Thanks for the input guys! I originally thought about doing every writeup as a journal entry but that was too hard for my addled brain, although I bet I can do one or two in that vein. I'm mostly asking because this is a let's play and honestly this is the only kind of input I can get from you guys.
By the way, I am seriously considering the interpretive dance.
Welcome back to Let's Play Angband. This update is brought to you buy Guinness, the beer that people think is good until they drink other beers. That's right, Guinness - I'm onto you. You only survive in the US because of underage drinking. In fact I'm pretty sure that's how most terrible foreign beers thrive in the US market. I'm looking at you, Sapporo. Fosters, you're on notice.
Anyway, where was I? Last time on Let's Play Angband, Viki discovered a fantastic new weapon that will allow her to learn more prayers at the cost of actually being able to kill things. Naturally, she would rather have a higher wisdom rating, being a priest - she can always swap back. Firestar is dropped off in her home and she goes straight for wielding the tulwar. Awesome?
This allows her to learn two previously useless spells from the first book; Detect Evil will show all non-invisible evil monsters, and Find Traps... finds traps. That's an excellent spell to have in a pinch, when those monsters that create traps show up.
Hey! It's time for some dungeon crawling!
That is, some dungeon crawling you're not going to see. Because it's so boring. Viki gets bored too, and heads down for level 14.
Well, I guess this is a little better. The two monsters there are a (p)riest and a tengu (u); the Priest is just an upgraded version of our old buddy the Novice Priest, and goes down easily. The tengu is a more interesting monster - it can teleport you away, and also teleport you to a square adjacent to it.
Viki also steps on a trap, which unleashes a gaggle of monsters! One of these days I'd love to see a trap of Create Monster that summons a monster that creates traps. One of which is a trap of Create Monster.
However, it's not like any of these are going to be a big problem for her. The Dark Elf (h) and the White Harpy (H) are both susceptible to Draining as is the (G)host up there. Everything else is going to get taken out in the splash damage.
Awesome. But honestly, that's as awesome as the level gets, and Viki makes a trip back to town and then into the dungeon again.
How unexpected!
Shockingly, another unique monster appears, and this one isn't in a room of any kind. The purple (y) is Boldor, King of Yeeks! and he's a total pushover - like all the other uniques Viki has been running into. He's got a little entourage of yeekly creatures, which means there are Master Yeeks hiding in there somewhere, so Viki's just going to say to hell with the treasure and spam draining all over this little dungeon nook.
Although she'll have to keep up with his summoning of other yeeks. Things could definitely be worse. In fact, things don't get worse, even though Boldor summons more yeeks a couple of times.
And here's what you've all been waiting for: After a heavy dose of draining, Viki finally puts Boldor down for the count. Now it's just mopup of the monsters that he summoned that are clogging this little artery of tunnels.
It would have been kind of nice to drag him out into a larger room, but any monster that can summon is dangerous - especially if it can summon Master Yeeks, which will summon other monsters. Of course, a monster can't summon if it's surrounded, which makes fighting Boldor in a tight space a pretty good idea.
Perusing the loot, Viki finds some gauntlets [2,+5], which will be great for filling up the slot taken previously by her paltry [1,+whatever] gloves. Nothing special, but more armor is more armor, and 42 is probably a dangerously low AC for this point in the dungeon. Viki should be pushing at least 55 by now.
Little else of real note happens on this floor; Viki gets her life drained again right as she's about to hit level 25, and has to smash through a few more monsters than she'd like.
So it's back to the town to drop off her fabulous loot, and then into the dungeon again! Time for more thrilling (?) adventures!
Man, the RNG (Random Number God) is being very unkind today. Any more boring and somebody here is going to fall asleep, and it'll probably be me, because I'm still on vicodin.
Also I just noticed that at some point between the last screenshot and this one, Viki hit level 25. You go, girl!
Viki runs into a room filled with traps! An interesting feature of rooms structured like this one - a corridor encircling a room filled with pillars - is that they're almost always filled with traps and a dangerous monster or two. This is where Detect Traps comes in handy, because otherwise Viki would only find traps in here when it was too late and she'd already been hit by like 20 darts.
That, in fact, is the most interesting thing that happens on this floor. So interesting that the screenshots I threw away were quite literally all of empty rooms. Not kidding.
Back in town, there still aren't any Restore Dexterity potions at the alchemy shop, and so Viki makes a run on the Black Market only to find this. Mushrooms of Restoring are awesome - they do just what it says, in the description, and can be a little pricey at the market, in a couple of thousand. Viki's getting desperate, but not quite this desperate yet.
It's back to the dungeon!
Okay guys, you can stop playing this joke on me. It's getting really... boring.
The only reason I'm showing you guys these, by the way, is so that you can get an impression of how many trips Viki is taking back and forth through the dungeon. Otherwise this update would also be a hell of a lot smaller and I'd burn up my whole backlog, and that just can't happen!
Well, this is dull enough that Viki makes a beeline for level 15, and...
Great. Now Viki's fallen through a trap, so that means that the entire thing needs to be explored - because if it isn't, of course there's going to have been an awesome artifact or something there. That's just how this game works.
Maybe I shouldn't have wished for it to stop being boring. It's like that Chinese curse, which I could swear I got once in a fortune cookie: YOU WILL HAVE AN INTERESTING LIFE. (Learn Chinese: "Totally screwed")
Now we're talking! The (X) there is an Umber Hulk - this is a monster that is fairly unremarkable, but you might notice that it's in kind of a weird location on the map. This is because it eats walls! That's so awesome. The Umber Hulk is one of those monsters with a really great unique ability, which makes it fun to fight them, even though they're easy. It's best when they get scared and start running away, because they always move on a diagonal away from the player, chewing through walls as they go.
Here we go. See, it's always worth exploring these floors! Viki will never use this - she's already toting a great bow and crossbows are ridiculously heavy - but it should fetch a pretty penny back in town.
A couple posts ago I mentioned mimic monsters, and here's the first "real" one. Scroll Mimics use magic to try and blow you away (ign.com) It's got access to a pretty good set of spells, and here we see it poisoning the hell out of Viki before being turned into mush by Draining.
Back to town! It turns out the crossbow only fetches a paltry 1456 gold - what's up with that? This sort of weapon would easily fetch in the 5k range in earlier versions of Angband, so they must have done some serious, serious shop adjusting for the one I'm playing now. That's so lame.
She does, however, finally net a potion of Restore Dexterity from the alchemist. Score!
Now here's a classy item to be selling - it can hurt, or even kill you if you use it the wrong way. But if you use it the right way, then it can deal a lot of damage - which makes it the first of many interesting items with this property. Another, I presume, is the Potion of Death that we're all acquainted with so well by now.
Also visible in this list is a Staff of Starlight, which is a neat little staff that shoots light in the cardinal directions around Viki, and does massive damage to any light-sensitive monster in its path. It's also situationally useful at best and costs way too much for what it is.
Finally! Some action. Maybe there will be something worth picking up on this floor, and by "worth picking up" I mean "providing valuable resources relative to its cost of carrying around." Unlike that dumb crossbow.
Finally! It's time for Viki's first encounter with Angband's most-loathed monster group, the hound. Hounds are, for some reason, represented by (Z), and I've already told you a lot about them - except for Clear Hounds. Clear Hounds are like any ordinary mob monster, except they're invisible and lack a breath attack. This makes Viki glad she's using the Holy Avenger instead of Firestar, and also allows her to plow through them with no difficulty. It's just like a pack of wolves.
I.. what's this?
What's happening?
OH GOD NO DON'T
NEXT TIME! Our cliffhanger is resolved! Until then, please enjoy this youtube link, and if you enjoy it enough, start with Chapter 1 and work your way through all of the episodes with commentary because R. Kelly is truly a genius of our modern age.
As a special note the updates might come a little faster for the next few weeks as I try and burn up that backlog to get to some setup for some more "special" updates since I think it's almost time for us to hit one of those again. I don't feel any shame in saying that I made a major fuckup which will eventually be condensed into a single uberupdate (spoilers: Viki doesn't die. Or hasn't yet.).