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Last time we didn't dive too deep into Moria, and I concluded that we needed to do some grinding before we'd get anywhere interesting. So here's what happened after returning to Mirkwood:
Level 22: Frost Giants stole Fumblefingers' sword; gained Combat skill (our options sucked)
Level 23: Princess guarded by Giant Blue Ants, who have electrical attacks; got a Large Metal Shield of Resist Fire. Oh well.
Level 24: Princess guarded by Ice Trolls; got a Metal Cap of Infravision. Sigh.
Level 25: Algroths (poisonous trolls) stole Fumblefingers' sword. Got Stealth. C'monnnnnn...
Level 25 of Mirkwood has a special staircase, leading to the Heart of the Earth:
On the plus side, the entire level is mapped. On the minus side, the walls periodically rearrange themselves according to some cellular automata, which makes navigation a pain in the ass. At least it doesn't try to colocate your body with some granite and kill you. There's a special enemy at the bottom, Golgarach the Living Rock, but it's not worth diving through 11 levels of this crap, and we're one level short from unlocking Probability Travel (which would let us just dive straight down, staircases be damned).
Level 26: Princess guarded by Young Blue Dragons (electrical, again). Bizarrely, the princess didn't generate on the level; I searched the entire thing and it was empty. On the plus side, we found a Ring of Flying, so we can just fly over the entirety of the forest instead of having to follow corridors and so on. Fortunately, leaving and returning re-generates the level and lets us take another stab at the quest; we get The Cloak of Thorongil (free action, see invisible, resist acid, resist fear), and one of the dragons drops a randart morningstar that's strictly worse than our Gondolin morningstar.
Also, check this out:
The Icky Queen and her escort of Icky Things! A total non threat.
The Icky Queen says: 'Yeah, I knew it was dangerous, but I was thinking about the XP...' The Icky Queen dies.
Ouch, that's...uh, that's a little too on-point there.
Level 27: Princess guarded by Uldor the Accursed, and our first vault:
Vaults are full of monsters, traps, and treasure, and often made out of permanent walls, because digging your own passageways would be the cheesiest tactic in the game if there weren't spells that created new walls out of nothing. Ahem. Uldor is put to bed with Good Night; we get a Small Metal Shield of Resistance. The vault, meanwhile, has a Potion of Intelligence, and nothing else.
We recall to town, ditch our loot, buy a Crown of Might (+2 STR/DEX/CON) to replace Thengel, recall back, and holy geeze look at that thing.
(I think the colors are purple for out-of-depth, green for in-depth, gray for no-threat, and cyan for unique)
Fortunately not too threatening. The Silent Watcher blasts us with psionic energy, though, and there goes a quarter of our sanity. Whoops. Fortunately we have some Restore Sanity potions on-hand. Lokkak goes down without a fight.
Spoils: a Potion of Charisma, level 32, two Potions of Constitution (Yes! HP from 200 to 254), and a Potion of Dexterity. Not bad, though I could have done without the 10 minutes of sorting through items. ToME has a loot sorting mechanism to auto-destroy items you don't want, called the "Automatizer", and it's hilariously complicated and hard to use. You actually have to write XML clauses if you want it to do anything more complicated than "automatically destroy items of class X whose name/quality level is Y", which is a lot less useful than you'd think.
Anyway.
Level 28: Princess guarded by Impact Hounds (who breathe sound, which stuns you, worsening spell failure rates and combat ability). Reward: the Steel Helm "Lebohaum", which has +100 AC. And nothing else.
Level 29: Princess guarded by Mystics, basically nature monks. One of them drops a Potion of Strength (hooray!) and the Princess gives us the Cloak of Thingol (+3 DEX/CHA, free action, resist fire/cold/acid, activate for recharging wands/staves).
Level 30: Princess guarded by Fire Ants; we get a Dagger of Slay Troll. Damn.
Level 31: Princess guarded by Ologs (mid-tier trolls).
Figure 1: Mitch ignoring the intended pathways because he can fly, bitch!
Our reward: the Phial of Galadriel, finally. It's nothing special, just a radius-4 light source that never needs to be refuelled and can be activated to light the room you're in.
Level 32: Princess guarded by Mature Black [acidic] Dragons. Reward: a Rod Tip of Recall, which could be used to create a Rod of Recall except we can already cast that spell. Should've taken something different. We also find this randart ring:
+5 INT is no small amount, and if we uncurse it we can prevent the random teleportation...but there are monsters that can curse your equipment in the dungeon, and if they happened to re-curse the ring then it'd start teleporting us again. Plus we'd have to sacrifice either our +7 Speed ring or our Ring of Flying. No thanks.
Incidentally, somewhere around here we get our piety with Tulkas up past 15000, which gets us another point each of STR and CON. Thanks buddy! These will cap out at +3 each at 20000 piety, not that far away.
Level 33: Fumblefingers lost his sword to some Headless Ghosts -- spectral, melee drains experience, INT, and WIS, and has a few annoyance spells like confuse, cause amnesia, drain mana, etc. Not immune to meteors though. While doing a spot of ghostbusting, we manage to kill our first-ever opponent in melee:
You feel the hand of Tulkas guiding your blow. You hit the White jelly. The White jelly misses you.
You feel the hand of Tulkas guiding your blow. You hit the White jelly. The White jelly misses you.
You hit the White jelly. The White jelly misses you.
You hit the White jelly. You have destroyed the White jelly.
A great victory indeed 
Anyway, we get some Sneakiness out of the deal 
This just makes us slightly better at searching, but all the other options were worse.
And that's it for Mirkwood! But we picked up the level we needed to get Probability Travel, so let's head back to the Heart of the Earth. Annoyingly (but vaguely sensibly), Probability Travel only lets you use the "up" and "down" commands for level teleporting when you're in a vertical dungeon; Mirkwood is nominally "flat" with level transitions at the edges, so we have to hoof it back to level 25 the hard way (i.e. flying over the treetops).
You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into a passage leading into the very heart of the world.
You feel instable.
You enter a maze of down staircases.
It's difficult to convey exactly how this dungeon works in screenshots, so have a GIF:
Whatever process is running on this dungeon tends to create vaguely-stable open areas surrounded by "porous" walls. If you wait around long enough, an opening will appear in the direction you want to go in, but you have to to a lot of waiting to travel anywhere, and while there are the occasional monster and item here, it's really rather barren. Hence why we're skipping it.
You enter a maze of down staircases. <10x>
It says this even though we're levelporting; whatever.
Right, that Golgarach fellow should be around here somewhere. Rather than try to walk around, we just cast Teleport followed by Sense Monsters until Golgarach pops up on the list of "visible" enemies.
Right...now where the hell is he on this screenshot?
Here, I've highlighted him for you.
Yeah, our end-of-dungeon boss is a wall mimic. I look up his monster info; apparently he's supposed to appear with escorts (no sign of them though), he has a moderately-damaging melee, and he can, rarely, cast Acid Bolt, Fire Bolt, and Summon Kin.
He's easier to pick out now that he's in an open space. And sure enough, after waiting around for awhile,
Golgarach, the Living Rock magically summons its minions.
He summoned a bunch of Vampiric Mists around us, which are weak group monsters that can drain experience with their melee. We just drop meteors on them, and Golgarach too.
Oh well, I guess it's a bit much to ask that we have a climactic fight in a wide-open space against an enemy with no significant ranged attacks. The "real" fight for this area is just reaching him, and we neatly circumvented that particular issue.
Golgarach drops a randart shield, which we take back to town for identification.
Ehh, our other randart shield with an elemental immunity is better. Immunity to acid is nice for melee characters, whose armor can end up wrecked by the many, many enemies in the early game with acidic melee attacks, but eventually it becomes less relevant as everyone gets decked out in artifact gear which cannot be damaged by anything except disenchantment. Meanwhile, we only recently bothered to actually equip anything in all of our armor slots (we picked up some Boots of Levitation awhile back, filling in the last empty slot).
So that's Mirkwood and the Heart of the Earth done. Let's finish up some quests in Bree. We go and talk to the mayor and ask him what's up:
This is a branching quest; caster characters (higher Magic skill than Combat) get the wights, and melee characters (vice versa) get to go fight Bill, Bert, and Tom, the three stone trolls from the Hobbit. Ironically, casters would have a much easier time against the trolls, and fighters probably would have an easier time against the wights -- the trolls don't have much in the range department, so casters can mow them down with impunity (as long as their SP lasts), while the wights don't have much in the HP department, so if you can survive their ranged attacks they'll fall quickly.
The quest entrance is right next to the entrance to the Barrow-Downs:
There's a bunch of different cells, each populated by Forest Wights and/or Grave Wights. Both have experience-draining melee and some nuisance spells; Grave Wights can also cast Cause Critical Wounds, rarely, though that's less of a threat than it used to be thanks to our higher HP pools. The cells are connected via Void Jumpgates, but each gate is one-way, and there's a branching point for some reason, so you can't kill everything in the quest unless you have some climbing gear. Eh, oh well.
A few cells in, we're close enough to detect the boss of the quest.
That's three Emperor Wights (moves at double speed and can cast Nether Bolt; ouch) and The Wight-King of the Barrow-Downs in the bottom-right corner. He's a souped-up Emperor Wight with Nether Ball instead of Nether Bolt, so he can nail you even when there's minions in the way.
We haste up, and gate into the showdown...
You fall into the void. Brrr! It's deadly cold. The Emperor wight points at you, incanting terribly! There is a malignant black aura surrounding you...
Not the greatest possible start; one of the Emperor Wights, and the Wight-King himself, are both awake, and we got nailed for 80 damage. The malignant black aura was one of our pieces of equipment (our Crown of Might, as it happens) getting cursed, so we'll have to uncurse it before it can be removed. No biggy.
Anyway, we cast Rocks Fall to clear out the chaff:
The Forest wight is destroyed. <5x>
The Grave wight is destroyed. <3x>
The Emperor wight cries out feebly. <3x> The Emperor wight flees in terror! <3x>
The Wight-King of the Barrow-downs cries out in pain. The Wight-King of the Barrow-downs casts a fearful illusion. You refuse to be frightened.
The Emperor wight tries to cast a spell, but fails.
One more casting will do for the Emperor Wights and leave the Wight-King mostly dead. I love having overpowered spells that hit everything in LOS. If only the failure rate were better than 15%...
The Emperor wight is destroyed. <3x>
The Wight-King of the Barrow-downs screams in agony. The Wight-King of the Barrow-downs flees in terror! The Wight-King of the Barrow-downs says: 'Such senseless violence! I don't understand it!' The Wight-King of the Barrow-downs points at you, incanting terribly! You resist the effects!
Hey man, I'm just giving to you what you've been giving to other people, judging from the skeletons at the entrance. 
The Wight-King of the Barrow-downs says: 'I've fallen and I can't get up!' The Wight-King of the Barrow-downs is destroyed. Without their king the wights won't be able to do much.
Victory! And we score a Potion of Intelligence from their remains; nice! We also get a guaranteed artifact:
Just in case you really wanted to double-down on being a mage. But generally I find you're best-off trying to compensate for your weaknesses rather than emphasize your strengths, which is why we've been focusing on getting more CON rather than more INT.
Because of the curse, we can't even sell the rags, so we just throw them away.
You have no more Filthy Rags of the Wight [1,-1](40%) (+2 to searching) {cursed}. The Filthy Rags of the Wight [1,-1](40%) (+2 to searching) hits the Boil-covered wretch. The Boil-covered wretch is unharmed.
Ehh, what's the worst that could happen from throwing some incredibly cursed rags at a beggar? I'm sure he'll be fine.
As for our reward for completing the quest?
Cheapskate. 
The troll quest has a guaranteed artifact in Glamdring (or maybe Orcrist, I forget), a mediocre artifact sword.
On the other hand, completing the wights quest means we can take the next quest:
Ooh, that sounds bad: a Ringwraith is in town! Until we deal with this quest, Uvatha the Horseman has a chance to spawn every time we visit Bree.
Emphasis on "chance". I think maybe he's somewhere in the outskirts of town right now. Rather than wander around looking for him, it's easier to just hit "<" to go to the overworld, and then ">" to pop back into town, re-generating all of the residents.
Ahh, there he is, to the southwest. Now, the thing to realize about Uvatha? He has no ranged attacks.
He is such a chump.
He is...
...
He's stuck in a doorway. C'mon, man, just...just step to the southeast once!
There we go. Anyway, Uvatha's no threat; we can just pummel him with meteors, though for old time's sake we also hit him with a bunch of Inertia Beams until he's slooooooowly crawling across town to get to us. Meanwhile our Essence of Speed has leveled up enough that, in combination with our Ring of Speed, we're moving three times faster than normal.
We get to where we're getting 12 turns for every 1 of his. 
He doesn't really stand a chance after that. Well, he never stood a chance to begin with. You know what I mean.
Uvatha the Horseman is destroyed. Somehow you feel he is not totally destroyed...
And here's one of the big gimmicks of the game. The 9 Ringwraiths are all immortal, and Sauron will continually resurrect them, for as long as the One Ring of Power still exists. Eventually we're going to have to find that ring and wear it cast it into the Fires of Mount Doom; only after that will we be able to kill the Ringwraiths and, more importantly, Sauron himself.
On the other hand, every time we kill a Ringwraith, we get their Ring of Power!
...which is a randomly-generated artifact, always cursed, that generally sucks. And it's stuck in our inventory until we find a scroll of *Remove Curse* (oh wait, there's one for sale at the temple right next door). Oh well.
And yes, we can find and kill Uvatha again and get another Ring of Power, and so on until there've been way more than 9 Rings of Power for mortal men, doomed to die, etc. etc. etc.
Unlike the last quest, we also get a "real" reward:
Athelas cures the Black Breath, which is a status affliction you can receive from getting into melee with Ringwraiths. It slowly drains your experience and stats and can only be cured by Athelas, the activation on a certain artifact, or the "herbal healing" service at one of the shops at Gondolin. And lest you think the game wasn't tilted against melee characters enough already? Meleeing a Ringwraith has excellent odds of shattering your weapon, even if it's an artifact, unless it is specifically enchanted against Ringwraiths. So melee characters basically have to find one of those weapons and then carry it as a swap all the time just in case they run into a Ringwraith.
Oh, incidentally, we've leveled high enough to learn Greater Identify from our Tome of Knowledge, which means we don't have to buy scrolls of *Identify* or track down Galadriel every time we want to identify a randart. This mostly just saves us a bunch of overworld trekking, though later in the game it's possible to find a dozen randarts in a single dungeon dive, so the ability to separate wheat from chaff without returning to town is welcome.
Also welcome is this junkart:
If we're sick of being hassled by zephyr hounds, or orcs, or liches, or whatever, we can just fire this puppy up and it'll remove the specified "race" (a.k.a. all monsters represented by a certain letter) from the current area. The recharge time will prevent us from horribly abusing it though. It's a convenience thing more than anything else.
Alright, that's enough for this update. See you next time, when we mop up some towns and miscellaneous dungeons.