the water. Few have ever escaped its grasp." It's a moderately unpleasant opponent if you face it in melee, but its ranged attacks aren't all that hot. Its main claim to fame is that it makes a fantastic body for Possessors, a class whose gimmick is being a bodysnatcher, basically. It has 3 weapon slots, 3 shield slots, 6 ring slots, 1 head/neck slot, and no torso/back (body armor and cloak) or boot slots. And ToME is one of those games where if you equip two weapons, well fuck it, you attack with both of them! Or all three of them, in the case of this guy.

Anyway, he doesn't last against the Black Hole, so we nab our requisite randart and move on.



I've seen much worse. I mean, we're not going to use it, but it's briefly tempting.

One last overworld map, west of Bree and the Sandworm Lair, in the ocean at the end of the world:



It's the sunken city of Numenor!

You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into a submerged way to the lost land of Numenor.



Numenor has seen better days. The entirety of the place is underwater; this presents certain problems.

The Water elemental is destroyed. The Stargazer dies. The Mirkwood spider dies. <3x> The Leather Scale Mail melts! The Human Skeleton melts! The Two-Handed Sword melts! etc...
You cannot breathe! You suffocate!

We don't have gills. Nor do we have any items that let us breathe underwater. So every few turns we take around 50 damage from suffocation. But that's okay; we don't plan on being here long. We do however want to wear our body armor that grants acid immunity, since, as in the Small Water Cave, everything here occasionally gets nuked by acid.

Probability Travel sinks us like a particularly heavy stone, taking us from level 35 to level 50 in 15 turns. From there, a short bit of teleporting finds us the dungeon boss, Ar-Pharazon the Golden:



Flavor text: "Last and proudest king of ancient Numenor. Corrupted by power and avarice, he fell victim to Sauron's wiles, tried to fight the immortals themselves, and condemned Numenor to oblivion." Word of advice: don't pick fights with the gods.

You are really not intended to be here without gear that realistically isn't found until the late game; the entire dungeon is functionally just a gear check to make certain you deserve to survive this place. Ar-Pharazon's strategy, in turn, is mostly to fight a delaying action and hope that the water gets you before you get him. He has 5000 HP, moderately powerful melee (4x 8d12 hits), and can summon monsters, heal himself, haste himself, and teleport you away.

This doesn't help him much when he dies in one turn, of course.

Ar-Pharazon the Golden says: 'And you thought Tristan was unlucky...' Ar-Pharazon the Golden dies. You feel the urge to pick up that plain gold ring you see. The Metal Lamellar Armour melts! The Metal Brigandine Armour melts! The Large Metal Shield melts! You cannot breathe water! You suffocate! *** LOW HITPOINT WARNING! ***

Awright! The One Ring! It automatically gets dumped into your inventory as soon as it drops. Ar-Pharazon is one of the potential owners of the Ring, and the last one left besides Sauron, so this was lucky.

Oh, and we're kind of dying due to lack of air. But that's okay; our backpack has 42 potions of Healing (300 HP apiece) and 45 potions of *Healing* (1000 HP apiece!). So we'll be fine. We grab Ar-Pharazon's loot, queue up Word of Recall, and patiently wait for it to kick in and yank us to the surface.

You cannot breathe water! You suffocate!
etc.
*** LOW HITPOINT WARNING! ***
You feel very good. You have 39 Light Green Potions of Healing.
You feel very good. You have 38 Light Green Potions of Healing.
You cannot breathe water! You suffocate!
...
*** LOW HITPOINT WARNING! ***

...maybe we should have just taken Probability Travel out. Oh well. Soon enough we're back on the surface, none tthe worse for wear. Let's check out what we got!



Ar-Pharazon's guaranteed, and non-random artifact, is a serious contender against our Amulet of Doom for taking our neck slot. +40% mana is always handy and it has plenty of other useful abilities. The water breathing is kind of irrelevant now, though. We couldn't even have worn it on the way back up as our Doom amulet is cursed and we can't break curses without returning to town.

And that's about it so let's get started on the dungeon of Angband and oh yeah we got another toy.



Ha ha ha ha ha oh man this ring is great. We're going to wear it right now!

Really use the Ring of Power 'The One Ring' {cursed}? [y/n]
You were warned not to wear it; are you sure? [y/n]
You were warned not to wear it; are you *REALLY* sure? [y/n]
You were *WARNED* not to wear it; are you *R*E*A*L*L*Y* sure? [y/n]

Sheesh, game! What's the worst that could happen?

As you put it on your finger you feel dark powers sapping your soul. The ring binds firmly to your finger! You feel you are drawn to the shadow world! Your material form weakens. You gain the ability to wreck the world.

There, that wasn't so bad! Let's go back to town and prepare for that last dungeon. The HP drain from the One Ring isn't as strong as our innate HP regeneration, so we can still walk around safely; we just won't heal as quickly as usual.



Uh, hm. Bree has seen better days. No stores, no home, blazing fires (the yellow/red %) everywhere. Ironically, Farmer Maggot, Melinda Proudfoot, and the various townsfolk are still present to irritate us (Maggot and Melinda want us to do a couple of tedious sidequests that I'm ignoring).

Surely Gondolin will be fine though, right?



Hm. I have a bad feeling about this, guys. Minas Anor?



Crap. Lothlorien?



Well hey, they still have a few trees that aren't dead! They can rebuild, right? I mean, maybe?

Really gettting desperate now; what about Khazad-Dûm?



...well, honestly, it doesn't look much worse than it was before.

And this is without even using our power to "wreck the world"! Let's give that a shot and see what happens.

The power of Eru Illuvator flows through you! The world changes!



...okay, a) that is not Eru Illuvatar's power we're using there, and b) that did all of jack diddly. That was the spell Alter Reality, which re-generates the current level you're on (just like taking the stairs up and then down again).

Still, this is kind of a problem. We could go and kill Sauron now, and then his boss Morgoth, and technically win the game, but everyone else is dead, Dave. Mitch may be a power-mad vortex of cosmic destruction packed into a 3-foot-tall frame, but he's not actually a bad sort. Plus you get locked out of the postgame if you wear the One Ring. So let's pretend this didn't happen.



Hooray, Bree still exists! Farmer Maggot can go back to begging us to steal mushrooms from his farm (seriously) in a more pleasant, less on-fire environment! Other than that...all these stores stopped pretending to any kind of relevance long ago, except the Black Market and the inn (which we used for ale to turn into empty bottles). Goodbye, Bree.

We need to take this gaudy little trinket to Mount Doom, which is reachable from Mordor. We never did finish exploring Mordor, at that; we were busily rescuing some princess or something when the plot hijacked us to go fight Morgoth's "army" of about a hundred units plus Maeglin. So we pick up diving where we left off, exploding various chump monsters as we go.

Pretty soon we hit the level cap of 50, which means we're all out of skill points to gain. Here's our end-game skill allocation:



Most of our spare points ended up getting dumped into Spirituality, which improves your saving throw by about 1.5% per point. Our saving throw now ranks as "Heroic", which puts it in the 85%-100% range; not bad, though I wish I knew if we were at the top of the scale or the bottom. This isn't technically our final values, since we can still get training from Fumblefingers, but that training probably won't amount to much.

While liberating a princess from some Hell Knights down on level 62, we find a couple of items of interest:



This scroll removes the "you have slain this foe" marker from all unique monsters, allowing them to be generated again. It's mostly there for Possessors who want a second shot at a specific unique corpse, I believe. We certainly have no need of it.



And this Mattock finally allows us to climb mountains, and also gives some useful boosts and resists. The slays are there because digging tools used to be weapons; notice that Nain has combat boosts but no actual combat dice. The addition of a "tool slot" for diggers mostly just means that players have one more slot to stick stat boosts into. And the fact that Nain still has its combat boosts now means that you fight better simply by having it equipped, making it almost certainly the best digger in the game, barring alchemist shenanigans.

Down on level 65 of Mordor, we finally find the purple staircases that provide access to Mount Doom.

You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into a way to the top of Mount Doom.



Y'know, I don't remember Frodo and Sam having to hotfoot it across magma to reach the caldera. Oh well. Mount Doom takes "the floor is lava" to new extremes, by making the walls out of lava too, and scattering blazing fire tiles (yellow/red %) everywhere. You really don't want to be here without fire immunity. In the worst case, though, if you have abilities or spells that create walls (and Thaumaturgy is by no means the only way to access such abilities), you can create some walls and then clear them, and the floor beneath them will be normal. You'll still get hit periodically by fire damage (just like Numenor and the Small Water Cave periodically hit everything with acid), but at least you can rest.

Anyway, this is a vertical dungeon, so let's just dive to the bottom and

Some powerfull force prevents your from teleporting.
(typos also present in the original)

Gonna have to walk there. At least we can still create Void Jumpgates and use the horizontal form of Probability Travel.

En route, we encounter Uriel, Angel of Fire, soon-to-be deceased.



The game also has Gabriel the Messenger and Azriel, Angel of Death. These guys are seriously out-of-place, so we'll just nuke 'em when we see 'em.

We also find Vecna the Emperor Lich and his escort of Iron Liches:



And yes, by "Iron Lich" the game means the giant floating skulls from Heretic. Marginally less out-of-place than the Christian angelic host.

Vecna gives us arguably the best stat-stick missile weapon in the game:



I mean, we don't really need the speed, but it does make a marginal difference. The only problem is that our boomerang is the only source of resist poison we have right now -- in fact, there've been an awful lot of launchers that we could have made good use of if only it hadn't meant losing resistance to poison. We'll just have to hold onto Cubragol and hope we get lucky.

A few levels later, the game kindly starts us right next to a graveyard.



And the "walls" are just bottomless chasms, so the monsters (which spawn awake) can all start casting spells immediately. Um, we're gonna go...place. That could easily have turned lethal with all the skull drujs, bone golems, and other nasty monsters.

Near the "bottom" of Mount Doom, we find Gothmog, High Captain of the Balrogs!



He's one of the pink U's, down near the bottom of the horde. Everyone else there is asleep. And they're never gonna wake up. We use the "swap positions" power of the Ring of Flare and jump into their midst:



Gothmog, High Captain of the Balrogs says: 'I'm no god...God has MERCY!'

Well, then we share something in common. One casting of Black Hole later, and Gothmog realizes he's made a horrible, horrible mistake.



Due to the open environment, it takes seven castings of Black Hole to kill Gothmog, but he didn't make a single atack or cast a single spell. Attack spells that slow your opponents are so, so good.

Anyway, Gothmog drops an equipment upgrade, of sorts:



I suppose it's inevitable in a game like this that if you allow players to equip ammunition, then someone will make some ammunition that boosts your stats when equipped. I mean sure, it doesn't do much for us, but it's more than we got previously. Note that wielding ammo is not remotely required to actually use missile weapons; you can fire bolts, arrows, etc. from your pack just fine. I think the quiver just lets you shoot slightly faster or something.

Finally, we reach the top of Mount Doom.



Mount Doom is a special level, of course, filled with all kinds of nasty monsters. Lots of demons, undead, giants, hounds, etc. We don't have the detection radius to see all of the monsters on the level; there's an awful lot of them, and we'll pretty much have to kill every single one of them en route to the Blazing Fires at the middle of the map where we'll need to drop off the One Ring.

After blasting through the first few rooms, we get near enough to the center to detect just about everything:



One of the monsters in that small room to the north must be destroying the other ones, because that place was a bit more...inhabited...when we started. Also, Sauron's here! He's the purple "p" just north of our position. Heya Sauron, we found your ring! Do you want it back?

Because you can't have it back.

The next room along our path has a horde of Nycadaemons, pretty seriously nasty demons. More interestingly, though, it has a pack of Aether Hounds, who actually resist Black Hole! In fact, they resist almost every element in the game, because their gimmick is being able to use every element in the game, with a few tiny exceptions.
Like, say, Area - Magic Missiles:



The "magic missile" element is just pure unresistable damage that doesn't destroy any items or damage any equipment. Literally nothing in the game can resist it, so these Aether Hounds don't stand a chance.

All that spamming of magic missiles, however, means that a Nycadaemon is left criminally un-slowed, and it summons Ancient Dragons at us.



Among them is a Great Wyrm of Power...which also resists Black Hole because it also can use every element in the game. Hm. We still throw a few Black Holes out there, to take out the remaining demons as well as the other summoned dragons. Fortunately, from there, we're able to spam Area - Magic Missiles until everything else dies. The Great Wyrm of Power gives us a whopping 80,750 experience, more than any other non-unique enemy in the game. Which, well, fair enough; it's the most powerful non-unique enemy in the game. During the fight, it got several turns against us, and dealt almost 300 damage to us!

You may be getting the impression I'm not taking this very seriously. I assure you nothing is closer to the truth.

Right. Next up: Sauron.



Also pictured: Polyphemus the Blind Cyclops (green "P", also responsible for killing all the chaff enemies in there); Carcharoth the Jaws of Thirst (black "C", Morgoth's pet bloodhound); Cantoras the Skeletal Lord (purple "s", fastest enemy in the game and with a lot of nasty attack spells. And some chaff enemies that are cleverly located in the middle of the room and thus avoided Polyphemus' brain-dead pathfinding.

Polyphemus goes first, and gets Black Hole'd for his trouble. Next is Sauron.



Sauron the Sorcerer is Morgoth's second-in-command, and the big bad of the Lord of the Rings series. He's fast, has powerful spells, hurts in melee, all that jazz. Basically what I'm saying is, it takes two castings of Black Hole to kill him.

Sauron, the Sorcerer says: 'What hast thou done?' Sauron, the Sorcerer dies. Sauron will not be permanently defeated until the One Ring is either destroyed or used...

Don't worry, we'll see him again at the bottom of Angband. As if to hammer home how much the devs prefer playing casters over melee characters, Sauron's drop is exclusively magic-themed: Mage Staves, spellbooks, and powerful rods. Mostly useless to fighters. Cantoras is more helpful, dropping one of the Elven Rings of Power:



It's quite nice, really.

Having dealt with Sauron, the rest of the level is just a slog through a bunch of high-powered undead and demons. It'd be a serious challenge for most characters, of course. We're just past caring.

One last room:



Aether hounds, Great Wyrms of Many Colours, a Great Wyrm of Power, and a whopping 10 Nightcrawlers (gigantic undead Shai-Hulud) and 6 Nightwalkers (gigantic undead titans). Criminy. Screw fighting all these guys. TIME OUT!



The Nightcrawlers can bore through solid rock, so this just somewhat limits the rate of engagement. Still makes this fight a lot more pleasant.

At last, we reach the fires:



This fire is so powerful it could destroy even the most powerful artifacts.
Drop which item?
You throw the One Ring into the Great Fire; it is rapidly consumed by the searing flames. You feel the power of evil weakening. Now you can go on the hunt for Sauron!

Gee, thanks game.

Next time: well, you heard the man. Let's kill us a demigod, and his boss.