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Last time: I made my way to Dwarftown and murdered a guy! This time: I look to murder a troll and probably some other stuff!

Probably the easiest way to find a troll is to head back up to the Big Room and kill shit there until one spawns. I can pick some more herbs while I'm at it. On the way I can explore the couple of levels I rushed through to get to Dwarftown.

As it turns out I don't even get as far as the Big Room. I find a troll as I explore the rest of D:8, kill her and head back down to Dwarftown turn in the quest.



As I head back I run into another dark sage. Apparently they wear sunglasses. In a dungeon. Guess he's been getting on the herbs too. Anyway I really really want his corpse so I equip the whip of hunting I found earlier. Motherfucker hits me with a bunch of spells as I flail ineffectively with the whip due to my lack of skill with it, and doesn't even leave a corpse. Crap. Never mind, I'll get Literacy very soon anyway.



"Well done.
Take dis potion as your reward.
A truly great brew 'tis that will give ye some insights."

I drink the sulphuric potion that he gives me.



It is an artifact potion called the Potion of Literacy. Drinking it gives me 44 points of Literacy. I can finally read my scrolls! The reason why I really wanted to get Literacy from that dark sage corpse is so I could instead give the artifact potion to the mutated ratling as one of my six. If you are already literate when you take Thrundarr's first quest the reward will only be a free ID of your whole inventory, but if you are illiterate when you take the quest the reward is the potion. I probably could have hung out in the Big Room until I got a dark sage corpse but I'm trying to do this with a minimum of avoidable tedium. God knows there's plenty to come whatever I do. There are six guaranteed and at least somewhat shit artifacts I can should be able to get without too much difficulty anyway.

I chat to Thrundarr again, he has more quests for me.



"Find da animated forest.
Cross it and find out about what is beyond.
Crossing da forest directly is perilous and tedious. Try it only if your will is strong enough to bear da stress.
Ye might wanna try da shortcut for da forest. It's a tiny stairway, which once led into some of our halls.
These days it was conquered by evil beasts of great power. Nobody ever returned from that forlorn place.
It's yer choice.
Return to me when ye have succeeded."

The animated forest is fucking bullshit. When Thrundarr says it's tedious he isn't kidding. The forest is one large room and is about 80% filled with a special monster type unique to the level - animated trees. They're not especially dangerous and most are non-hostile but they mill around and get in the way constantly. You can't switch place with them. Crossing the level involves waiting and waiting for gaps to open and painstakingly making your way from one corner to the opposite one while fighting off the occasional hostile tree. Once you finally make it across and down the stairs you have to go back to turn the quest in. And through again every time you want to go down from or come up to Dwarftown. I much prefer the alternative route, the Dwarven Halls. The halls are a two-level branch which rejoins the main dungeon on the level after the animated forest. The halls are much more dangerous than the forest however, as they spawn high-experience and often very out-of-depth monsters. I usually at least scout the halls - sometimes the stairs will be generated close together and often you get lucky enough to not see any ancient dragons or emperor liches or anything else terrifying. I have lost a couple of characters in there but honestly that's a risk I'm willing to take. There's a couple of tricks that can make the halls a little safer to pass through too.



Now that I can read I take a look at my list of identified items. Unfortunately no shops have been selling any identify scrolls yet so I don't know for sure if I have one. Lets have a look at my scrolls.



Identify is one of the more common scrolls so there's a reasonable chance that that stack of three scrolls labelled "mead ni napaj" (another anagram) are IDs. Before I check, dip my one scroll of uncursing into a holy water. Blessed uncursing or ID scrolls will affect your whole inventory. I uncurse all my stuff, including that one cursed "mead ni napaj" scroll so that it will stack with the others. I now dip all four into another holy water. Small, stackable items like scrolls, herbs and rings can be dipped up to 9 at a time into one potion. I hold my breath, read one of my newly blessed scrolls, and...



Phew. If I'd been wrong and those weren't ID I'd have been a little annoyed. Let's take a look at what that turned up, and my inventory in general since I haven't shown an overview since the start. Massive info dump coming!











I'll explain/comment on a few of the new items here.

Amulet of balance reduces the effect lawful or chaotic acts have on alignment.
Necklace of the eye increases vision range.
Fireproof blanket is obviously the fire version of the waterproof blanket. I'm glad this turned out to be fireproof and not a generic blanket, makes up for forgetting/losing the waterproof one somewhat!
Potion of cure corruption reduces corruption points. If blessed, by about 3/4 of a mutation's worth. This will reverse the most recent mutation if drunk before getting 3/4 of the way to the next one. Very useful for removing bad mutations and not dying from over-corruption. Rare and very valuable, a nice find.
Potion of troll blood increases HP recovery. I drink this right away.
Potion of ultra healing is what I thought was a blessed potion of extra healing from the HMV. I think there's a quest reward or two featuring blessed POEH which I confused it with. According to the guidebook they do pretty much exactly the same thing though, the only exception being that blessed ultra increase max HP by 1-3, as opposed to 1-2 for blessed extra.
Berzio potion increases satiation. It's like food only liquid!
Potion of insight tells you what intrinsics you have.
Potion of potential [attribute] increases the max value of the corresponding attribute by 1. (2 if blessed.) I drink these right away too. I won't have enough spare holy water to burn on these any time soon.
Scroll of defense is like scroll of protection, but for DV instead of PV.
Scroll of dark predictions reveals corruption percentage.
Scroll of magic mapping reveals part of the map for the current level. The whole map if blessed.
Scroll of literacy check tells you how literate you are. We have the skills screen for that, so it's useless.
Scroll of increase melee damage permanently increases melee damage of the current weapon. If I had holy water to burn I'd be seriously tempted to bless this and use it on my penetration spear right away. I'll save it for now.
Scroll of amnesia is a very strong argument for not read-IDing scrolls (along with potentially wasting valuable scrolls). It makes you forget a lot of the items you've identified, along with part of the map of the current level. If cursed, you forget ALL of both.

I'm pretty disappointed not to get any attribute increasing potions, I usually find at least a couple before Dwarftown. Anyway, a couple of the items that turned up are handy for negotiating the Dwarven Halls, so I head on down the stairs. The halls and forest are a few levels below Dwarftown, around D:13. On that note, be very careful about venturing beyond Dwarftown before getting this quest. If you enter either the forest or halls without the quest, you get a "kill a random monster out of anything in the game" quest instead, just like if you win the arena championships early. Explore each level thoroughly. If you find two down staircases, do not go any further. Be certain there's no hidden rooms before you go down levels too, there could be a second staircase in one.



Unfortunately, D:10 has a river and the stairs aren't on this side. Fuck. I wish I had that waterproof blanket about now. Interestingly, I find a 67s long spear on the river bank. I don't remember anything that's called a long spear other than an artifact weapon that weighs 10s. This could be something new in the crowdfunded version. Let's see what happens if I equip it, what could go wrong?





It turns out to be a two-hander but HOLY SHIT look at that damage. I guess long spears are a new base weapon type. This one is adamantium, hence the unusual weight. The mayhem suffix is a not-quite-as-OP version of devastation, increasing the number of damage dice by 2 and adding +6 on top of that. It costs me 17 points of DV to abandon my shield, but I for this much killing power I think it's worth it. I'll keep the shield and my spear of penetration too though.

Ok, so the river. I have a couple of ways of dealing with this, one that probably won't work but only involves ducking back to Dwarftown for a moment. I'll try that first.



"Aye, we closed the deeper levels of the dungeons to prevent foolish adventurers from uncovering even greater evils. The portal seems not to be able to lock the forces of Chaos away but at least it prevents the foolish from wreaking havoc."
Do you want to venture beyond that portal?
"First ye need to prove yer worth in a quest.
A vile necromancer has defiled the grave of one of our bravest heroes. The graveyard is located in the southeastern part of the Drakalor Chain. Find it and kill the evil sorcerer. Purify his grave and ye will be rewarded. Take these items to help you in your quest.



Shit. For some reason I though he gave you a pickaxe here. I haven't played ADOM in a while so I'm a bit rusty. The plan was to try to dig around the river. Oh well, I'm pretty sure the game wouldn't have let me anyway. So anyhow, I've taken this quest out of order. An unspoiled player would advance beyond Dwarftown and the halls/forest and eventually run into a portal (down stair) she/he couldn't use because of a locked door, and have to come back to ask Thrundarr about it. However, if you know to ask about "portal", there's nothing to stop you from obtaining the quest as soon as you get to Dwarftown.

Fuck it. I'll stash my valuable, water-vulnerable shit on the down stair of Dwarftown and swim across. While I'm not on the level, time freezes for its inhabitants so none of them will steal my shit. Theoretically.



On the other side is a general store.



The good stuff. Potions of education can grant a new skill or increase an existing one. Skills already at 100 will be ruled out. In order to maximise my chances of getting a new skill I'll leave this one here until I've hit 100 in a few of mine.

D:11 features a pool but is otherwise uneventful.



On D:12 I find a rust monster. Sweet, come here and eat my armour.



Thank god. I also finally find a couple of shortbows which I can use to shoot all the arrows I've been finding. Shortbows are frequently dropped by kobolds, one of the most common monsters in the game, but somehow I didn't find any til now. It's very strange to find two crossbows before any normal bows.



Swordsmen and master swordsmen have the annoying ability to disarm you. Their chance of doing so decreases as you level up your weapon skill. If your weapon doesn't land under them (or another monster) you can pick it back up and re-equip it but they'll often just disarm you again on the same turn.



Eat shit acid and die, asshole.



I find the animated forest on D:13. I promptly make like a tree and leave.



The other staircase on D:12 leads to the first level of the Dwarven Halls, DH:1. The way the room with the up stair is almost in the corner and has a door leading towards that corner makes me suspect the down stair is next door.





Very nice, I love when the stairs are so close. An entire potentially life-threatening level skipped. Especially nice since I had to leave the items I was going to use to help me here back in Dwarftown thanks to that river.



DH:2 is not so kind. In this corridor I encounter an ancient minotaur. Not the scariest monster I could have run into but I'm not taking any chances. Besides, I'm taking a similar approach to the way I handled my return to the Small Cave. Every monster I kill has a chance to be replaced with something terrifying so I try to avoid killing. I lead the minotaur back to the dark room I passed through earlier and lose him in there.



Ugh. Black wizards, in addition to having dangerous combat magic, are summoners. I don't want to spend time chopping through the hordes of monsters he'll summon, especially since I suspect he can summon much more dangerous monsters than usual in the halls. Also, that pink K is a berserker emperor. Yeah, seeya shitlords.



Diamond golems have high PV and rapidly regenerate HP. I think I'll make my way back and go through the forest. I'm getting a bit nervous here, I shouldn't have come to the halls without my consumables. Hopefully I can make it back okay. I was going to wait to demonstrate the tricks I had in mind, but I'll just explain them here instead. First, I was going to read a blessed scroll of magic mapping to know exactly which way to go. Second, if the stairs were a long way apart, I was going to use a wand of trap creation to make teleport traps close to both exits. With teleport control, I could set these off deliberately to teleport myself to the other stairs whenever I need to pass through. Wait, fuck. I could have done that to get across the river. Jesus fucking christ. Guys, I'm not sure I'm gonna be beating this game if I keep doing dumb shit like this.



I lose a few hp fighting my way back to the corridor and run into the ancient minotaur again. Looks like I'll have to fight him. In the end he goes down pretty easily. I'm really fucking thankful for my new spear right now. I back it the rest of the way back through the halls without incident. Phew.



A lightning vortex catches me on D:12 and destroys my armour and my nice boots of speed. Fuck. I replace my armour with a leather apron I found, just like old times! Also I'm not lightning resistant and it does 50-odd damage, leaving me on a little over 20 HP. Fortunately the damage First Aid restores is proportionate to how much you just took, and it gives me 20 back. I rest up a bit before I re-enter the forest.



I hate this fucking shit.



Several minutes later, I've finally made it. I lost 40-odd HP along the way, so I'll rest up some more before I go back again. I'll also re-enter the halls from the other side to find out where the stair is.



In between all the spam about trees following me downstairs and attacking me, there are two other messages. One saying I feel excited. Well I feel excited to be on the other side of the fucking forest, but that's not what it means. This message indicates the presence of a vault. The buzzing sound indicates there's a beehive around. Beehives are similar to ant holes in that they spawn a series of worker and warrior insects and eventually a queen. Beehives can also be kicked to speed the process along.

I find a room full of trolls and ogres and hit level 12.



At level 12 I get one of the nicer barabarian class abilities - the base energy cost of movement is now only 750 energy. This stacks with the Long Stride talent to make it 700.




One each into Alertness (7), Athletics (6), and Dodge (8).

For my level 12 talent I pick Healthy for faster healing.



I find the beehive and kill the bees. Once the queen emerges, the hive will usually drop beeswax and gelee royal. Gelee royal can be eaten to cure sickness and poisoning, increase Appearance by 1, and remove Appearance-reducing scars caused by a particular mutation. Beeswax can be used to plug your ears, making you deaf. This will come in useful later.

I find the stairs up to DH:2 and rest a while before entering. Vault levels are a good place to rest if you haven't cleared the vault yet. All the monsters in the vault put the level at or close to its monster cap, so you get far fewer interruptions than normal.



As I rest I get some skillups from usage. There's been a lot of this going on as I play, I'm just taking a moment now to illustrate it now that the increases are getting reasonably substantial.



Ah, this is a nice location for the DH:2 stairs. Not far from the way up, as the bird flies. Once I have a means of digging I'll be able to make a nice shortcut.

Back on D:14, the vault turns out to be ratling themed. This one is a lesser vault. Lesser vaults take one quarter of the level up and tend to be filled with relatively weaker monsters (although lesser vaults on later levels may have a number of powerful ones), while greater vaults are half a level in size and full of more powerful monsters like element-breathing dragons or attribute-draining undead. Or full of karmic creatures. Greater vaults are guaranteed to contain at least one artifact, often two, and monsters may drop even more. They can be extremely dangerous however.

Ratling duelists can also disarm, just like swordsmen. This happens to me as I clear the vault and my spear rolls under the feet of a ratling warrior.



Well shit, I sure don't wanna engage him in melee. I back off and kill them both with acid spit. There are several more duelists and they have another annoying ability. Monsters will sometimes "punch through" your armour, ignoring PV. Ratling duelists do this more often than most. I take quite a lot of damage and have to back off and eat some of my pepper petals (healing herbs) to regain HP.



I clear the rest of the vault. I decide to explore a little deeper in the hopes of finding another wand of trap creation to get back across the halls and river before I had back.



On D:15 I find an ancient scythe. This guaranteed artifact weapon is the Scythe of Corruption "Moon Sickle." It's actually useless as a weapon since using it in melee corrupts you. It can be dipped into potions to turn them into potions of raw chaos. These cause massive corruption when drunk but items can be dipped into them to change them into another item of the same type. This carries the risk of causing a very corrupting and damaging explosion however and probably isn't worth it. I'll be giving the scythe to the ratling.

On D:16 I find a studded leather armour. These have higher base PV than leather aprons so I go to put it on and realise I have an adamantium ring mail in my inventory. I probably looted it from the vault without realizing. I put it on and it's stats are (-1,-2)[+0,+7]. Pretty nice, especially compared to what I had. Not cursed too, which is nice.

I encounter a quickling lord. Quicklings are annoying to fight. They have extremely high speed (enough to get several moves or attacks for every one of mine) and very high DV. I manage to kill him (but not without losing a few HP) and he leaves a corpse. Quickling corpses permanently increase speed when eaten. I'd bless it for extra effect if I hadn't left my holy water in Dwarftown. (I don't think potions are actually prone to water damage but I decided to play it safe.) The corpse increases my speed by 2.



I run into a room full of chaos servants. I kill them and find this guy sitting on the stairs down:



Khelavaster, the dying sage, is wounded beyond hope of magical healing, dying slowly.

If I talk to him, he'll give me a speech then die. I need Khel alive however, if I'm to achieve an ultra ending. There's one way to do this, and it involves a very rare item which I don't have yet. (Unless I've lucked out and it's in my inventory unIDed and I just don't know it yet.) As long as I don't talk to him, he'll remain alive indefinitely. This is as far down the dungeon as I can go without talking to him though, so I head back up. I run into another shadow troll who drains my strength to 19. God damn, I gotta stop meleeing these guys. I seem to remember them being pushovers.



Sigh.



Fuck my life.



FUCKING MOVE YOU FUCKING FOLIAGE CUNTS



This is what they look like in tile mode.



Fucking finally. It retrospect, it wasn't so bad the first time, I crossed in about five minutes of real time. The return trip was fifteen.

I leave my newly looted scrolls on the D:11 stairs and swim back across the river on D:10. My other gear is thankfully still on the Dwarftown stairs where I left it. I turn in the quest to Thrundarr who rewards me with a wand of fireballs. Ball spells in ADOM are centred on the player rather than ranged. I pick up my next quest from Thrundarr:

"Ye need to vanquish the ogre tribe adjacent to the dwarven city.
Those beasts lately started to attack us!
See to it that none survive!

This quest spawns another down staircase in Dwarftown. I've got something else to do first though. Wand of trap creation in hand, I head back down to D:10



I fire one test shot off next to the stairs. Traps are similar to herbs in that the type depends on the dungeon tile. The same kind of trap will spawn along SW/NE diagonals though, rather than rows like herbs. Teleport should spawn 8 tiles to the right of light. (Or 4 to the left, but that's in a wall.)



Key word: should. Maybe Biskup has changed the way they work in the new versions. That fucker.



Ow! Okay, acid isn't supposed to be anywhere near light, idk wtf. I try one to the right and make an alarm trap. (Turns neutral monsters hostile or some shit, useful to lead cats over so other monsters attack them. Pretty harmless to the player.) At this point I look up the wiki but it has the same pattern as the guidebook. I guess I'll have to keep experimenting. I create a bunch more traps, recharging my wand with booze potions as I go, and get several traps repeating, including two acid traps in a row. As far as I can tell placement is totally random now, great. I'm out of charges and booze potions with no teleport trap. Well shit. My new scrolls can stay over there for now, I'll identify my other new loot without them and get them another time. Fuck me, I wish I had that blanket. Fucking hell. If I hadn't lost my bridge manual I could have leveled Bridge Building enough to painstakingly build a bridge over. I'd sooner slit my wrists than try it with 6 BB skill.

I read another blessed ID and it turns out I have some more potential stat potions, which I drink, along with a blessed potion of dexterity. This will increase my Dex by 2, but I'll wait until I hit the cap of 25 Dex from herbs to drink it. I also find a potion of exchange. These can be thrown or fired from a sling at monsters to change them into a different monster. This is one option for dealing with cats in the arena, but it can miss, so I'll want some other tricks up my sleeve. One would be to use a wand of trap creation but fuck. I'll have to find another or get some more booze or scrolls of charging. I look through my newly-IDed amulets and find a +5 amulet of protection. Nice. That'll replace my +3 willpower amulet quite nicely. Checking my weapons I've picked up an eternium sabre of slaughtering (+0,3d8+10) and an adamantium-shod quarterstaff of mayhem (-2,3d10+14). I've never seen so many higher metal damage suffixed weapons so early in the game. They aren't polearms though, so I'll be selling them for a tidy sum. Also a (+9,+3) longbow of hunting. Sweet. A much better weapon for hunting than a whip and much better ranged weapon in general than the shortbows I looted off the kobolds too. Let's see what else I've picked up...

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS.

HOLY SHIT
HOLY SHIT
HOLY SHIT

Cursed wand of wishing (2 charges).



I've only ever found one wand of wishing before, in years of playing ADOM. This is a fucking game changer.

Fuck.
Yes.

Unfortunately they can't be recharged like normal wands, but still, that's three wishes right there. Wands can be used on 0 charges but they will break and not be rechargeable. Obviously not an issue with a WoW. Cursed means it only gives a 50% chance of a wish, so I bless and read another uncursing scroll.

Next time: The RNG has something truly, truly horrible in store for me.