Part 12: Destroyer of Armies

Last time we mopped up all of the available quests, except for the Khazad-Dûm house quest because we can't really be bothered to go back there.

We're now level 42. Something special happens at level 45. So let's go hit that real quick, shall we? We storm through Mordor, rescuing princesses left and right, finding lost swords, and looting all kinds of useless-to-us artifacts.

At level 43, we level up Mindcrafting enough so that the Psychic Drain spell becomes a radius-one ball attack (able to hit up to 9 enemies at a time). Let's give that a shot.



You convert the Black orc's pain into psychic energy! <5x> You convert the Black orc shaman's pain into psychic energy! The Black orc resists.

Wow, so we literally derive energy from the pain of others. The gains are fairly modest on a per-enemy basis; maybe 10-20 SP at a time. But it's a hell of a lot faster than resting. Unfortunately it only works on intelligent enemies, and undead (some undead, anyway) and demons, while intelligent, have a chance of causing backlash, which hurts you instead of them. Still, small mobs of orcs and trolls are all over the place in basically every dungeon, and we a) are psychic and thus know they're there, and b) have a targeted teleport. So we can just drop everything in the middle of a fight, go torture some mooks, and then bop back and pick up where we left off.

On level 51 in Mordor, we finally find a dangerous quest:



This Princess has been captured by 12 Eye Drujs (the red "s" monsters), stationary undead spellcasters. Each one "moves" very quickly (triple normal speed), always casts spells on its turn when possible, and has a spell list with zero duds in it: Mana Bolt, Nether Bolt, Nether Storm, Brain Smash, and Summon Undead. They probably wouldn't kill us if we spent a turn in their collective sights, but they could if we got a little unlucky.

We could easily skip the quest via Probability Travel. Instead we're just going to abuse the hell out of sight lines.



Digging out the tile to our northwest will leave us free from being hit by any druj spells, but we'll be able to hit them with splash damage by casting ball spells around the corner. The one druj three up and one left of our position will be able to see us, but he won't have a clear firing angle; the wall to our north will be in the way. As we kill drujs along the bottom, we can dig east, move east, and dig northwest to maintain cover while exposing more drujs to our fire. It's a little slow, but the only danger we're in is if a wandering monster comes by and disturbs us while we're resting between castings.



Halfway done; note the Void Jumpgates we made to travel from the southwest to the northeast.

Oh, one more thing: we won't be finishing this quest anyway. Killing the seventh druj puts us over the limit to level 45...

The Eye druj starts moving slower. The Eye druj is destroyed. Welcome to level 45. You can learn 16 more skills. A Thunderlord appears in front of you and says: 'Hello, noble hero. I am Liron, rider of Tolan. Turgon, King of Gondolin sent me. Gondolin is being invaded; he needs your help now or everything will be lost. I can bring you to Gondolin, but we must go now.' Will you come? [y/n]

Liron here isn't kidding about needing to go now; if you don't, Gondolin is razed to the ground and you lose access to everything there (including, I believe, the contents of your home). Better hope you weren't in the middle of anything important when you dinged 45! Like, say, having found a bunch of artifacts but not having decided which ones to bring with you, say. It'd sure suck to have to leave something awesome on the floor behind you, losing it forever. Yep. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Anyway, we say yes, because screw that Princess anyway.

'You made the right decision! Quickly, jump on Tolan!' 'Here we are: Gondolin. You must speak with Turgon now.'

Incidentally, this all happens in a single turn, and the map doesn't refresh until the turn ends, so as far as we can tell, we're still in Mordor:



Turgon hails you. 'Morgoth is upon us! Dragons and Balrogs have poured over secret ways of the Echoriath, and are looking for our city.'

Secret ways? Dude, there's an obvious foot path leading up the mountains to your city. Hidden city my ass.

'They are conducted by Maeglin! You must stop him or they will find us. Do not let Maeglin get to the stairs or everything will be lost! Go now, be brave.'

And now we're finally in Gondolin.



Fun fact: nighttime is equivalent to daytime for anyone with a high-level Vision spell.



And no, there's no actual time pressure here. The game spawns a quest entrance over by the gates of Gondolin, and we can enter it, or not, at our leisure. You can just leave this quest here unresolved and go win the game if you feel like it; Gondolin only gets destroyed if you aren't willing to drop everything the instant you hit level 45 to go listen to Turgon for a bit. But hell, we're up to the challenge, so let's go stop Maeglin.



This quest is a knock-down, drag-out brawl with a bunch of nasty monsters and of course Maeglin, Traitor of Gondolin. The big notables are a bunch of Lesser Balrogs, many ancient dragons, some Master Mindcrafters with potentially nasty spells (but also a lot of duds in their spell lists, so they're unlikely to hit us with the painful stuff). Maeglin can bore through solid rock and all of his spells are summoning spells.

Our first priority is to get away from the stairs, since I believe if Maeglin reaches them then Bad Stuff happens -- not that I've ever experimented nor noticed any differences in the monster AI on this level.

Then we start moving northeast and spamming Black Hole everywhere. Even without constraining its firing lines by creating walls, it does a great job of killing chaff enemies. This does however create a problem:



There's items everywhere, and walls can't be created on top of items. That greatly limits the value of Time Out.

You may also notice the completely black tiles in the northeast; that's Maeglin chewing through walls to get to us. We use the Swap Position power granted by the Ring of Flare to move closer (our normal targeted teleport may be disallowed; I don't remember. Anyway, it takes two turns: one to create the jumpgate, and another to pass through it).



Then we quaff one of our Restore Mana potions and throw up some privacy walls. Unfortunately, Maeglin (the dark gray "h") is indeed ignoring us and charging for those stairs.



We blow away our brand new walls with a Blast - Wall Destruction spell, and give chase.



Fortunately once we get close enough, Maeglin turns to fight us. And then he gets sucked into a black hole, the end.

Maeglin, the Traitor of Gondolin says: 'Time for lust, time for lie, time to kiss your life goodbye.' Maeglin, the Traitor of Gondolin dies. You did it! Gondolin will remain hidden.

Hooray! And after mopping up, we're left with this mess:



I really wish I could just hire some poor Gondolin elf beggars to sort through the muck, identify the lot, and present me with a list of their findings. Alas, I'm stuck doing it all manually. As it turns out, really the only notable bits of the loot are maxing out our STR score and more than replacing the consumables we used. Oh well.

Turgon appears before you and speaks: 'I will never be able to thank you enough. My most powerful mages will cast a spell for you, giving you extra life.'

And he's not kidding. We go from a maximum of 962 HP to a max of 1142 HP, though remember that we're getting a 20% boost from our body armor. That's still a hefty improvement, and easily worth the price of admission. For reference, in Vanilla the burliest of warriors might hit 1200 HP in the endgame, which is enough to survive two unresisted hits from almost any spell/breath (not counting the basic 4 elements, which have a high damage cap but the resistances are ubiquitous). So the fact that we're nearly to 1200 with a mage is pretty silly. ToME 2 has a lot of nasty monsters that Vanilla doesn't have, but as a rule they don't deal damage much faster. You're just in more danger of getting swarmed. We have way too many hitpoints.

Anyway, Turgon's out of quests for us, but maybe now that we've hit level 45 Aragorn over in Minas Anor will finally give us the time of day.



Hooray, one more quest! And all we have to do is walk to Gondolin; sounds easy!



Honestly I don't see what the big de...

Looks like a full wing of thunderlords ambushes you! Trone steps forth and speaks: 'The secret of the Void Jumpgates will not be used by any but the thunderlords!'



Okay, yeah, that was pretty predictable. This quest dumps us into a brawl with a ridiculous number of thunderlords (which you should basically think of as red dragons -- lots of HP, fire breath, not much else). There's 22 greens, 14 blues (one of which has inexplicably been zombified), 10 browns, 3 bronzes, and 1 gold. Bronzes and golds can both breathe time, and golds can also summon more thunderlords, but otherwise these guys are basically harmless because hey, we're immune to fire!

Also, pretty sure "Trone" was named "T'ron" in PernAngband.

Thunderlords can fly over the trees around here, and we can't cast Black Hole through trees, so we take a couple of steps back and through up a Time Out.



This will neatly keep us from getting surrounded. Then we just open a crack in our little keep and start killing. We use Psychic Drain to top off our SP periodically, because there is an awful lot of HP to chew through here, but otherwise it's mostly just a matter of stacking bodies. Pretty soon all that's left is one poor Blue Thunderlord who's been clipped by so many inertia blasts that he's practically in stasis. I count 14 turns of ours for 1 of his. Poor guy.



And a crapton of loot of course. Plus, thunderlords give excellent experience for each kill; we end up gaining two levels (to 47) off of the mob. Incidentally, this is what our skills look like right now:



We still have 17 spare skillpoints to allocate. Top contenders include Spirituality, for better saving throws, and Stealth, to help us keep one fight from leading into another. The important thing though is that we've finally maxed Thaumaturgy. Here's our last two spells:



Kinda neatly illustrates the problem with Thaumaturgy ball spells when Area - Meteors has upwards of 500 times the damage potential. That acid ball is ridiculously gigantic, though -- I threw it to the northeast, and check out the dead trees (black # symbols):



Of course it also blew up a bunch of loot, but honestly at this point we only really care about artifacts anyway, and those are indestructible. So blowing up loot is just fine by me.

Killing all of the thunderlords creates an up staircase for us to escape the "ambush". Taking it sends us...to the southeast corner of Minas Anor? So we get to walk back to Gondolin again, head over to Turgon's throne room, and



Oh god damn it. I wonder more than a little if the exit to the ambush was supposed to drop you in Gondolin and someone just forgot which way the quest goes. So we march aaaaaalll the way back to Minas Anor and stomp in on Aragorn's dinner:



The horn in question?



It sounds potentially useful -- an instant levelport to the surface. But check that 20% failure rate. We're only rank 9 at magic devices, so we could drop it by investing some skillpoints, but not by all that much. And Aragorn went ahead and slapped a 100% discount on it, so we can't even sell the damned thing! Come to think, that same discount gets applied when we steal stuff, so where exactly did you get this horn, Aragorn?

And yes, there's now a Void Jumpgate in Minas Anor and a corresponding one in Gondolin, which you can use for fast travel now that the overworld poses zero threat to you.

More interesting than some dumb horn is this shiny ball we got off of a dead bluebird:



It's an easy upgrade over the Phial of Galadriel, which had been our previous light source. The chaos resistance (which also covers confusion resistance) means we can swap out our Shield of Anarion if we want; we swap back in our randart shield which grants reflection (deflects bolt spells). It also has fire immunity, but that's wholly redundant with our Ring of Flare.

Let's go check some more dungeons to wrap up the update. First off, there's the Sacred Land of Mountains, where we can follow up on that Thunderlord ambush. According to the dungeon spoiler: "The Sacred Land Of Mountains is located in a large mountain range, with the remains of many old towns. Considered a perfect place to hide for one who could fly, it is rumoured that Trone the rebel Thunderlord fled into the ruins here."

It's over here, east of Lothlorien:



Annoyingly, the dungeon a) is "flat", so Probability Travel doesn't speed things up much, and b) uses mountains for everything, which you can't fly over, despite the flavor text. And we still haven't found any climbing gear. Monsters are pretty varied (I can't detect any kind of theme, anyway), and the dungeon spans from level 45 all the way down to level 70. Down at the bottom of the dungeon, sure enough, is Trone, the Rebel Thunderlord.



Flavor text: "As the Thunderlords came from afar to help the elves, Trone and his rebel wing came to defend Morgoth! He is an evil and powerful Thunderlord."

He's basically a souped-up gold thunderlord (albeit presumably flying a bronze), with the fire and time breath weapons and the ability to summon thunderlords, plus significantly more powerful melee. Doesn't help him much when we embed him in granite and then hammer him with Black Hole.

Trone, the Rebel Thunderlord starts moving slower. <18x> Trone, the Rebel Thunderlord grunts with pain. <2x> Trone, the Rebel Thunderlord flees in terror! Trone, the Rebel Thunderlord says: 'I'm going home, babe.' Trone, the Rebel Thunderlord dies.

Appropriate last words, you cross-fictional substitute character. Go back to Pern! (I don't really mind the thunderlords being in ToME; it's just one more really weird thing in a game full of really weird things)

Trone drops a bucketful of awesome artifacts. First, his guaranteed drop:



This is ridiculously good body armor. Great stat boosts, immunity to fire, flight, and reflection all on the same item is insane. Of course we'd be sacrificing 20% of our HP if we equipped it. The "fiery sheath" would deal 2d6 fire damage to opponents every time they hit us, which is not a big deal at this point in the game.



The shield of the Haradrim would be decent if it didn't aggravate monsters. Aggravation gives us zero stealth, basically -- everything wakes up as soon as it gets a turn. Not worth the frankly not that amazing benefits of the shield.



Aule, the god of the dwarves, has one badass hammer, with great damage against all endgame monsters and ESP on top. Totally useless to mages though.



I love this thing. It's a hammer, named Skullcleaver! That's either the sharpest hammer known to man, or it swings really, really hard. As a weapon, it's pretty decent; good damage and the aggravation is generally less of an issue for warriors anyway. The "destruction" activation basically sets off a nuke around the player, deleting all monsters and non-artifacts in a wide radius around the player and blinding them. The monsters aren't killed, just removed from the level. It's a great escape option, though activating artifacts can have a substantial failure rate.



Thunderfist is just a really big stick that you can hit things with. Kind of underwhelming compared to what we've just seen, but it is still a pretty good weapon.

That seems like enough for now. Next time: we start making inroads on the endgame.