Welcome back to Let's Play Angband! This update is brought to you buy something that I haven't written in here yet. I think I'm actually going to leave that in, I like it.
Last time, Viki just would not stop getting ego items. To the point where it was actually making me kind of angry, because in any other game, I would have been pissing myself with joy. Well, not if I was playing a mage, who couldn't even hold most of that crap.
So it's back to town to blah blah blah sell buy blah blah. The rules of the game are known by now!
Here's something interesting hanging out in the Black Market. This isn't quite Angband's answer to monster genocide that other roguelikes have (which completely removes a monster type from the game forever), but it's close. This can be an excellent way for dealing with Vaults that are filled with dragons or for unique monsters which come surrounded by lots of nasties. But Viki doesn't buy it, because really now. She's hopefully never going to need it, and she's got better things to save her money for.
Like this hot little number! If Viki got this, she could actually drop her earliest spellbook off at home and never, ever carry it again; she has Resist Fear from the Holy Avenger so she doesn't need spells to remove it, the Phial can light areas, and this item would take care of finding doors and traps. And it finds monsters to boot! This thing would be a boon to Viki, and the best part is that it weighs way, way less than a book. She's only a few thousand gold shy of it, so time to pawn off some more junk sitting in her house.
This, by the way, is what Viki's house looks like. Minus the cats. She keeps the Cap of Beauty around in order to swap it on and off when she's in town and get slightly better deals on items, but it'll have to go someday because it's taking up a valuable slot at home.
Back to Floor 19, and boredom!
Viki uses her detection rod first thing, and this thing is already clearly going to be a godsend. For one, it's going to tell her where all the hound packs are in the dungeon before she runs into them, and secondly it takes care of detect doors/traps/stairs/treasure in one fell swoop - and it's been a long time since that shovel's gotten any use, so treasure detection is an extra sweet bonus.
Meanwhile, something burns up Viki's most costly spellbook, which is not something to be thrilled about, but at least she never really uses it. Instead she makes a dash away, not ready to confront the Fire Hounds that must be lurking ahead right now.
Yeah, those are fire hounds alright. The mix of light hounds with them is not very pleasing, because Viki really needs area of effect spells to take out fire hounds like this. Instead she'll have to approach carefully and use corners as much as possible.
The game really does seem to enjoy mixing up Blink dogs with Fire and Light hounds. That's the most annoying possible combination; getting yanked around by a Blink dog while blind is really dangerous, because you could get pulled straight into the middle of a group of monsters.
The large Os up there, by the way, are (O)gres, the big brothers of orcs. They have many of the same properties, but just hit harder and have more HP.
On this particular floor, Viki also does a lot of digging to get at some goodies.
Here's an item which is useful only in games where you're not using artifact spoilers, or if you happen to pick up a whole lot of ego items which have a "random" effect on them. Self Knowledge simply tells you everything about your character's current state: What resistances they have, what stat sustains they have, what bonuses they're getting, if the weapon they're using is branded, and so on. Viki will take this and save it for later when she's got a whole boatload of equipment to fully ID at once.
Uh-oh.
Here's something that I haven't mentioned in the past - scrolls of Word of Recall can cancel each other out. So when Viki went down to the floor and got a good feeling, that meant I wanted to explore the whole thing. But then I accidentally pushed the wrong button and Viki read a Recall scroll, which means that she had to read another one to cancel the effect and stay in the dungeon.
Unfortunately, this is the only time in several trips where she's gone into the dungeon with just two recall scrolls. That means there's only one way out for Viki now: A mad dash to the surface.
And that usually means death. But first, she better finish exploring the rest of this floor.
Here's the Potion Mimic, which is a lot like the Scroll Mimic. But a potion! Destroying it is small consolation for the long trip that Viki knows she has ahead of her. She finally finishes exploring the area, and gets ready to go back to the surface.
Viki makes a break straight for floor 18. Her goal right now is to not explore any floors beyond what she needs to do to find stairs; she'll ID items only if absolutely necessary based on the level feeling, because she's carrying around just a handful of ID scrolls and also no way is she going to be able to tote everything back up.
Here's a prized item! *Slay* weapons are like Slay weapons, only moreso. In this case, *Slay Animal* does 3.5x (or 5x, I forget) damage to natural-type monsters, where Slay Animal does a measly 2x. Most adventurers love *Slay Evil* weapons, because they work on most dragons and demons, the most dangerous enemies that you're going to encounter on the floors of the dungeon that are further down.
Viki also decides that it might be kind of fun to try and dig her way out. But no such luck; the construction of Angband is such that even if the dungeon is changing constantly, it has hard boundaries. In this case, quite literally hard. This is the game's way of keeping you from digging past the boundary of the map, although sometimes you'll see permanent rock elsewhere.
Viki rushes up through floors 17-12 with no incident, getting her past the point of danger. It should be a boring cakewalk out of the dugneon from this point on.
Then Viki IDs this. This is actually the first item she's ID'd in many, many floors, and holy shit. Telepathy is a very useful skill - it allows you to detect all "mindful" monsters within a certain radius. This means Viki won't be seeing things like mushrooms, worms, or undead, but it does mean she'll be seeing hounds, trolls, orcs, demons, and other large groups of nasties well before they're in her range of vision.
This is a great find, but the enchantment on it is shit, especially compared to her current hat. But she's going to put it on anyway. It kind of makes her want to go onto a daytime talk show.
Viki, by the way, finds nothing else on her way back to town. But she made it, and that's what counts! The whole trip was actually quite boring, which is another thing to be thankful for. She's had a run of incredible luck for me doing such stupid things.
This is what Viki's holding before she takes a trip into the dungeon again. Nimloth is going to be the order of the day, just for kicks; I want to see how it works out. If it turns out that it's good enough to supplement those extra casts of Draining Viki would be getting, then this will become her primary weapon.
The order of the day turns out to include this charming fellow, who would honestly be better served by having Viki dish up some hot magic action from the other side of the room rather than getting cozy with him. In fact, Viki's mana depletes fast enough that she has to teleport away to another part of the dungeon before she gets beat up too hard. This was probably the wrong day to bring Nimloth.
Even though this game is now taking place four days after Mother's Day, the RNG is still giving Viki way too many ego items.
This may actually be the most anticlimactic screenshot I've posted in this thread yet. I'm not even sure exactly what happened here, besides that Viki must have cast Draining and was about to teleport away again. She gets some reasonable experience from the deal, though.
And this.. amazing? drop.
Potions of Life are obviously pretty fantastic, but the problem is that you have to carry them to use them, and they take up an inventory slot. This is going in Viki's house until the very end of the game. If she makes it that far. If not, I'll probably wish that she was holding it.
You'll notice it doesn't restore mana, however. This makes it useful, but not as useful as a potion of Restore Mana, believe it or not.
Viki goes back to town to drop off her phat loot and swap that Holy Avenger back in. It's still bullshit in melee but she needs those ranged attacks anyway, doggone it!
I swear to god, in all the tens of games of Angband I have ever played, I have not, in all of them combined, gotten as many ego items as I've gotten over the course of this one game. There had to have been something changed in v3.0.6. There had to have been.
Let's leave on a positive note. You'll notice that even though Viki's blind, she can still see all these monsters. That's the magic of telepathy! She can't read her books, but she can at least position herself out of the way of these nasty beasties or, if she's bold enough, rush in and beat them down the old-fashioned way.
NEXT TIME: Ego items that the game shouldn't even generate. I'm not kidding. Well, it wouldn't generate them in the 2.9.x versions anyway, but I guess that changed. Also, Viki discovers cursed ego items and a prayer book she's been wishing for!