Part 2: Mitch II

Alright, let's try this again. Same character as before -- a Hobbit Warper with
a specialization in Thaumaturgy spells.

Incidentally, we could have chosen the Thaumaturgist class, which would give us a slightly better multiplier in the Thaumaturgy skill (1.0 instead of .7), but then we'd be worse at all the other magic realms with a .7 multiplier instead of .8 (or 1.2 for the realms that Warpers specialize in). Classes aren't balanced!

This time we grind to level 4, and pick up these spells:




The main item of interest here is the Gravity Bolt. Gravity teleports its target a short distance away, and also can slow them down. The Nexus and Acid bolts are also useful for the short term, not for any special effects but because they have better DPS than our Manathrust at 2d8 instead of 2d4. And the Area - Plasma spell has great damage potential, but plasma destroys a lot of valuable items; it's sort of like a combination of fire and electricity (which destroys rings, amulets, and wands).

Anyway, we head back to the rogues quest, get knocked out, recover our gear, and set off the plastic-explosive-armed door.



This time, we're going to try to not polymorph our enemies into vastly more powerful foes.

The Novice rogue cries out in pain.
The Novice rogue screams in agony.
The Novice rogue dies.

Three acid bolts, and one dead rogue! Only problem is, all his buddies are catching up to us:



So we fire up the Gravity Bolt.

The Novice rogue disappears!
The Novice rogue disappears!

It's expensive, for the moment, at 4 SP per cast, but we have 49 SP total so we can spare a few shots. That just leaves one more rogue, who gets dissolved before he reaches melee range.

The other rogues show up shortly thereafter, but they've been slowed by the gravity damage, so they're no real threat. Getting hit by slow once takes a normal-speed enemy to -10 speed, which halves the rate at which they can act. That's easily enough to turn a difficult fight into a cakewalk.

That is, of course, as long as the enemy in question can't one-shot you with stinking clouds. Ahem.

There's also a Bandit in here, who is basically a Novice Rogue with more hitpoints. Not enough to protect him from protracted acid damage, though.

The Bandit dies. Welcome to level 5. You can increase 6 more skills. Welcome to level 6. You can increase 12 more skills.

Sweet. Let's get more thaumaturgy spells!



Unfortunately, we've hit the skill cap. Well, this gives us an excuse to broaden our investments a bit. We dump all the remaining points into Divination instead, since knowledge spells are incredibly important, and then stomp over the remaining enemies -- a Novice Mage, some Novice Warriors, and one last Novice Rogue.

You stopped the thieves and saved Bree!

Uh huh. Thanks, I guess. Our reward is the ability to use the thieves' hideout as a stash for our extra gear, and the Dagger that the Bandit dropped, which is always at least somewhat magical. In our case, it's a Dagger of Slay Animal -- totally useless to us with our abominable melee skills, but it sells for good money:



Oh yeah, the stores. We have a general store (food and light), weapons, armor, a temple (prayer books, some potions, some scrolls, and blunt weapons), alchemist (potions and scrolls), magic (spellbooks, wands, staves, crappy rings and amulets), a bookstore (spellbooks and prayer books), and a black market. Of these, the only ones that are of real interest to us are the bookstore and the black market. Here's the bookstore:



And hell yes, there's a Book of Identify here. Identification in ToME is a pain in the ass -- there's thousands of bits of gear, none of which start identified, and our little noodle arms can't carry much in the way of identification consumables, let alone carrying items back to town to identify them. This will make our lives far more pleasant. If there hadn't been a copy here, I probably would have spent a few days hanging around town until one randomly stocked, but now that's not necessary.



"Probing" tells you a monster's hitpoints in ToME. Not very useful, since you can tell at a glance what their HP are in rough percentage terms. Still, this spell is invaluable.

Now, let's head into the Barrow-Downs and make some progress on the main dungeons! They're over to the west of town:



There is a way to the Barrow-Downs.
You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into a way into the Barrow-Downs.
You hear someone shouting "Leave me alone, stupid Brown mold." You feel strangely lucky...

And there's our first random quest: a Princess has somehow been abducted by a group of entirely-stationary Brown Molds. Should be easy; her cell will be somewhere on the level. We just have to kill the molds.



The dungeon itself has rooms with granite walls, and "fill" (between rooms) of forests and mountains. The forest fill is a bit of a pain, actually -- we can't walk through it, but there's a number of irritating flying enemies that can. For now though, we're overleveled and just kind of stomp our way all over the dungeon's denizens, like this Floating Eye. The book of Beginner's Cantrips that we started with has the spell Detect Monsters, which we've learned through our investment in Divination spells, so we spam that as we go to search for the princess.

You sense the presence of monsters!



And there she is, the yellow p. Annoyingly, I can't seem to find a path to her:



Then I remember that we have a Blast - Wall Destruction spell.

The wall turns into mud! The wall turns into mud! The wall turns into mud! The wall turns into mud!





There's a variety of different Princess rooms, depending on how many monsters have captured her (thus, this is the five-monster version). These Brown Molds have a confusing melee touch, but that's no problem when you have attack spells. They're also worth a lot of experience, since they're supposed to start showing up around level 6 instead of level 1, but we're also overlevelled a bit so we only get one level off of them (to level 7).

Oh Great and Noble Hero, you saved me! I am heading home now. I cannot reward you as I should, but please take this. There, Noble Hero. I put it there. Thanks again!

We're given a choice of three different items as a reward: a Sickle, a Longsword, and a Main Gauche (and no, she doesn't identify them for you). Since we have weenie arms, we pick the lightest of these, the Main Gauche. Identifying it, it tturns out to be a Spectral Main Gauche, which can be activated to let us temporarily walk through walls. Could be handy, but the money it's worth is probably more handy. Especially since it drains your HP while equipped!

Anyway, the princess was also standing on the stairs off the level, so in theory we have to complete her quest to proceed. Which we have. So we do.

You enter a maze of down staircases. You hear someone shouting: 'Leave me alone, stupid Skeleton human.' You have a superb feeling about this level.

There are an awful lot of princesses in Middle-Earth. At least this one had the decency to be captured by something that can actually move.



And she's close to the stairs! Good princess.

Skeleton Humans are a legitimate threat at this point in the game; they have lots of HP and a reasonably strong melee attack. There appear to be 8 of them, too.



There's a pair of locked doors on the eastern side of this small room that keep them locked up. There's also a bunch of traps in there, but fortunately we have a trap-detecting spell. Traps in ToME are no fun.



Unfortunately, we don't have any amazingly powerful thaumaturgy spells yet. The best we have going for us is a Sound Beam, but it's expensive and failure-prone. Well, and there's the Gravity Bolt. We may have to lean on that one pretty hard, because Manathrust isn't going to be up to the task.

Oh, while we're here, we might as well start praying to Tulkas. Praying causes your piety to slowly decrease, but (with Tulkas as our god) it also goes up more when we kill evil monsters, which Skeleton Humans are.

You start praying to Tulkas.
You failed to pick the lock. <10x>
You have picked the lock.



The Skeleton human disappears! The Princess implores you to help her.
The Skeleton human disappears!
The Skeleton human disappears!
The Skeleton human disappears!



This isn't working quite as well as I'd intended. We step around to the edge of the entrance so only one skeleton can reach us, and continue bouncing skeletons around. But there's too many of them, and we're spending all our mana on teleporting them short distances instead of damaging them. It's not even clear that they're being slowed down. When I said previously that gravity, inertia, etc. applied "unresistable" slowing, I meant more that nothing, or at least very few monsters, is immune to it. But everyone still gets a saving throw, which I believe depends on the damage dealt. Our 1d8 Gravity Bolt isn't very effective against these guys.

So instead, we run for it. Three castings of Phase Door end us up here:



and we start hoofing it away, chased by just the one skeleton, which we start pelting with Manathrusts.



Uh, make that two skeletons.



The Skeleton human disappears!
The Skeleton human grunts with pain.
The Skeleton human squeals in pain.
The Skeleton human squeals in pain.
The Skeleton human shrieks in agony.
The Skeleton human is destroyed. Welcome to level 8. You can learn 6 more skills.

Hooray, progress! We're down to 22 SP, and yet another skeleton has shown up, but this seems doable now! The third skeleton dies without incident, and we're able to rest back up to our full 85 SP. Now we can go back in and fight properly.

We're able to kite out the remaining skeletons and kill them one by one. Really, the main problem with this quest was that we were facing all of them simultaneously; alone, they're far less of a threat. In the process of killing them, we reach level 11 -- they're worth gobs of experience since they're a whopping 10 levels out of depth. Our reward choice:



Gauntlets could be helpful if they have free action or a DEX bonus; otherwise, they'll make us worse at spellcasting. But I'm still hoping for a decent stat stick weapon, so we pick the Basilard...which is a Basilard of *Slay Demon*. And hey, it gives +1 to INT, our casting stat!

We dump our points into hitting the skill cap on Thaumaturgy, Divination, Conveyance, and Magic. Here's our second two pages of Thaumaturgy spells:





Note how expensive these things are; we only have 109 SP right now. Still, that Area - Nexus spell looks good. Nexus ordinarily teleports the player around; I'm not sure if it does the same with monsters. If it doesn't, then that's basically a gigantic pile of unresistable damage that doesn't destroy items.

Also note how ball spells have awful, awful damage. They cap out at doing a flat 100 damage at max rank, when late-game monsters generally have thousands of HP. No, it's the area and beam spells that are what make the Thaumaturge happen.

We head back to down and sell our Spectral Main Gauche for 10k gold, increasing our wealth by an order of magnitude. We check out the bookstore, and hey, looky here!



Essence of Speed is the haste spell. We'll be wanting that.



We can't cast it yet, because we haven't put any points into the Temporal realm, but we'll be working on fixing that ASAP. Being fast in ToME is vital -- just like slowing our enemies makes them trivial, so does being faster than thtem. And the speed boost from casting Essence of Speed scales with your investment into the Temporal realm.

Anyway, we grab some Scrolls of Word of Recall, which bounce us between the surface and the dungeon, and head back in.

You enter the next area. A strange man wrapped in a dark cloak steps out of the shadows: 'Oh, please help me! A horrible Large grey snake stole my sword! I'm nothing without it.' This level can't be all bad...

And here we have Fumblefingers, the other kind of random quest. In exchange for killing all the Large Grey Snakes on the level, he'll give us some training in one of three randomly-selected skills. You can get out-of-class skills this way, so Fumblefingers is great for twinking out your characters to absurd lengths.

As for the snakes? They're pathetic -- only one level out of depth, and naturally slow. They have decent HP, but that hardly matters.

While exploring and wiping out of a few reptiles, we stumble across a Parchment - Deep Thoughts:



And it goes on like that for quite some time. I don't know either.

Anyway, eventually we find the last of the snakes, which are all scattered across the level instead of being in one convenient room like with the Princess quests.

The Large grey snake dies. The adventurer steps out of the shadows and picks up his sword. 'Ah! My trusty sword! Thanks. If you wish, I can help you in your adventures.' Do you want him to join you? [y/n]

This is a dumb question, since you never want Fumblefingers to join you. He'll be a coaligned (i.e. friendly) monster that follows you around and beats up monsters, but you get no experience for this, it's easy to piss him off, and monster vs. monster combat tends to take a very long time, because monsters have lots of HP compared to the player. So we say no, and instead we get this:

'As you wish, but I want to do something for you.' He touches your forehead.



We can either get 3 ranks in a skill that we already have at at least a .5 modifier, or we can get 1 rank and +.3 to the modifier of a skill we don't know. If a later quest gives that same skill, then we only get a +.1 modifier, up to .5. Still, this is really handy, and we got one of the best skills in the game: Mindcrafting. Mindcrafters are psionicists and they get some hilariously useful spells at very cheap costs. We won't be able to make much use of it now, but later if it comes up again we'll start investing points into it.

Next level! Fumblefingers quests can easily be skipped, by the way, since the levels have staircases as normal.

You enter the next area. A strange man wrapped in a dark cloak steps out of the shadows: 'Oh, please help me! A horrible Novice rogue stole my sword! I'm nothing without it.' You like the look of this place...

Oh Fumblefingers. And not even an actually threatening enemy! Oh well, easy money, so to speak.



One reason I'm not too fond of the Barrow-Downs is sections like this. There's a "stream" made out of small trees here, which you can walk through but can't see through. This is no problem for the enemy, but is annoying for us because we can't pelt our enemies from a distance with spells. Hitting the small trees with certain elemental attacks (like the 4d27 Fire Bolt spell I was using) kills them, turning them into dead small trees...which you can't walk through, for some reason. Nor does our Blast - Wall Destruction spell work on them. And meanwhile,

The Novice rogue hits you. The Novice rogue touches you. Your purse feels lighter. 754 coins were stolen! The thief flees laughing!

Fortunately, we'll get the money back when we kill him. But he's teleported elsewhere on the level. Tracking these guys down will be annoying.

Nearing the end of the quest (there's 17 Novice Rogues on the level, and we've killed 15), we encounter our first unique monster of the game.

Smeagol says, 'Every way is guarded, silly foolses!'



Smeagol has somewhere north of 300 HP, which is preposterous at this stage in the game. However, he's also wholly non-threatening; he moves at random and the worst he'll do is steal some of your money. We just ignore him; he can die later when we have more efficient atttacks.

Finally, we find the last rogue, incinerate him, and get Fumblefingers back his sword. And this time, our selection is:



Nothing super-useful here, but we can effectively save 3 skillpoints, or half a level's worth, by investing in a skill we were already planning on maxxing out. Fumblefingers' boosts ignore the skill cap (though he still can't take you past rank 50). We take Thaumaturgy, netting us these new spells:



Ehh, nothing great, beyond that Inertia Beam. The life of the Thaumaturge is a bit variable, but the law of averages is in our favor; there are an awful lot of thaumaturgy spells, and we're bound to get something good eventually.

We'll call it here for now. See you next time!