Part 10: Drinking Our Way to the Top

Last time, we attained Phenomenal Cosmic Power, or at least the ability to squish any particular foe like an itty bitty bug, which comes to the same thing, right?

At this point, what we need is a) levels, and b) stats. Our HP at 483 is too low to comfortably take on late-game foes (unresisted nether attacks can do 550 damage, and Morgoth packs a manastorm for 600), but that can largely be fixed by boosting our CON score, which gives bonus HP for every level we have. Levels will also help us get our Mindcrafting skill up to snuff, and we can also dump points into the Magic skill to directly boost our SP. Our goals are to get our CON up to 38 (the effective cap) and to get the Psychic Drain spell unlocked and down to a reasonable failure rate.

How to grind for stats? Well, there's a potion store in the first Orc Caves dungeon town. Potions weigh .4 pounds apiece, and according to the skill spoiler, with no ranks in Stealing we'd need a DEX score of 18/140 (a.k.a. 32) to steal a single potion safely. Our DEX is 27, and besides that sounds really boring -- stealing all the potions, smashing them on the floor, waiting for the shopkeeper to bring more out, and repeating until our stats are buffed out.

Instead, let's go get drunk.



The Prancing Pony has an unlimited supply of booze. We buy ourselves 99 pints of ale, take them outside, and drink the lot, downing 29.7 pounds of ale in about two and a half minutes to no ill effect aside from slowing down a bit because we're overfed.

Why do this? Because it gives us 99 empty bottles. Now let's hare away over to the Lonely Mountain. We make it well over halfway there before starting to feel hungry again.

Now remember, the Lonely Mountain dungeon looks something like this:



and it starts out at level 60. Incidentally, left to right the monsters in this room are a Dracolich, Kavlax the Many-Headed, a Dreadmaster, and a Death Drake. Nasty stuff.

What we're looking for here is fountains. Fountains can spawn in any dungeon and hold a set number of doses of random level-appropriate potions. You can either drink from the fountain directly, or you can fill a bottle; the latter approach is vastly to be preferred because then you can identify the effects of the fountain before you drink it and discover it was nitroglycerine.

You think I'm joking, but I'm not.

Anyway, in "large" dungeons like the Lonely Mountain, every 2x2 "grid" of fountains has the same potion type, so we could easily max out a stat from a single uber-fountain if it has the right type. We just need to, y'know, not get killed in the process. Fortunately we have Vision and Time Out, and can just regenerate levels infinitely until we find what we need.



This looks promising.



Hit "H", and

Do you want to [Q]uaff or [F]ill from the fountain?

We get 4 Gloopy Green Potions from the fountain.

In your pack: 4 Gloopy Green Potions of Death.

Well. That's...auspicious. We huck one of the potions at the adjacent Ancient Blue Dragon; the potion explodes, but deals negligible damage. I thought these things made better missile weapons; oh well. Let's just leave the awful fountain of literal death alone.

The other fountains on the level are Lose Memories (experience drain), Infravision (temporariy boost in darkvision), Corruption (gain a probably character-ruining mutation), and Curing (trivial HP regen and status ailment removal).

Vaults in the Lonely Mountain can get kind of silly.



On the plus side, that yellow ~ in there is this:



Also, that fountain we're on is a Fountain of Booze.

It is, I suppose, inevitable that we should encounter some unique dragons while here. Like Scatha the Worm, say.


(cripes this room is huge)

We embed him in granite:



then dig out a single tile of open space for him to move into:



And, more importantly, for loot to drop into. Then we fire up the Black Hole.

Scatha the Worm starts moving slower. <3x> Scatha the Worm grunts with pain. Scatha the Worm cries out in pain. Scatha the Worm starts moving slower. <2x> Scatha the Worm flees in terror! Scatha the Worm dies.

So that was...8 hits. Out of 41. And Scatha has 2200 HP. Yeah, I think we're set, damage-wise.

Itangast the Fire Drake doesn't even get the benefit of being put on Time Out for better targeting of spells:



After all, we're immune to his fire anyway. Consequently, he manages to survive two castings of Black Hole, its scattershot aiming being far less effective in such open space. He gives us new armor:



which is an easy upgrade over our old stuff. We also get an amulet:



but that's kind of garbage, CON bonus or no. Better than Scatha gave us, mind.

Finally, after a dozen or so levels and no stat-gain potions, we find a Potion of Constitution just lying on the floor, and it takes us to 38 CON all on its own. We now have 609 HP instead of our old 480. We must be in the range where stat gain potions give us more than one point per potion; nice! That generally happens when your "internal" stat is in the 18-20 range (for unknown reasons), which means...



...yeah, we're getting a whopping +12 to CON from equipment, +3 from worshipping Tulkas, and +2 from being a Hobbit. That'd do it. Any additional CON gains from potions will just give us the option to swap out CON gear for something else.

Shortly afterwards, in this rather unpleasant room (containing a Bile Demon and several other nasties):



A fountain of *Healing*! We make out with 16 *Healing* potions, each of which will restore 1000 HP when drunk. This is more than we should need for the entire rest of the game (I sincerely hope). And another fountain on the level has Restore Mana potions, giving us 20, which should fill in nicely until we get Psychic Drain up and running. Each such potion restores our mana to full, no questions asked.

This kind of thing is why scumming the Lonely Mountain can be dangerous:



The rooms are huge, which increases the odds that you enter the level next to something awake and nasty; in this case, a pack of Time Hounds. Time Hounds can breathe time at you, which has one of three effects: drain a ton of experience; heavily drain a single stat; drain -1 from every stat across the board. Fortunately none of them breathed on us in the turn we spent casting Vision, and we were able to escape posthaste.

We opportunistically snack on a pack of maybe half a dozen ancient dragons, and get a ridiculous haul in artifacts:



Evenstar would have been quite welcome earlier; it's a fantastic amulet. Now we actually need the INT from our Amulet of Brilliance more.



While wielding this, nobody can teleport, period. Generally a bad idea; either you want to be able to teleport yourself out of harm's way, or you want to be able to force monsters to go away. I could see it having the occasional niche use, though, and I believe it also, uniquely, protects you against Time attacks.



Need stat sustains? Anarion has you covered. Its other abilities are usually redundant with other gear. But it's great for non-cheesy characters who want to melee Morgoth, who can drain all stats with his melee. Provides zero protection against time attacks, as with any other stat sustain in the game.



Just a crappy randart.



Not an artifact, but better than most artifacts. This would easily be an endgame weapon in Vanilla, and probably qualifies in ToME as well. Y'know, for melee characters. For us, its stat bonuses are slightly smaller than the Morningstar of Gondolin we found way back in the Orc Caves, and it's really heavy besides.

The Great Wyrm of Law that gave us some of these could have pulverised us, if it had got a turn. It went straight from sleeping to dead, though, so no worries on that front. We swing by Lothlorien, sell off some junk, tank up on more ale, and head back to the dragonlands.

We get worryingly close to Adunaphel the Quiet before sucking her into a Black Hole:



Adunaphel is a Ringwraith who can walk through walls and is invisible, but you have zero business diving down to her native depth without being able to see invisible monsters.

Her ring:



Eh. On the plus side, killing her got us to level 37, which gives us enough skillpoints hit a major milestone in Mindcrafting:



First, we can cast Psychic Drain (albeit poorly). But more importantly, Minor Displacement is now a targeted teleport. Probability Travel already allowed us to go from point A to point B without occupying the intervening space as long as that space was a wall; now we can just point somewhere and be there. The potential for abuse is pretty astounding. The range is a little limited, sure, but it's still a lot better than walking around like some kind of pedestrian.

Annoyingly, while we find fountains of hallucination, fountains of neutralize poison, fountains of restore dexterity, fountains of ruination (permanently reduces all of your stats!), fountains of cure sanity, fountains of ugliness, and even a fountain of apple juice, we just aren't finding those stat fountains. I swear I remember this working better last time I tried it. In a snit, I start us diving towards the bottom of the Lonely Mountain. If we can't get what we want, then we're at least going to shank the guy in charge here. Otherwise how will they know to improve their customer service?

As we go, we destroy some sleeping dragons. The Great Wyrm tier is fantastic experience (over 30k each, and we need somewhere around 120k to level up right now), and as long as we get the drop on them, the fights are easy. Fortunately they're universally very heavy sleepers, and we have good stealth.


Shown here: a Great Bile Wyrm about to get a hands-on study in relativity.

At the bottom of the dungeon, en route to giving its boss a stern talking-to, we slaughter one of the mightiest non-unique dragons in the game, a Sky Drake, and it gives us a new toy:



Nimthanc, Narthanc, and Dethanc are, in Vanilla Angband, the earliest artifacts in the game; they'll give a young melee character a substantial step up, but they run out of utility by around dungeon level 30 or so, outclassed by later weapons. Dethanc here doesn't look like anything much, does it? The key is that "It is sentient" line.

Sentient artifacts can level up, by being used to kill things (all sentient artifacts are weapons). Every time they level, they gain some points, and may choose to spend those points on upgrading themselves. This can be by improving their pluses, gaining access to a new power realm, or gaining a power from a realm they already have. So for example, if Dethanc had access to the Air realm, it could gain resistance to poison, or a poison brand, or a DEX bonus, or levitation, etc.

Mostly sentient artifacts end up being a lot of hype and not a lot of payoff, given the effort you have to spend on improving them. But they're fun toys to play with.

Anyway. We were looking for the dungeon boss, and we've found him, and encased him in rock:



Glaurung, Father of the Dragons, the big red D himself.



These days, Ancalagon the Black, "Rushing Jaws", is the biggest dragon around, but Glaurung is still a potent foe. He has 12000 hitpoints (Cripes! A huge step up from Vanilla), decently powerful melee, and a spell list that is uncommonly only filled about 50% of the way with dud spells -- Blind, Confuse, Frighten, Breathe Fire, Breathe Poison, Breathe Sound, and Summon Ancient Dragons.

He manages to survive to the 30th strike from Black Hole before dying.

Glaurung, Father of the Dragons says: 'Only the good die young, all the evil seem to live forever.'

Dude, I'm pretty sure you lived for centuries.

So yeah, we can deal over 12000 damage in a single spell! For comparison's sake, Morgoth has 30000 hitpoints in ToME. Why am I bothering to grind for stats again?

...right, because we'll still fold over in a tough breeze if anything actually gets to attack us. It's a fine line we walk here -- we can obliterate anything with a thought, but the same holds true in reverse.

Anyway, let's check out Glaurung's drops!



That Dimension Door activation is the same as our high-powered Minor Displacement spell, and is therefore insanely good. The other abilities are pretty great too. If you've read any of the Pern books, you may remember F'lar? Yeah, this is his ring. I'd say this is fanboyish self-insertion fantasy except a) F'lar is an actual character from the series, just being bodged into another work, and b) DarkGod is actually directly a monster in the game. Seriously. Here's his record from the monster file:



Unfortunately he counts as a "joke" monster, so we won't be seeing him. Same goes for Bull Gates (because childish namecalling at Microsoft was an in thing at the time) and Barney the Dinosaur.

I repeat, this game is weird.

Anyway, Flare's ring is a straight upgrade over our old Ring of Flying (why were we even still wearing that?), and boosts our CON high enough that we can afford to swap out some other piece of CON-granting gear if we like.



A very nice amulet, but it mostly just gives us stuff we already have. Could be a useful source of redundancy though.



No stat boosts, no resists we really need. This is Glaurung's guaranteed randart drop.



I guess technically Glaurung didn't give this to us, but we found it near him! And it sucks.



If Orcrist is here, then I guess that means that the reward for the Trolls quest (that we couldn't take because we got Wights instead) must be Glamdring. This guy's hopelessly out of date now, though.



If Orcrist is out of date, then Elvagil is just tripe. There is a miniscule window in this game in which this weapon would be worth wielding; it's too heavy early on to be effective compared to an enchanted dagger, and by the time characters can wield it properly they have much better options. It's even a lousy stat stick.



Also garbage; you want way more +damage (the +9 in "(+6,+9)") on your weapons. Also, someone really likes halberds.



Now we're talking. Eorlingas is a bit tricky to use, because it's so heavy, but it at least has power backing it up.

Of course, we don't use any of these, so this was all a huge waste of time! Bah.

Well, okay, so here's the thing: we're basically ready to win now, except we'd like better stats and more levels, and there's a few remaining things I want to show off too (mostly special levels). Next time, we'll take a look at some of the remaining content; in the meantime, I'll be offscreening the grinding.