Part 6: Orcus Dorkus

Last time we did a lot of grinding in Mirkwood before killing some really big spiders. Let's follow up the spider quest with another quest that's far less dangerous:



The EPA has been slacking off and Lothlorien's water supply is threatened by toxic waste. We need to go find who's doing it, give them a stern talking to, and then drop some scrubbers into the water to clean it up. Helpfully, Celeborn gives us the gear we need:



and then some. We only need the one potion, dude.

This quest is located on the overworld, northwest of Lothlorien:



When we descend to the detailed map, we can see the extent of the poison:



That's one big puddle of goop. What could be causing it?



A bunch of stationary monsters, of course! The pollution is full of mushrooms, molds, floating eyes, and the occasional mimic. Some of them have attack spells, but they can't cast them until we step into range. And conveniently, our View spells hit everything we can see, which is more than everything that's in range -- thus, we can shoot these monsters down without them getting a single turn against us.

Well, there is one monster here that can move -- the Spectator, a sort of extremely weak beholder. So weak that none of them manage to do anything, anyway.

Anyway, pretty soon everything's dead, and we drop our Potion of Water Curing in some of the polluted water...

Well done! The water seems to be clean now.



And that's that for that! The items are the remains of some mimics; nothing interesting. Back at Celeborn's, we get our reward:



A guaranteed set of Elven Dragon Scale Mail. Using it instead of our Cord Armor would mean gaining flight but losing poison resistance, plus it's a lot heavier. Soon that tradeoff will be worthwhile though; we just need more strength.

Celeborn's out of quests now, but there's one more we can take in Lothlorien, from the master of the Wizard's Spire in the northwest:

I need a very special essence for a spell I am working on. I am too old to fetch it myself. Please bring it back to me. You can find it north of here. Be careful with it, it's fragile and might be destroyed easily.



"Essences" are a crafting component used only by the Alchemist class, so everyone else has to just put up with them junking up the dungeon. There's essence types for most elements, and alchemists can extract them from and/or infuse them into various items to create enchanted gear, add charges to wands, and stuff like that. It's a neat concept, but unfortunately very grindy. Anyway, this particular essence is just a "plot coupon". Go into the dungeon, get the item, make it back.



Pretty simple dungeon. Nowhere to hide, either. Despite appearances, the dungeon is "dark", and the essence is somewhere on the other side of that lava river. We just step close and then fire off a View spell or two. Since all of these guys are fire-aligned, Everything Burns is out, but we picked up a nice new View - Magic Missiles spell which is straight-up unresistable by anything.

It is destroyed. <5x>
It dies. <2x>
The Chimaera dies. <2x>

And that about does it. Over in the northeast, you can make it across the river by only stepping on two tiles of lava, and...

You found a trap! You feel very weak. You identified the trap as Weakness Trap.



Oh, did I mention there are traps here? I kinda forgot to detect them. Oops. We can get the drained STR point restored back in town, though.

Along with the essence, there's some miscellaneous loot, which we'll just hock since we'll be back in town in like fifteen seconds.

Our reward for turning in the essence:

Great! Let me fireproof some of your items in thanks. I can do 3 books, 4 staves, or 12 scrolls.

Nice. We can come back to this guy any time for additional fireproofing until he "runs out". If you've found a Tome for one of your realms but it isn't fireproof, you definitely want to get it proofed by this guy. Losing access to your spells sucks. Fortunately, our important spellbooks are already fireproof -- though we still haven't found the Tome for the Conveyance realm (our fireproof book of teleportation just has three of the Conveyance spells, not all of them).

Oh, remember that randart boomerang we found? Let's get that *Identified*.



Okay, yeah, it sucks. No stat boosts, just a bunch of brands. This is pretty typical of randart boomerangs in my experience, sadly; "ego-item" boomerangs are much better. Imagine a *Defender* boomerang; they can happen! At least this randart's worth 26k gold.

Speaking of gold, we're pretty flush, so let's head back to the Orc Caves and check the stores. We have a scroll of Reset Recall in our house, which when read...



...lets us recall to any level of any dungeon that we've visited in the past.



Hey guys! Remember us? Let's just clear out your new clientele real quick-a-like with this new spell we picked up:



I'm renaming it to "Rocks Fall". And then everything dies.

Nothing good in the magic store, bookstore, or the various equipment stores, but the black market does have this little number:



If we bought and wielded it, all of our spells would be cast as if they were 4 levels higher. Which would be nice, except that it doesn't affect thaumaturgy spells, only book spells, and our book spells don't really scale with level that heavily. There's some thresholds we want to hit, but we'll want to hit those with proper skillpoints, not equipment -- at least, in the long term anyway. We can't count on our endgame equipment having spell power bonuses on it.

Incidentally, there's a Spell Power skill as well, and we should probably be investing in it. Our multiplier is only .7, compared to 1.2 for our class skills, though. I guess it depends on how many levels we want in our spells "for effect" as opposed to just for unlocking things.

So that was a bust. We laboriously take the stairs up to get to the other town at level 10...only to take a multi-level shaft at level 12 which returns us to Lothlorien.

At least there's this juicy item in Lothlorien's Black Market:



Y'know, we only have a DEX of 18, but I'm gonna try stealing it anyway. If we get caught, we'll get kicked out of the store and lose access to it for a long time, but getting a Ring of Speed now would be fantastic.

Steal which item?
You steal a Ring of Speed (+7) {100% off}. You have a Ring of Speed (+7) {100% off}.

Sweet. It can replace our Ring of Invisibility. The thing about invisibility is, while monsters can't path to you very well, they can still cast spells at you with 100% accuracy. Which, oddly enough, includes things like firing arrows. So if you're standing in the middle of an awake orcish horde, they'll have no clue where you are, but they'll still unleash the occasional missile right at your location.

We take a nap at the inn to let some time pass for stores to restock, then head back. And the dungeon bookstore has a Tome of Translocation, the realm spellbook for the Conveyance realm!



We've been slacking a bit on pumping Conveyance; we have the points to unlock Recall right now, which will allow us to do some fun things. We can teleport to/from the dungeon, of course, but we can also swap places with a monster, or teleport a visible item to our feet, though heavier items are harder to move.

And Probability Travel, as I mentioned previously, is a great spell for bopping around the dungeon at high speed. Walk into a wall, and you appear on the other side of it -- or at the edge of the dungeon, whichever comes first.

We'll be fireproofing this as soon as we get back to Lothlorien, of course.

And after walking back up to level 10 a second time, there's nothing in the stores there except a couple of Potions of Dexterity. Alas. Guess we'll need to find a better way to gain stats. The problem really is that we need more hitpoints. We can handle killing things, we have all of the resistances and abilities we really need to go a lot deeper into the dungeons, but we'll basically go "pfft" if a monster looks at us too hard.

Well. Screw going back into Mirkwood (I'll offscreen that at some point). Let's check out some other dungeons.



Like the Mines of Moria, say. Chock-full of orcs and trolls, with a smattering of other monsters, Moria's main claim to fame is that the monsters inside are awake and they're angry. You get swarmed pretty constantly, so if you need to rest (like, say, to restore your SP), whelp. Better home you have a time-out spell!

You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into a stone door leading to the Mines of Moria. You have a good feeling...

Moria also starts us out at 1500', which, conveniently, is the depth at which stat-gain potions are no longer out-of-depth items.



Moria uses granite-walled rooms with a "fill" of mountains. We can't pass through mountains; you need a Climbing Kit for that and none have turned up yet. Not even flying works with mountains; it's climbing or nothing. Once we find such a kit though, we'll be able to walk "through" mountain tiles as if they were ordinary land.

In the meantime, we wander around casting Everything Burns and Rocks Fall and so on. None of these guys really merit our attention. But we make certain Tulkas knows what we're up to. He likes us enough now to give us +1 CON, and fairly soon he'll add another +1 CON and +1 STR to that.



Hi, Ibun, Son of Mim.

Ibun, Son of Mim grunts with pain. <3x> Ibun, Son of Mim cries out with pain. Ibun, Son of Mim writhes in agony. Ibun, Son of Mim flees in terror! Ibun, Son of Mim says: 'Tell me this was an illusion... please!' Ibun, Son of Mim dies.

Goodnight, Ibun.

Several levels later, and no stat potions, we take the stairs and

You hear orc warcries.



Oh yeah, there's a special level in Moria too. This is the Orc Barracks, I think it's called. Basically full of orcs and ogres, with Bolg, Son of Azog (who is King of the Uruk-Hai) straight south of us in hot pink. It's a total non-threat by now, even with the creative use of Shrieker Mushroom Patches (the red ','s) to serve as an alarm system. When they shriek, every monster in a wide radius around you wakes up, and any monster that can see you gets a free speed upgrade.

But man, there sure are a lot of orcs here! Ooh, and that red L a bit southeast of Bolg is a Master Lich, who's actually a legitimate threat. I think. We might be able to cheese him.



Now you see them...



Now you don't. Literally, the only monsters left are the ones we can't see. Also note the ridiculous piles of dropped items we have to sort through; this kind of thing is why having an infinite source of Identify is so important. Still, I can't complain too much; one of them dropped the Chainmail of Arvedui, a standard (i.e. non-randomized) artifact that gives resistance to the basic 4 elements, shards, and nexus, as well as +2 STR/CHA. Worth keeping at home, certainly.

The Barracks have a tricky layout. How do you get out of the northern half?



The highlighted wall is illusory; you can walk right through it, and if you use the Look command on it, you'll be told it's "an illusion wall". Otherwise looks identical to all the permanent walls the rest of the level is made out of (except when it's made out of permanent glass walls). There's numerous other illusory or granite walls that you have to find to make progress.



The wall just north of us is illusory, for example. Fortunately, monsters will happily pathfind through illusory walls, so they can help point the way as long as you're paying attention.

There's not much left to this level. We just have to deal with that Master Lich, who almost certainly is immune to Good Night. We'll settle for blasting him with DragonForce at max volume (a.k.a. casting Sound Beam).



With this angle, we can see, and cast spells at, the lich; he however cannot see or attack us. Angband, and ToME, have asymmetric line-of-sight rules which lead to certain abuses like this. Suits me fine; why play fair?

Speed metal is working great against the lich; he's being kept stunned and thus unable to attack us. Unfortunately, we have a problem -- our SP is running out faster than the lich's HP. I try to cast Time Out again, but items have dropped on the ground, preventing walls from springing up on the tiles between us and the lich. And he wakes up from stunning!



On the other hand, from this position he gets hit a lot more by the Area - Nexus spell I've been using to damage him.

The Master lich shrugs off the attack. <9x> The Master lich misses you. The Master lich touches you. The Master lich touches you. You feel clumsy for a moment, but it passes. The Master lich misses you.

The best possible outcome. His melee drains experience and DEX, both of which we have sustained since we're hobbits; it also drains charges from wands and staves, of which we have none. This is as opposed to him casting, say, Cause Mortal Wounds or Brain Smash or Summon Undead.

The Master lich shrugs off the attack. <4x> The Master lich grunts with pain. <5x> The Master lich misses you. <4x>

Okay, no, that is the best possible outcome. And the next casting does him in, leaving us with only 36 SP left. Yikes. Too bad we haven't learned Psychic Drain from the mindcrafting spellset yet; we could suck the brains of these ogres dry. Instead we have to settle for regenerating SP the hard way, 5 per turn. It's a bit slow going, but we do eventually do in the last of the ogres. Victory!



Before we leave the level, there's a void jumpgate just to our south, hidden by a granite wall. I don't think I've discussed these previously -- jumpgates connect two points on the map, and you can move through them with the '>' command. Back in the PernAngband days they were "Between" gates. Anyway, this one takes us to an inaccessible arena area in the northern half of the map:



In which is the only guaranteed artifact of the level, the Stone of Lore. This is a "light source" with a radius of 1, but you can activate it to identify items every turn. It's called "perilous identify", which I think just means it drains some HP when you use it. It's borderline mandatory if you decide to play a non-magical class, but for us, it's just money.

Our inventory is filled to the brim with loot and gear:



The Iron Helm of Gorlim makes you into an amazing fighter -- that (+25,+25) is to your accuracy and damage, respectively, and those are just huge bonuses. But it drains your HP constantly when worn, and also has the "TY_CURSE" flag, a.k.a. the Curse of Topi Ylinen, the maintainer of ZAngband, off of which ToME branched back in the misty depths of time. This curse periodically causes random bad stuff to happen to you. Most notably, it can paralyze you even if you have Free Action, it can summon Cyberdemons against you (I'm not kidding), and it can do both of these in a single "event". So yeah, don't use Gorlim's helm.

Most of the rest of this is vendor trash. The Small Sword of Life is notable for giving +20% HP, but we actually get more HP from using our Gondolin weapon, with its +3 CON, not to mention many other benefits. The "Aman" ego-type is basically a Holy Avenger, with slays against evil/undead/demons, a WIS bonus, see invisible, etc. And the Harp of Power is a "missile weapon" used by bards; each instrument has a different set of songs (spells) it can cast. Harps of Power additionally give resistance to the basic elements and See Invisible.

Unfortunately, Bree, our current home base, has no *Identify* service for us to figure out what Tenser's Alteration Manual is, and the alchemist is out of *Identify* scrolls. So let's go find the hidden city real quick.



You see Gondolin (the hidden town of the Noldor).

That wasn't hard. If you head straight northeast from Bree you'll practically walk right into it.



Gondolin is absurdly huge, and has a full suite of town services. We'll deal with its quests later; we're not really up to them just yet. But the librarian is happy to tell us all about Tenser's little notebook:



Nice. Stat restoration in a can is always handy.

For that matter, we also picked up some new gear down in the mines:



More CON is always good, as is poison resistance (even though we already have it from our Cord Armor).



Now this is nice. Fire immunity! We can tapdance on lava all day! Reflecting bolts is also quite nice, because there are monsters out there that like to cast Mana Bolt and it hurts. It hurts bad.

Right, we're doing pretty well! We're still kind of mired in the midgame, though -- we need more stats to tackle the nastier dungeons. I'll probably offscreen the rest of Mirkwood for the next update and just provide a précis. In the meantime, here's Mitch II:









See you next time!