Part 11: Hobbiton Mitch and the Amulet of DOOM

Last time, we killed an awful lot of dragons in a vain attempt to whip our noodly little body into shape. After that update, I returned Mitch to town, toked him up on ale again, and marched him right back to the Lonely Mountain. My logic here is that we need stats and experience, and we'll find both better here than anywhere else -- even if we don't find stat potions, we're deep enough in the dungeon that they're readily found lying on the ground. I might as well do some grinding. What I'm not going to do is subject you all to it.

I will share a few moments with you, however. Like this pit full of ice dragons:



Pits of this kind always have 95 monsters in them that are related somehow, and all of the monsters start out awake. Pretty scary, given that we aren't immune to cold; however, we do have some Potions of Resistance, which give temporary resistance to all elements, that stacks with our permanent resistance. Thus protected we only take 1/9th normal damage.

Put another way, about ten turns later the situation looked like this:



And not a single stat potion in the lot. On the other hand, we did score this little beauty:



This will be quite nice, especially since our current amulet is only being used for stat boosts anyway. Oh, sure, it's a bit of a fixer-upper, but it's nothing a few Remove Curse scrolls can't fix. See?



What happened here? Every time you uncurse a cursed item, it has a chance to flip all of its modifiers. There are some insanely nasty cursed items in ToME, which make for correspondingly powerful items once flipped. Amulets of DOOM are merely particularly convenient for this because they re-apply the sticky curse if you remove it, so you can just camp outside the temple buying their Remove Curse scrolls until one of them flips the enchantment (the re-cursing effect won't flip the modifiers again). It took six scrolls this time to flip this guy.

Suddenly I don't care so much that our stats aren't maxed. With the Amulet of DOOM [for everyone else] equipped, we have perfect 40s across the both except for WIS (28) and CHA (33). And then when we go back into the dungeon, we find a fountain of *Enlightenment*! It's not quite a fountain of Augmentation, but each dose of Enlightenment has, well:

You begin to feel more enlightened... Wow! You feel very smart! Wow! You feel very wise! You sense the presence of traps! You sense the presence of doors! You sense the presence of ways out of this area! You sense the presence of treasure! You sense the presence of objects!

*Enlightenment* permanently boosts your INT and WIS, does a full detection of the area, lights and maps the entire dungeon, and acts as a Self Knowledge potion, listing all of the abilities, resistances, etc. that you have. Here's Mitch's current status per Self Knowledge:



Functionally this is a less detailed version of the information displayed on the character screen, but it doesn't require you to have *Identified* all of your equipment first. Back in the old days of Vanilla when *Identify* was a lot harder to come by, Self Knowledge could act as an ersatz version of it -- strip naked except the item you want to learn about, drink the potion, note the effects on your character.

Anyway, this fountain lets us cap off our INT and WIS stats, all of our others are effectively capped at least with our current gear, except for CHA and who cares about CHA? We have over a million gold, we can buy just about anything we want anyway.

Let's head on over to Gondolin and check out the quests there. If you've forgotten, Gondolin is northeast of Bree.



Let's go say hi to the king! Surely he won't mind a random hobbit dropping in on the throne room.



Predictable. We're just the hired exterminators. This is the house quest for Gondolin, and it's not really that bad.



A few baby dragons, a few young dragons, and a bunch of mature dragons, with a mature multihued dragon as the most dangerous threat here. Most of them start out asleep though, and these levels of dragon don't have very good DPS. I wouldn't want to come in here at, say, level 30 and with no source of temporary resistance, because there's nowhere to hide on the level so you'll be tanking hits a lot, but Mitch has no problem just dropping space rocks on everyone before they can figure out what's going on.

So that was fun. Got anything else for us, Turgon?



Oh, I see how it is. Dark elves aren't welcome in this city, huh? Racist.

This quest is just a throwdown with a moderately powerful unique enemy:



Eol has a huge suite of nasty spells, including both attack and summoning spells. He's also very fast (triple normal speed). You really want to kill him before he can get his pain train rolling. Fortunately the walls are granite, so you can dig an antisummoning corridor (a twisting corridor into the rock that only lets one monster see you at a time) to keep a rein on his summons.

Eol, the Dark Elf says: 'You'd have to be a GOD to smile after that hit!' Eol, the Dark Elf dies. Such a sad end...

Or you can just suck him into a black hole. That works too. Our reward is a shiny thing:



This is legitimately a good reward, especially for characters that can't cast Vision. Having a map of your surroundings handy is very helpful, and the stat boosts from this thing make it better than most artifact light sources.

What's next, Turgon?



Kill all the trolls? Sounds good! This quest really is right at the city walls:





Inexplicably, Morgoth's army is all asleep. A stealthy character could theoretically walk all the way to the up stairs at the opposite end of the level and fulfill the quest requirements without killing anything beyond a single troll right at the start. If you do decide to start a fight, though, watch out for those 'P' monsters: those are Hrus, who move quickly and have four hits that deal a whopping 12d13 damage apiece. I mean, they can't do anything else (i.e. they have no ranged attacks), but goddamn does that melee hurt. There's also a unique monster here: Ulik the Troll, the purple T. He's basically a slightly stronger Hru.

Of course, this is all entirely academic. We use the Ring of Flare's swap-positions spell to teleport into the middle of the army:



And then we fire up our latest new toy:



Remember that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where all the Nazis turn into skeletons and then into dust?



Scratch one evil army.



I believe the gold is the normal reward, and access to the Royal Jewel(ery shop) is the bonus reward for killing everything. This just creates a shop right outside the king's home:



There's nothing useful in it though, and we've had access to a jewelry shop in the Orc Caves for awhile now.

That's it for Turgon's quests. What about Aragorn? Last time we spoke with him he thought we were too wimpy to help him out. Maybe that's changed.



Oh, screw you buddy. There is another quest we can do here, though, handed out by the librarian.







Bree gets thieves, trolls, and wights; Lothlorien gets wolves and spiders; Gondor gets undead; Gondolin gets dragons; Khazad-Dûm gets demons. In this case, the stacks are full of weak undead and golems. Over in the southeast are the nastier foes, two Monastic Liches and a Master Lich:



Monastic Liches are undead monks, more or less; their kicks have decent odds of stunning you, which is highly unpleasant and can lead to being knocked out (unresistable paralysis). We've already seen a Master Lich, at the Orc Barracks. Neither is a threat to us now.

As a reward, the librarian will make a custom spellbook for us, which can hold any three spells we like.


(and it continues scrolling downwards)

We already have all of the spells we want, but this is a great reward for casters to whom the RNG has stubbornly been denying important spells. Technically any single-spell spellbook can show up in a bookstore, so with enough tedious waiting around you can get all of your spells, but it can take a long time sometimes. Man, I was so happy when we got a book of Identify right off.

This reward is also useful for Sorcerers, who can cast almost any spell in the game and thus tend to carry a massive number of books around with them. Some of the realms only have one useful spell in them so this reward lets you consolidate a bit.



Aww, our name's on the cover! As for what's inside?



I make bad decisions. Healing is pretty obvious, and Corpse Explosion works just like as in Diablo II; Listen to the Music is an identification prayer for worshippers of Eru Illuvatar. And of course these are all useless to us.

Anyway, we're out of quests for the moment, so let's check on some dungeons. Right outside Gondor is Cirith Ungol, Shelob's domain:



You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into an entrance to Cirith Ungol.



Cirith Ungol, appropriately, is full of spiders and orcs. The yellow "+" are all webs, with mountains in between, and scattered "dark pits" (gray "#"s) which can only be passed by flying. Webs appear to just act like walls, sadly; no "sticking" effect here. The dungeon ranges from level 25 to level 50, which is really too long, but fortunately we can just skip it all with Probability Travel. If we didn't have that, we could always pay one of the Thunderlord Nest guys in town to teleport us to the bottom of the dungeon, which is presumably what all the non-mage guys do (actually they all just ignore this and many other dungeons).

Anyway, as I subtly foreshadowed earlier, Shelob is the dungeon boss, shown here raging against her inability to swim:



She can breathe darkness and poison, and she has enough hitpoints to make them hurt (remember breath weapon damage scales with the monster's current HP). She's also the daughter of Ungoliant, who famously ate herself to satisfy her ravenous hunger, so it seems appropriate that we suck Shelob up into a black hole. Our reward is some damned nice armor!



This kind of thing makes it really obvious that DarkGod loves spellcasters; it's tailor-made for classes who don't ever engage in melee. The (-18,-27) are a massive penalty to your accuracy and damage in melee. The HP boost takes us from 750 HP to 900, which would be appropriate for endgame paladins and rogues in Vanilla. We do lose some nice resistances from our old armor that we'll want to restore somehow.

This calls for equipment shuffling. We wander around the overworld to our various homes and mix and match bits until we come up with this:



It covers all of the really important abilities:



and keeps both our INT and CON at maximum, which is all we really care about when it comes to stats. I gotta say, Mitch is feeling pretty good about himself!



Next time: we'll hit character level 45.