Part 5: Bug Spray

Last time we cleared the most interesting parts of the Orc Caves, and found, among other things, some Magical Clay of dubious origins:



Yeah, let's not keep this.

Our next target is Lothlorien, and its nearby dungeon, Mirkwood Forest. This is a long walk, so we stock up on food before setting out. It's entirely possible to get stranded out in the overworld with no food and end up starving to death, an ignominous end to your adventure.



This trip took 8 food rations, for reference. Also, you want to avoid stepping on water tiles as much as possible. Each terrain type has a "level" below which you're likely to get ambushed. Grasslands are the easiest/safest to traverse, and deep ocean is the worst, but even in rivers and other shallow water you can get ambushed by nasty things like four-headed hydras and lizardman kings. Unfortunately it's not quite possible to make it to Lothlorien without stepping on any shallow water, unless you go a very long way out of your way.

As for Lothlorien itself:



We have all the standard shops, as well as a few special services. The Thunderlords Nest, that X-shaped building in the west, will teleport you to any level of any dungeon you like, as long as you've visited the dungeon before. This is how we can skip random quests we don't like. In the middle of the pond in the southwest is Galadriel, who can "research items" for us, *Identifying* them. Around the pond are altars (the 0s) to every god except Melkor -- whose altars you have to find in the dungeon. I think altars are mostly for converting religions (or gaining religion if you're an atheist), though Melkor allows you to sacrifice some of your max HP in exchange for a permanent power boost.

Finally, in the center of town lies Celeborn, who has a quest for us:



This is the house quest for this town, and it's no big deal. Straight east from Celeborn is the house, near the armorer and weaponsmith (2 and 3 on the map).



Just a bunch of wolves and wargs, and their AI is going nuts because it can't find any proper rooms to ambush us from. So they spend most of their time futilely running away from us. This quest can be annoying if you're a melee-only class, but only because you have to corner each enemy to kill them. We just wander around spamming Acid Rain everywhere and the quest is done in under thirty seconds.

There are other quests available here, but they're more deadly; for now let's go check out Mirkwood. Lothlorien, like most towns, doesn't have direct access to "its" dungeon, which is instead a short hike away on the overworld.


(The dungeon to our south is Dol Guldor; we'll go there much later)

But while walking there, we get this message:

More of your prophecy has been unearthed! You should see a soothsayer quickly.

This means that we've received a fate of some kind, which is usually a promise to rig the RNG in a specific way on a specific dungeon level. Like, you can be fated to find a Broken Sword on dungeon level 4, things like that. If your luck is negative (which ours isn't), then you can be fated to die on a dungeon level, which means that level will be full of waaaaay out-of-depth monsters. There's also a remote chance to be fated to never die at the hands of mortals (for which DarkGod went through the entire monster list and labeled each monster as either mortal or immortal). I've never gotten that one though.

We'll hit up Mirkwood and set it as our dungeon to recall to before we deal with this fate business though.

You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into a way into the Mirkwood Forest. You hear someone shouting: 'Leave me alone, stupid Ogrillon!' You have a good feeling...



Mirkwood, like the Barrow-Downs, uses trees as its "fill" between corridors and rooms, but it also uses them as the walls around rooms, which makes flying monsters even more annoying. On the other hand, if you get a source of flight yourself, you can walk straight to anything in the dungeon and fight non-fliers with impunity.

Down to our southwest is Mughash the Kobold Puddle:

Mughash, the Kobold Lord says: 'So when I die, the first thing I'll see in heaven is a score list?' Mughash, the Kobold Lord dies.

The Ogrillons protecting the Princess are just slightly up-statted Ogres; no big threat. For our reward,



We take the Metal Cap, which could be, and is, the Metal Cap of Thengel. Back in town, Galadriel tells us more about it:



Even more luck! And protection from confusion, which, in combination with protection from blindness, means we can never be rendered unable to cast spells.

Galadriel is also a soothsayer, so we pay her to reveal our fate:

You know a little more of your fate.

...thanks? You have to hit the ~ key to bring up the "knowledge menu" to see your fates:





Yeah, this is pretty typical of the fate system. Anyway, back to Mirkwood. On level 12, there's a princess guarded by Ochre Jellies, who are a pain in the ass for melee characters as they're fast and have a multihit acidic touch melee attack, each hit of which can damage your armor. We have no armor to speak of, and what we do have is all immune to acid damage anyway. Also we're grossly overleveled. Our reward is a Dagger of Slay Evil, a.k.a. another 2-3k of gold.

Next level is a princess guarded by Elite Uruks, and we finally get a princess reward that offers a boomerang. Boomerangs go in the missile weapon slot, but they get enchanted like melee weapons, which means that you can have, say, a Boomerang of Gondolin or other such silliness. Basically boomerangs make great secondary stat sticks. ...though in this case, we get a randart: The Small Metal Boomerang of Silothor (3d4) (+18,+11). We'll find out what it does later. For now, as an uncursed randart I don't believe it's possible for it to have any bad attributes, so we equip it.

(As actual weapons, boomerangs are kind of awful, because they have no damage multiplier so basically they just let you do a single melee blow from range)

Next level: a princess guarded by Giant Red Scorpions. Have I mentioned that Middle Earth has an awful lot of princesses? Because it does. Or else it has one single princess who's immediately getting captured again every time we free her.

Anyway, we get a Small Sword of *Slay Dragon* (more cash), and on the next level she's been captured by door mimics. Sigh.



You're never really in danger of being tricked by a door mimic, because they don't get placed where doors normally go. However, this quest is actually a little dangerous, as door mimics have spells they can cast, like Frost Bolt and Cause Minor Wounds. Still, this gives me a chance to try out one of our new spells: View - Flames (for 5d32 damage; door mimics have 10d10 hitpoints). Or as I like to call it: Everything Burns.



The Princess gets angry! The Princess dies. The Door mimic dies. <3x> The Black louse dies.
The Princess dies. The Door mimic dies. <2x> Oh Great and Noble yadda yadda!

Given a choice between metal scale mail, chain mail, or chain mail...I guess we'll take the chain mail. It's Elven Chain Mail; not bad. A lot heavier than our cord armor though. Back in town, we get it identified and find that its resistances are strictly inferior -- it has blindness protection, but no poison resistance or any other "high" resistance.

Annoyingly, the armorsmith will pay only a maximum of 5k for anything, so we just stick the armor in our new home; we'll sell it next time we visit a different town.

Checking the black market...oh damn it.



It's about 25k outside our price range, too. Fortunately we can make up the price differential by selling either Maedhros or our Morningstar of Gondolin (each of which is worth 30k from the weaponsmith), but that does mean picking from the two. We sell Maedhros; the Gondolin morningstar just has too many good mods, and frankly we need all the STR and CON we can get right now, while INT is less vital, oddly enough.

Our new spellbook allows us to ditch the Beginner's Cantrips, Identify, and Reveal Ways spellbooks we were carrying. It also has the spell Vision, which I've been wanting for awhile:



Magic mapping is very useful, and being able to map and light the entire dungeon is ridiculously good. You can enter the level, see everything on it, and then go straight to the points of interest. Also it'll let us ditch our Rod of Illumination. Unfortunately we'll need another 11 character levels (or some lucky Fumblefingers quests) before the spell is high enough level.

In the meantime, the area of effect of Vision is precisely the area of the window you're using to show the main dungeon view, so make that sucker as big as possible.

Back in Mirkwood, level 16 sees Fumblefingers lose his sword to some Mummified Humans, yet another in the vast profusion of melee monsters with no special gimmicks that the early game has. While stomping around we run into Ufthak of Cirith Ungol and his escort, the Roasted Orcs, Squadron 16.



I call them that because one casting of Everything Burns and they're all dead, except Ufthak himself.

The last of the Mummified Humans dies and Fumblefingers gets us .3 ranks in Mindcraft, but more importantly +.1 to our modifier. One more time and we'll hit a .5 modifier and it'll make sense to start dumping hard skill points there.

(Our other options were Combat, Magic Device, and Symbiosis, of which only Magic Device could possibly be worth investing in; we have all we need from Symbiosis and Combat is and always will be worthless to us)

After retrieving Fumblefingers' sword from some Elite Uruks on the next level, we discover that we can't always win:



These are all pretty awful. Monster Lore is for summoners: it makes their summoned minions a bit better and improves the experience they get from pet kills. Disarming is pointless since we have a spell to disarm traps perfectly safely. We have all the points we'll ever need from Symbiosis (i.e. just 1), and Antimagic would actively destroy us.

Oh well, Symbiosis I guess.

Incidentally, I hope this grind isn't too boring. It's not strictly necessary to do all these quests, but you get substantial power boosts from doing so.

Next level sees Fumblefingers lose his sword to 20 Iron Golems, which I can actually respect. Iron Golems are pretty tough, and they're immune to Everything Burns but weak against Acid Rain. They can also see invisible, and hit decently hard in melee. So y'know, we can't quite sleepwalk through this one. The local dungeon denizens are starting to creep up in power level too.

A horde of Black Orcs burns to a crisp, and under their bodies we find:



Oh mama. *Defender* weapons can be insanely good...or merely decent. It'll have to wait until we get some *Identify*.

Finally we finish melting the last golem, and Fumblefingers follows through!



Now we can start dumping points into Mindcrafting! Ironically, most of the really important abilities it gives are replicated by spells we already have access to, but there's still several good reasons to invest in it. I'll just screencap the help text on Mindcrafting here:


(the cutoff text is "and maybe banishing monsters")

The key abilities for us are:

* Minor Displacement at level 25. This gives us a targeted teleport. We'll be able to go precisely where we want to go, and that's just insanely good. There's an artifact ring that provides the same power and it's one of the best rings in the game for that reason.

* Character Armor, which provides temporary elemental resistances. Combining these with permanent resistances drops damage taken to 1/9th of normal, a substantial boost in protection.

* Adrenaline Channeling is a cheap haste + heal combination, and we have no other healing spells. Not useful for in-combat healing, but for fast recovery outside of combat it can be handy.

* Psychic Drain means never running out of SP again, as long as there's intelligent, non-undead/demon monsters around. And with targeted teleport, it's very easy to find those monsters.

All of these spells are also insanely cheap, compared to shelling out, say, 37 SP for a single casting of Everything Burns. The Mindcrafter's attack spells are also pretty decent (especially Telekinetic Wave, which can hit targets multiple times as they get bounced away from you), but Thaumaturgy has better DPS if not better efficiency.

Right now we're level 26 with 25 spare skillpoints. There's another 144 skillpoints in the game (the level cap is 50), of which we'll need 30 to max Thaumaturgy, 9 in Divination to get full-level-detection out of Vision, 18 to max Temporal (to max the bonus from Essence of Speed), and probably 20 or so into Magic for more SP. That's 77, which leaves another 102 for miscellaneous skills. We'll want to dump at least 48 into Mindcraft to get it to rank 25 for targeted teleporting, and more wouldn't hurt. Plenty to spare though.

Speaking of skillpoint investment, we hit 30 ranks in Thaumaturgy and finally get another Area spell: Area - Pure Dark. It fires 31 balls of elemental darkness, each of which does 7d64 damage, for 50 mana. Unfortunately undead tend to resist darkness, but there's still plenty of valid targets for this spell.

Finally we're back in town, let's check that *Defender*!



Aww, no elemental immunities. These babies can get multiple outright immunities to elements, so you could take 0 damage from, say, fire attacks. Which is great if you need to walk across some lava, for example. This is still a nice suite of powers, but right now our Gondolin weapon and Elven armor are providing most of the same benefits and others besides (like +3 STR).

Back in Mirkwood, en route to level 20:

You enter a maze of down staircases. You feel you will meet your fate here.

[SCREENSHOT MISSING] (sorry guys)

Yep, there's an Arrow. A singular Arrow. Just the one. It's an Arrow of Slay Evil, sure, but that's still not a very impressive fate.

(Fumblefingers lost his sword to some Skeleton Trolls; we burninate them and get some points in Conveyance)

Y'know what? This is boring. Let's take on a quest. Back in Lothlorien, we hit up our good buddy Celeborn for some action:



While the text mentions Mirkwood, the quest is in fact right here in Lothlorien, just northwest of our home:



This is the "Spiders" quest, and that difficulty level of 25 is a vicious lie. There's some nasty monsters in it that we have to kill.



All of them spiders, of course. The main threats are the Aranea and their bosses the Elder Araneas, who have some nasty attack spells. We'll be making gratuitous use of Blast - Wall Creation, hereinafter named Time Out, as in "we put the fight on Time Out so we can rest up a bit".

I accidentally cast Teleport Self instead of Essence of Speed and end up in the middle of the level, near one of those Elder Araneas:



Let's try out our new Area - Pure Dark spell. Um...name it Good Night, I guess?

The Elder aranea resists. <17x>
The Elder aranea concentrates on its wounds. The Elder aranea looks healthier.

...well, crap. We did deal a decent chunk of damage despite the resistance (after healing it has 80% of its hitpoints), but that's way too expensive to be effective. We blast him with a Sound Beam to buy some time; fortunately he does get stunned. Unfortunately our next-most-powerful Area spell is way back at rank 12 (compared to rank 31 for Good Night). It does kill the guy, but only after three castings, which is a lot slower than I'd hoped for. Elder Araneas can cast Mind Blast and Cause Critical Wounds, and while our saving throw is decent it's not great. I'd rather not risk getting hit by those.

Also, Elder Araneas are native to level 40. Hence the "vicious lie" comment from earlier. If you went in here with a character only capable of handling level 25 you'd get stomped.

All told, there's 9 Elder Araneas here; two groups of 3, and 3 individuals. Our plan is to get close to them under cover of Time Out, cut open a hole in the walls (with Blast - Wall Destruction) or trees (with a shovel we picked up awhile back) to gain access to a single target, hit them with a powerful sound spell (we have both Sound Ball and Sound Beam at high level, with good odds of dazing them), and then follow up with Area - Nexus until they die.



Everything else dies easily to Everything Burns or Acid Rain, and fortunately the elders are pretty heavy sleepers. But lest we forget how much peril we're in, an Aranea (not even an elder) "points at us, incanting terribly", and suddenly we're half-dead. Ouch. Cause Critical Wounds pulls no punches, especially when you only have 146 HP.



This is hairy -- two awake elders, and a third ready to wake up any time. Fortunately, from this angle only one of the elders can actually see us (and thus cast spells). We're able to stun them both, eventually (our expensive, failure-prone Sound Beam only seems to stun them maybe half the time ), and then do them in with Area - Nexus. Then we put the dungeon on Time Out and rest up again.



Two more elders to go, as well as some scattered normal Aranea! Time Out is just so good for partitioning the level and keeping us from getting overwhelmed.

You failed to get the spell off! The Elder aranea misses you. The Elder aranea claws you. The Elder aranea misses you. The Elder aranea bites you. Oh wow, everything looks so cosmic now!



Whelp. Elders have drugged fangs, so we're hallucinating. This doesn't really change our tactics any though.

The Chaos beastman is dazed. The Necromancer is no longer stunned. The Half-troll claws you. The Half-troll claws you. The Half-troll misses you. The Half-troll bites you. *** LOW HITPOINT WARNING! ***

This does, though. We're down to 63 HP and there's still about 1.75 elders to kill. Time to bail. Fortunately we can teleport on this level.





Phew. Good thing the game doesn't model airflow or we'd suffocate in short order. Let's try this again.



This time, each elder falls to a Sound Beam followed by Area - Nexus (which really should get a name; any suggestions?). Phew. Now we just have to kill the remaining scattered Aranea, and...

The Aranea dies. The forest is safer now, thanks to you.

And we can just walk out the way we came in. Hooray! Celeborn has our reward:

All of us praise your mighty deed in driving back the menace. Take this as a reward.



Awesome.

Wow! You feel very strong! Wow! You feel very smart! Wow! You feel very wise! Wow! You feel very dextrous! Wow! You feel very healthy! Wow! You feel very cute!

That seems like a good spot to end for the day. See you next time!