Part 8: High-Speed Spelunking

Last time we finished up Mirkwood and the Bree town quests. Today, let's go on a little tour of some of the other dungeons.



Just west of Bree is the Old Forest, which has a lot in common with Mirkwood. Here's what the dungeons look like:



Corridors and rooms made out of trees, with scattered shallow water; the dungeon is "horizontal" (so you can't use Probability Travel to skip levels). You can get dungeon towns here, like in the Orc Caves, but we don't. At the bottom is Old Man Willow. The dungeon spans from level 13 (remember the Barrow-Downs stopped at 10) to level 25.

Sometimes you can get rivers through the dungeon:



The deep water in them will drown you if you aren't levitating and are carrying too much weight; fortunately drowning is just a damage effect like standing in lava, so no big deal. There are water-only monsters that sometimes spawn, and for added benefit most of them use the ~ character as their symbol. Some of them don't, though -- that cyan k is an Aquatic Kobold! The ways of nature are mysterious and kind of squicky.

Here's Old Man Willow, just northeast of us, sipping water by the riverside:



(Also shown: an Aquatic Kobold Captain)

Let's brighten his day a little.



(He lasts four castings)

Like most of the dungeon bosses, he drops a random artifact:



Which I guess was supposed to be cursed, but it's based off of an Amulet of the Serpent, so its DEX bonus just got nerfed down to 0. Pretty crappy reward all told, though it didn't take much effort to get.

Back on the overworld, just south of Bree is the Labyrinth:



You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into a small tunnel leading to a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.



The Labyrinth is kind of awful, because the game refuses to remember the map for you. The map doesn't change, it's just UI fuckery. Detection spells work for one turn, mapping spells like Vision just flat-out don't work. As you'd expect, every level is a randomly-generated maze, though fortunately the walls aren't permanent so you can just smash through them if you like. No towns here.

It's a vertical dungeon, so we just skip to the end using Probability Travel (after killing Lugdush the Uruk, who's right here). The dungeon spans from level 25 to 37, and at the bottom is exactly what you'd expect to find guarding a maze:



The Minotaur of the Labyrinth, the grey H to our west. Rather than tell you his stats, I'm just going to screenshot his monster record from the resource files:



1500 HP, very fast, no spells, and he's about to be very butthurt. First we open up the maze a bit.



Then we put him on timeout.



And create ourselves a little minotaur-fighting arena.



Hey Minotaur, say hello to 31 balls of elemental darkness!



The Minotaur of the Labyrinth grunts with pain. <6x> The Minotaur of the Labyrinth cries out in pain. The Minotaur of the Labyrinth screams in pain. The Minotaur of the Labyrinth flees in terror! The Minotaur of the Labyrinth screams in agony. The Minotaur of the Labyrinth dies.

He lasted maybe a third of the way through Good Night before dying. That's good enough that we should be able to use Good Night to kill anything that doesn't resist darkness. Unfortunately, I expect most endgame uniques to be so resistant.

The Minotaur always drops the Helm of Hammerhand:



Which is a pretty straight upgrade to our old Crown of Might. The extra point of CON nets us another 16 HP (to 326). We can also now access a new ability using the "U" command:



"Create Food" is a hobbit racial intrinsic and basically means we should never run out of food ever. Berserk is the ability imparted by Hammerhand; it costs 8 SP (or 8 HP if we don't have enough SP), uses our STR stat to calculate its failure rate (we'd do badly if our STR were below 14), and makes us go berserk when we use it. For us that just means it gives us some more HP, since the combat benefits are totally pointless.

Boots of Leaping would give us a Phase Door ability here, and there's a few others. The most valuable is an artifact ring that gives us the power of Dimension Door, a.k.a. targeted teleport. We shouldn't need that though, not once we get enough skillpoints into Mindcrafting. Just 20 more!

A bit south of Moria is the Illusory Castle:



Man, fuck this place.



As you can imagine, there's illusory walls all over the place. I hope you like tediously looking at every wall you see to figure out the path forwards! There's also something periodically, and silently, dealing damage to us; I think it's some kind of ambient effect (like damage from standing on lava or ice) because it's certainly not a monster.

Fortunately, it's a vertical dungeon, so we can just teleport to the end. It starts at level 35 to...

You hear the sound of a market.

Hold that thought. Dungeon town.



This is another kind of dungeon town -- an actual "town" with buildings with shops, surrounded by doors for some reason. Rather more dangerous than the "towns" we saw in the Orc Cave as those wide-open spaces are perfect for getting ambushed by monsters. On the other hand, all of the stores are right out in the open.

Also note the "D" monsters to our east -- ancient dragons (an Ancient Blue Dragon and a Great Crystal Drake, respectively). These are among the first monsters in the game that can throw out hundreds of HP of damage in a single action, using their breath weapons. Breath weapons in ToME and other Angband variants deal damage scaling with the monster's current HP (generally, 1/3rd of their HP, capped at anywhere from 300 to 1600 damage). So they hurt.

We say Good Night to the Great Crystal Drake and just leave Big Blue up there alone.

Amusingly, the town is full of townspeople, who are all utterly harmless but have been level-scaled to be "appropriate" for the dungeon level (level 49, incidentally). So there's a level-40 Village Idiot following us around at +30 speed and drooling on us.

Our store options include an Expensive Black Market with this little number:



That would be ever-so-yoinkable except it costs 90% of our current gold reserves. On the other hand, it only weighs half a pound...hmm...

There's a jewelry store with an Amulet of the Magi:



It'd cost us a point of INT compared to our Amulet of Brilliance, though, and we don't actually need any of its other abilities. Regarding that "store a spell" ability: some equipment can have spells copied into it, at which point it acts like a spellbook. So we could copy e.g. Word of Recall into this amulet and cast from the amulet instead of the book. Very little point to doing this though, aside from increasing the resale value of such items we find.

A footwear shop has something nice:



Boots of Speed are typically the best boots you'll have in any given playthrough. They max at +10, so these are quite close to the cap. And they're too heavy for me to want to risk stealing them. So we buy them. Our old boots of levitation go out the window; oh well. Levitation isn't that great. And between our ring, boots, and Essence of Speed, we can hit +31 speed, about quadruple normal speed; nice!

Since we aren't liable to return here, we stoop to some petty theft.

You steal an Amulet of the Magi (-4,-4) (+3 to searching) {100% off}

Nice. Now how about an Amulet of Trickery?

Arghhh! I have had enough abuse for one day! Get out of my sight!

Oops.



If we try to return, the doors are locked, and they'll stay that way for a long time.

Fortunately, we are able to steal the Shadow Cloak of the Magi. Annoyingly, even with 37 INT (the cap is 40), we still have a minimum 1% failure rate on our spells. Almost there though; we just need to find some Potions of Intelligence.

There's also a swordsmith, general store, Recaller (for teleporting to/from the dungeon), and master archer (bows, crossbows, and ammo).

One level down,

The clatter of strange machinery surrounds you.

And then I fat-finger the controls and accidentally leave this special level, losing it forever. Let's dig up the resource file and see what it's about.









Right, yeah, let's not and say we did. That map's pretty hard to read; the main thing is that X is a permanent wall, # is an "ethereal wall", I is an illusory wall, and G is granite, a.k.a. an "actual wall". We missed out on The Boots of the Machine, but we just got some shiny new boots anyway, so who cares? Those boots aggravate, anyway, which would effectively give us 0 stealth (monsters wake up as soon as we get remotely close).

The bottom of the dungeon is at level 52, so this horrible place is almost 20 levels long! Down at these depths, monsters get a lot nastier; there's things like Dreadmasters and Lesser Black Reavers wandering around that we do not want to fight without a lot more stats under our belt. What we're looking for is the dungeon boss...



This guy. The Glass Golem. And holy shit is he a motherfucker. Flavor text:



His melee causes insanity, and he has a number of powerful breath weapons he can haul out (confusion, light, darkness, and disintegration!), as well as being able to summon more golems, teleport us off the level, and "shriek for help", which wakes up monsters and hastes them if they can see us.

And we're in melee range of him, unhasted, and without the ground prepared for proper attacking. And since he can breathe darkness, he's almost certainly immune to Good Night.

So we teleport him away.

The Glass golem disappears!

People who've read my Angband Let's Play will know all about Teleport Other. Teleporting yourself around in the deep dungeons is dangerous, since you can land next to awake, angry monsters. Teleporting away your opponents is much safer. In Vanilla Angband, Teleport Other is a single-target spell, and it fires a "bolt" effect so you can't teleport monsters that are behind other monsters.

In ToME, Teleport Other starts out as a beam, and at high enough levels turns into a massive-radius ball effect, and then eventually into teleporting every single monster in LOS.

Anyway, the golem's on his way back to us, and he can bore through walls so we don't have much time. We haste up, prepare the battlefield, and invest another point into Thaumaturgy, and hey hey hey, payoff!



I mean, kind of. Nether is resisted by literally every evil monster, and all undead are immune, but the Glass Golem isn't evil or undead. This should kill him nicely.

There is a grinding sound.



Walls filled in, hasted up, the golem's nearly upon us, we cannot miss.



Fire!

The Glass golem grunts with pain. <3x>
The Glass golem cries out in pain.
The Glass golem screams in agony.
The Glass golem is destroyed.

...hm. Maybe I overestimated him? Well, now we've cast our new spell, its stats are identified, so let's just jesus christ



That's 39 balls each doing 9d84 damage. Each ball does an average of 382 damage at its epicenter, half one tile away, a third two tiles away. Around about 5000 damage if every ball strikes a glancing blow. The Glass Golem has 1500 HP.

Yeah, I think we're set for fighting non-evil monsters for the rest of the game.

Anyway, what'd we get from the Glass Golem? Just one thing:



Considering what we had to go through to get it? So not worth it. I guess it's better than the Stone of Lore for fighters (just wield it briefly when sorting through loot), but still. Cripes.

Back on the overworld, a fair ways southwest of the Illusory Castle is...



Wait, that's not the Sandworm Lair.

You see the entrance to a lost temple.

Oh yeah! Tulkas is still waiting on us to get him some relic bits. Sorry, Tulkas!

You go into the entrance to a lost temple.



So, here's the problem with relic quests. Every temple is 5 dungeon levels long. Somewhere in the temple is a relic piece; all you have to do to finish the quest is pick it up. But if you leave the level it's on without finding it, you instantly fail the quest. So you have to scour the entire level, and if you don't find it, just hope you didn't miss some little pocket the relic was in.

We chug a Potion of Enlightenment, which maps and lights the entire level for you. This is a little wasteful, but we're one level short of having the Vision spell do the same thing for us.



And conveniently, the relic piece is just south of us in the first level.

You have a Piece of the Relic of Tulkas {quest}. Tulkas speaks to you: 'Well done! Thou hast found part of the relic. I shall surely ask thee to find more of it later! I will take it from thee for now. As a reward, I shall teach thee how to pray better.'

We just gained 5 points' worth of Prayer (putting us at rank 2.5). Hooray. We're not worshipping Tulkas for his prayers; we just want an easy +3 STR/CON!

Anyway, the actual Sandworm Lair is more west than south:



You go into a sandhole.



The Sandworm Lair is a dungeon made out of sand walls, which are mostly notable for being trivial to dig through. It's populated almost exclusively by worms of various kinds, all of whom are trivial to kill. And it's a vertical dungeon, so we can just skip to the bottom. The dungeon starts at level 22 and ends at 30; back in the day it used to be recommended as a place to safely do some early stat-gain, since stat potions can be found on the floor starting around level 30 and the monsters are so weak.



Seriously, we're 30 levels into the dungeon and the only things around us are a White Worm Mass and Yellow Worm Mass, monsters that are native to levels 1 and 3 respectively.

The dungeon boss is the Sandworm Queen, shown here having just summoned some "dragon worms" around us (which are still really weak, but they have breath weapons, so that's something I guess?).



That, and breathing poisonous gas, are about all Queenie can do. If you're really unlucky, she'll summon a Purple Worm or Wereworm, about the most dangerous possible enemy you can get down here. Not that they'd be a threat to us at this point anyway.

Her drop is a guaranteed artifact:



And it's not bad, really it isn't. Our current armor is giving us protection from confusion, but I think we have an alternate source of that somewhere around here. Maybe we'll wear the remains of a giant worm as our body armor for awhile. On the other hand, we don't really need the STR and stealth the new gear gives us, and the other abilities are even less relevant. STR used to be super-important, but once you get up to 18 or so you can carry plenty of gear without getting weighed down. Plus weight just slows you down and we have lots of speed now.

One last stop for now. Last time we went to Moria, we didn't go down to the bottom; we just stopped at the Barracks. But it's a vertical dungeon, so we can easily dive to the bottom now. The Mines bottom out at level 50, and I'm sure you can guess what the boss will be.



You see Durin's Bane (level 50, undamaged).

Durin's Bane is a balrog, of course; he has fairly punishing melee, nasty fire breath, and the ability to summon undead and demons. But we're immune to fire and can avoid his melee, which goes a long way towards neutering him.

Durin's Bane starts moving slower. <4x>

And that should do the rest of it. He's now so slow that we can just throw up Time Out and take a nap in the middle of the fight. The walls don't slow him down any -- he can bore straight through granite -- they just stop him spellcasting while we recover our mana.



Finally he catches up with us, so we can start attacking. Nether won't work, but we can try out Good Night on him.

Durin's Bane shrugs off the attack. <5x> Durin's Bane grunts with pain. <19x> Durin's Bane flees in terror!

That's one casting, mind you, and he has 3000 hitpoints. Good Night is quite powerful. One more casting does him in, and we get a new amulet:



It's pretty bad.

Unusually, there's a down staircase on this level, even though Probability Travel won't let us go any lower. What's on the other end?



Hunh. A town.



Whelp, welcome to Khazad-Dûm, folks.