Part 9: Killing in the Name of Lord Tulkas

Last time we did a tour of a bunch of side-dungeons, then dove too deep and found a secret dwarfish town in the middle of the mountains. Welcome to Khazad-Dûm!



It's kind of an awful place. The stores are all along the perimeter, it doesn't have any more services than Bree has, and for some reason there's no magic shop. There is a bookstore, though, isolated way on the other side of town from all the other stores. I guess the dwarves don't like books.

There's also a house, though per tradition we have to complete a quest to unlock it. There's nobody in town to give us the quest; we just walk down the yellow staircase to start it. And then get locked in until we complete it or die. There's a problem here of course -- we can't see the difficulty of the quest in advance. And I know for a fact there's greater demons in there, but I can't remember how nasty they are. And you remember the spiders; the game has no qualms about throwing massively out-of-depth monsters at us, so just being able to reach this place is no guarantee that we can cope.

So we're going in there, but I want to make it clear I'm making a backup save beforehand, because quests can be bullshit even when you know what you're getting into. The only purpose of the backup will be to give us a chance to say "yeah, fuck that" and not even try the quest.



Yeah, fuck that.

Telepathy reveals four Lesser Balrogs, a Greater Balrog, and a Pit Fiend (native to level 77!). We don't have the hitpoints to be able to avoid instant death from the latter two, nor the kind of damage I can be confident will one-shot them -- they definitely resist nether (being evil) and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they resist darkness too, so there go our two heavy hitters.

Back to the overworld, then.



Incidentally, the grey ^ we're surrounded by are high mountains, which can't be climbed even with climbing gear. The only way to reach Khazad-Dûm is through Moria, and the only way back out is to walk through Moria again, because the game wasn't programmed to handle dungeons with two entrances very well. Right now if we walk into Moria and recall, we'll appear back at the surface next to Khazad-Dûm.

Fortunately we have Probability Travel, so we can just levelport our way through the dungeon. Imagine having to actually walk back!

Along the way, we nuke some Fire Giants and make it to level 35. This has two major implications: first, our Vision spell now maps and lights the entire level, which will make exploration even simpler. For example, we can enter a level, cast Vision, and then look around the level for stat potions without ever having to leave the notional stairs we'd be using if we didn't have Probability Travel. Second, Tulkas gave us another temple quest. Which is now trivial thanks to our powered-up Vision spell. Tulkas says the temple is southeast of Bree and northwest of Minar Anor, which it turns out means...



...right outside Moria. Thanks for being convenient, Tulkas!

You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into the entrance to a lost temple. You have a superb feeling about this level.

And this is what powered-up Vision looks like:



No sign of the relic (a purple ~) on this level, but there is a vault, with a 7d6 Demonblade in it. We should go pick that up. First, though, a word about leveling. In a lot of these side-dungeons, the game levels up your enemies. So these cave orcs?



These are level 46 cave orcs. All this does is make them faster, tougher, and harder-hitting, but man does that still make a big difference. They actually survive a casting of Rocks Fall. In fact, basically everything here is tough enough to survive at least one hit from our attack spells, which is a major letdown, let me tell you.



When they do get turns in melee, they can put out a significant amount of damage. It's not bursty, so it's not likely to kill us -- we can always just blow everyone off with Teleport Other and then recover our health by driving ourselves into a berserk rage -- but it's pretty noticeable considering that most enemies don't ever manage to lay a hand on us.

As if that all weren't enough, nominally this place is only level 23, so all the loot sucks. And we're having to expend tons of mana to keep up with the hordes of enemies.

One plus to this place, though, is that every single enemy here is evil and Tulkas loves it when you kill evil stuff. So he's super-happy with us. We've maxed out our bennies from being Tulkas' pal though -- +3 STR/CON and that's all we're getting.



Well, we nab the Demonblade, after chewing through way too many hitpoints' worth of enemies. Let's move on to the next level before checking it out though; this level's kind of angry at us.



Right. Here's our new toy:



Gothmog's demon blade is a staple weapon for melee characters. Not because it's all that amazing; it's reasonably strong but there are better. But it's by far the most common weapon that you can safely use against Ringwraiths. It's thus more or less obligatory gear for most characters.

The green text indicates that it's part of a set, along with Gothmog's Demon Horn and Demon Shield, the other two "books" for the Demonologist class. As with sets in other games, wearing them all at the same time gets you some benefits, though I never bothered myself to find out what they are.

There's a number of other sets in the game. Most notably, there's three artifact daggers: Narthanc, Nimthanc, and Dethanc. Wielding all three requires some trickery; the most common approach is to play as a Possessor, who can inhabit monster bodies, and then take over the body of a Marilith, a multi-armed demon, or the Watcher in the Water, a giant tentacle monster. Both of them get lots of extra arms to equip weapons to. Possessors are kind of silly.

Anyway, no sign of the relic here, nor on the next two levels, which means it's forced to generate on the last level of the 5. And so it does. There's also a vault:



but I don't want to take on a vault of suped-up Novice Rogues or whatever without some means of getting infinite mana; our mana reserves just can't hold up otherwise. And that's going to have to wait for more Mindcrafting points. Instead, we just use Probability Travel to scoot through the dungeon without occupying any of the intervening space, and land up next to the relic.



You have no room for a Piece of the Relic of Tulkas {quest}.

(easily fixed by dropping some vendor trash)

Tulkas speaks: 'Well done! Thou hast found part of the relic. I shall surely etc. etc. etc.

And now we have rank 5 in praying. Hooray?

Soooo...where to next? I think we've delayed going to the next town long enough; the remaining side dungeons are all pretty rough places that we aren't ready for yet, stat-wise anyway.



So here we are, way to the south of Lothlorien. The town of Minas Anor to our west, Cirith Ungol just to our northeast, and the Land of Mordor to our southeast. Incidentally, that dungeon along the mountains to the northwest is the Paths of the Dead; this may give you some sense of geography for what was going on in the Lord of the Rings' last book.



This is what Mordor looks like -- mixed mountain and granite-wall fill. As with all main-line dungeons, every level has a random quest (because we chose 98 quests at the start of the game). In this case, a Princess has been captured by Mature Red Dragons, doubly not a threat because we're immune to fire. And we can immediately pinpoint the Princess' location with Vision.

Man, why would you ever play a non-caster class in this game? The spells are just so good.

The Princess gives us a Frozen Wooden Boomerang; meh. On the next level, we clear a vault en route to the Princess (Cloud Giants) and find a few things of interest: a Potion of Intelligence (we're nearly at the cap), a Scroll of Acquirement, and a Scroll of Summon Never-Moving Pet. Acquirement generates a random highly-enchanted item appropriate to your dungeon level, and Summon Never-Moving Pet does similarly with a monster (that is, of course, of a type that does not move, like molds or quylthulgs). Let's go find a high-level dungeon to pop into for using these.



Right here, the Lonely Mountain, this should be good.



You may notice this place is kind of big. It's built at double scale, which has some interesting implications that I'll get to later. It also starts out at level 60. None of the guys in this room are too threatening, except for the Death Knight to our southwest, who can cast Nether Bolt -- except we can reflect projectiles with our shield, and Nether Bolt counts as a projectile. We just bury everything with view spells. We don't have quite enough mana to kill off the Maulotaur to our east, but we can just cast Time Out, rest, and then finish it off.

Anyway, those scrolls! The Scroll of Acquirement generates...some Bolts of Slay Animal. Damn. And the Scroll of Summon Never-Moving Pet? It summoned...nothing. Hunh. Maybe immobile monsters are barred from being generated here; tthe Lonely Mountain is kind of a dragon-specific place. So that's dull.

This kind of thing is why I usually use "gambling" items immediately when I find them rather than reserve them for some future payday -- so often that "payday" is a big fat nothing. At least in ToME it's pretty easy to find a high-level dungeon to use such items in. In Vanilla Angband you'd actually have to walk down into the depths of the (singular) dungeon if you wanted to boost the odds of an Acquirement scroll giving you something powerful.

Let's swing by Minas Anor on the way back to Mordor.



There's more town to the north; it just doesn't fit on my screen. Minar Anor is a "full-featured" town, with all stores and all important services (which basically amounts to having a dude that can *Identify* gear and having a dungeon recall service).

Fun fact: now that our Vision spell lights up the map, night has ceased to have meaning for us. I like to imagine the townsfolk getting woken up at 2AM by the sun rising, because we're stopping by to unload a bunch of vendor trash on them.

Per tradition, Minas Anor has a house quest for us.



Oh hey there, Aragorn. So if you're king, does that mean that Lord of the Rings is completed? So what's Celeborn doing in Lothlorien? And why does Gondolin still exist? And where's Rivendell? The timeline for this game is somewhat confused. Or concussed.

Anyway, this quest is not a huge deal, despite the nominal level 45.



Here's a complete listing of the monsters here:



The only really threatening enemy is the Crypt Thing, the green L in the room we start in. Everyone else has too little HP to pose much threat. Even the Crypt Thing dies after two castings of Good Night, resistance to darkness or no.

We kill a Headless Ghost, and for some reason it drops five chests.


(chests are the grey ~, and are almost invariably trapped, so watch out)

From the lot, we get two junkarts: Raal's Tome of Unconventional Warfare (activates for teleport), and Baalzebub's Tormented Skullcap (activates to cause hunger). Oh well.

Anyway, the rest of the ghosts are easily dispatched, and thus

Minas Anor is safer now.

Sweet, new stash. All of our stashes are independent, which on the one hand means increased storage space, but on the other hand means that if we want to track down an item we have to trek to the town it's stored in. Khazad-Dûm's house is thus not only a total deathtrap but also spectacularly pointless.

What's Aragorn's next quest?



Well screw you too buddy. Actually this is okay; if the game doesn't think we're ready for a quest, it's almost certainly right. You have to be reallyunderlevelled to not be able to pass its level checks.

Back to Mordor, I guess. We liberate some Princesses from empty threats, find a room filled with 92 Driders...



...and 3 skeletal Driders...

The Drider dies. <92x> The Skeletal Drider is destroyed. <3x>

Ahem.

We find some great gloves:



+4 CON = +90 HP, and because they can be used to store a spell, they don't interfere with spellcasting. Ehh, I guess that makes sense.

We level up, and Tulkas gives us yet another quest. Man, he's really mashing that "call my only competent servant" button, isn't he? Well, the quests are so easy that we might as well do them. I mean, so long as we don't have to fight too many grossly leveled-up monsters. This one's northeast of Bree and northwest of Minas Anor, which puts it in a fairly narrow, but tall, stripe of the map.



Not pictured: Minas Anor, waaaaay the fuck to the south. You couldn't have used literally any other town as a landmark, could you Tulkas?

The temple is nominally level 24, and oh jesus these guys.



To our northeast: a group of Dark Elven Warlocks. These guys are the bane of players who aren't breaking the game over their knees -- fast, group monsters who can cast Mana Bolt for over 100 damage, and they show up early, like "normally native to level 23" early. Dark Elven Warlocks are one of the game's first signs that it doesn't fuck around (assuming you didn't do stuff like wander around the mountains at character level 5). Fortunately, we reflect bolts.

Unfortunately, the experience and loot here still suck. We skip most of the dungeon, noting only that the fourth level is comically tiny:



and nab the relic on level five before bugging out. I hope you appreciate this, Tulkas!

Oh, we gained a level awhile back. As per tradition we max out Thaumaturgy and heeyyyyy guys? Damage is officially No Longer A Problem.



This is almost literally the best spell in the game; the only way it could be better would be if it were a rank-50 spell, for 50x 10d100 balls. Practically nothing resists inertia (and the only ones I'm aware of are not threatening anyway). And anything we hit with it that survives will be hovering somewhere around -500 speed, assuming the speed table even goes that low.

Really the only problem now is that it costs 76 SP and we only have 443 max. We need to get Psychic Drain up and running ASAP so we can deal with crowds properly.

Well, that and we have few enough hitpoints that many lategame monsters can still one-shot us. Can't kill them if they nuke us first. But there's no longer any concern of us being unable to kill things effectively, which is always something of a crapshoot when you're playing as a Thaumaturgist.

Let's name our new spell Black Hole. Because you're highly unlikely to survive its forces, but if you do you're gonna experience some serious time dilation.

And on that note...

...see you next time!