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First up, character creation. This is very straightforward:
- Noldor are High Elves and are the standard difficulty, this is what we’re playing
- Sindar are Grey Elves. Harder than Noldor but not significantly so, my first ever win was a Sindar archer.
- Naugrim are dwarves. Much more difficult than either elf race but not impossible. I’ve spent the last few weeks getting dozens of these guys killed trying to get a dwarven smith off the ground and need to take a break, maybe we’ll come back to this after the elf run.
- Edain are humans and are awful, far and away worse than any other races with a uniform 0 for their starting statline.
After race comes house. For the Noldor you’ve got Feanor, Fingolfin and Finarfin which are Smithing, Will and Perception based respectively. We’re going with Finarfin who in addition to having a bonus to perception trade a point of dexterity for grace.
Next you assign stats (top right) and skills (bottom right.)
Str affects melee dice
Dex improves the first 4 skills (melee, archery, evasion, stealth)
Con improves HP
Grace improves the last 4 skills (Perception, Will, Smithing and Song)
We’re going for a graceful song-sword who dances through crowds of enemies singing songs of death and destruction while murdering everyone with swords.
Some final biographical info and off we go!
OK so let’s explain the interface real quick, this game is very simple.
Current depth is in the bottom right, floors are in 50 foot increments and the throne room is at 1000 feet.
On the left we’ve got our statline, current exp, health, voice (used for singing and horns,) melee statline and defensive statline. offensive stats are always in ( ) while defensive stats are in [ ].
Before setting out we’re gonna spend that last 500 exp. Elbereth causes intelligent non-human enemies to run in fear. Extremely useful for either splitting mixed packs up into humans/non-humans or for escaping. The first ability in a tree is 500 exp, second 1000, third 1500 etc etc so it gets rather expensive very fast.
I would probably be better off sinking my 500 exp into melee or something but it feels a little silly to be a singer who doesn’t know any songs. 
The two items on the ground are a bow and a shitty sword. You’re guaranteed 2 things in a run, you get a sword in the first room and a forge on the second floor, everything else is random. The bow is neat but it’s completely useless until we find some arrows. Besides what we found on the ground we’ve got 3 pieces of Lembas bread which is food that sates hunger / restores grace and 8000 turns of torchlight.
”The Wolf” posted:
This ragged wolf is part of the orcish packs. Normally found at 50’.
”The White Worm Mass” posted:
It is a disgusting mass of worms, twisting and writhing on the floor. Normally found at 100’.
First enemies, Wolves are just dumb animals and will blindly follow you around while being generally unthreatening unless your build is extremely weak at the start. White worms are breeders and multiply every few turns so left unattended they will fill an entire room (or floor) with awfulness. White worms in particular are largely unthreatening, they do very little damage and have a small chance to cause poison.
However Bonnie has invested heavily in Melee and Evasion to start with and is fully capable of charging straight into the room and murdering everyone in a handful of turns without taking a hit. A more cautious strategy would be to lure the wolves into a corridor and fight them single-file but that takes time and we want to get off this floor ASAP.
On the left hand side you can see Bonnie’s current target’s HP and morale. Wolves don’t have much of either and are prone to running away.
”The Grey Mold” posted:
It is a strange growth on the dungeon floor. Normally found at 50’.
Molds are stationary enemies that usually inflict nasty status effects on anyone dumb enough to come in melee range. Grey molds just do damage and are again, largely non-threatening
However they ignore evasion and thus are capable of doing a bit of damage to fresh characters. On a character with a weaker start than Bonnie I would just bypass molds until I got ranged weapons but 
”The Orc Scout” posted:
He is one of Morgoth’s grim mockeries of the firstborn. The miserable creature tries to stay away from you and attract attention. It has a crude sword. Normally found at 50’.
Orc scouts are extremely weak in combat (Bonnie kills this one in a single swing the turn after this screenshot) but their AI is extremely annoying. They attempt to stay on the edge of your line of sight constantly shouting to try to draw more orcs down on your position.
The orc was standing on the down-stairs, and with that we’re doing with the first floor.
We probably only explored 25-50% of the level but the wolf (along with basically every enemy in the 50-150’ depths) is not worth fighting. You get a certain amount of exp for seeing and for killing enemies and this amount goes down as you encounter more enemies of that type. Wolves are already down to 1 exp for sightings and 2 exp for killing and I’m sure to see plenty more wolves as I move forward so there’s no benefit from wasting time killing this one or anything else on this floor when we have the opportunity to move forward.
Next time we’ll get to know some more of the residents of Angband and probably make it down to the 150/200’ floor. Sil’s start is the weakest part of the game so I’d like to get through it as quickly as possible.