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The following is a winning (high priest / full win) run in IVAN. It has the "full win" (killing the dark frog, then the demon king beyond the portal and then petrus in atnam to claim your place as the new high priest of the great frog). I did not kill all the uniques; I believe I only missed shererax the mistress whip queen and the unique mage but they are pretty terrifyingly dangerous so its just as well. Note also that I will be skipping over a lot of the early game because its already been shown in other LPs, including mine, the final update of which is here: http://lpix.org/sslptest/index.php?id=22839.
And now, onward to victory!
First, as before, we kill the big plant. We have an enchanted iron scimitar + 2 (high damage, reasonably accurate because of the +2) and bronze chainmail + a leather cloak for decent armor so he falls pretty easily.
One the plants irritatingly bites off our arm so we head over to atnam to the priest who summons us a new one for 100 gold.
While we're here, we do our first significantly abusive act and use a scroll of taming bought from the library to charm one of the elite guards it atnam so we can steal his stuff. The second image shows the (invisible) guard, the third shows his stuff. All of the mithril gear is very valuable (and strong), and the rings of invisibility and infravision are useful as well. The first because we can use it to hide from certain dangerous enemies that can't see through invisibility (high level golems, kamikaze dwarfs) and the second because it allows us to see most invisible monsters even if we don't have ESP.
Fourth image just shows the elite guard's stats; he's far stronger and higher HP than us but we aren't going to use him as a pet because it's not necessary and babysitting him is annoying.
Next order of business is training up our stats and unarmed skill on the remaining plants in the Underwater tunnel (i.e. the ones that bit our arm off). They won't have any ability to hurt us in our mithril armor. I forgot to take a screenshot, but all you missed was me holding the directional key for a minute or so while my dexterity and unarmed skyrocketed. Also took off armor to get injured a bit and train endurance so we have a few more hp.
Stats shown below. Dexterity is 30, which is very high for natural limbs and will allow me to repeatedly strike the sumo wrestler in the head, limbs and groin where he has little hp instead of the torso where he has a ton of hp.
As promised, we make very short work of the sumo wrestler.
Because we are so roided up, we are already spawning reasonably high level monsters (i.e. necromancers) early in the dungeon. Normally wouldn't expect to see these guys for several floors.
Early spawn of Rondol the kobold, the weakest unique. Our mithril armor is too much for him and he goes down screaming.
Always pray before tough fights; sometimes you get an angel. We are about to enter UT:4, land of crystal golems, which are dangerous to early-mid game characters as they can crit for ~50-60 damage which is easily enough to destroy a torso in one shot unless you have > ~120 hp (which we don't).
Here we are killing the Enner beast, the guard of GC:5. He has a damaging scream which breaks equipment, including all your potions at range. Up close he can do 30 or more damage a scream every round which will rapidly kill most characters. We use wands to kill him at range. Most of the work is done by wands of fireball but it takes a wand of lightning to finally bring him down. He drops a horn of fear, which does what it sounds like (aoe fear status effect on enemies) but I think it isn't that useful as I believe most monsters that matter are resistant to it (not really sure as I never actually think to use it).
The first of several special chests that are guaranteed to have high level items in them. This one is easy to find (although protected by meteoric steel walls that can be hard to break). There is a second that is hidden in the walls somewhere and then 2 more that are hidden in GC:7-12.
Meteoric steel walls can be broken by a pick axe that is harder than meteoric steel (e.g. mithril pick axe from the GC shopkeeper), sulphuric acid (throw potion at wall, but don't stand too close) or by vomiting on the walls until they rust and then using a meteoric steel pick axe which is harder than rusted meteoric steel.
Second unique, the goblin king wielding two mithril swords. Much meaner than the kobold rondol, but still weaker than our roided up + mithril plated character. Down he goes. In the interim I've done some pool drinking and was lucky enough to get permanent invisibility and ESP (although also permanent polymorphing while needs to be managed with always-on polymorph control or we could more or less die at any moment by being polymorphed with no warning into a rat while in combat).
Goblin king also dies screaming; no real interesting drops as our equipment is already better than his (although normally it wouldn't be and he drops a nice enchanted meteoric steel mail along with his mithril swords).
Me detecting the second (but first hidden) special chest. Contents are the artifact spear (high damage, gives teleport control and teleportitis and sometimes teleports monsters on hit) and a sapphire and an adamantine bear trap. Bear trap could be useful but we aren't going to bother; sapphire doesn't really matter and is only to sell (or create a golem out of) but anyway not that valuable and the spear is good but not my preferred weapon. Basically didn't get anything that helps us win here but them's the breaks.
Third unique, Xinroch the skeleton, spawns in GC:6, aka the big room. Notshown: him dying (which he does), but probably not screaming as he is a skeleton.
Enchanted ommel tooth plate spawns on the floor, a very large upgrade to our current mithril plate. Ommel materials are very strong but rot to nothingness over the course of a few days. Betting that we can finish in time, we make the trade.
Me polypiling to generate sacrifices to the head evil god as well as some useful equipment for myself. Once we have enough favor with Mortifier (the head evil god) we pray to receive is artifact, the +6 adamantine mace Ne'erc. It does a ton of damage and also occasionally life-drains and also happens to be my preferred weapon as it is available every game. At 32 arm strength or more we can wield it one hand, allowing us to have a highly enchanted whip or some other weapon in the off hand.
An example of how IVAN murders tough characters. A seemingly innocent goblin prince (weak monster) spawns with highly enchanted swords. Melee damage is calculated multiplicatively in IVAN, so these +6 steel short swords do about 3 times what a normal goblin prince would do. The most lethal example of this phenomenon is a mistress who quietly spawns with a highly enchanted whip and then proceeds to one shot whip your head off (which an amulet of life saving won't protect you from because, in true IVAN logic, the amulet is no longer on you after you lose your head).
Another example of how IVAN murders tough characters! This orc general doesn't seem so dangerous and we have killed many, many orcs by this point. Mithril halberd +2, how bad could that be vs. the meteoric steel halberds that orc officers have, whom we have been killing by the boat load? The answer is easily enough to kill me in one hit along with the general's high arm strength. IVAN lures you into complacency with many lower damage monsters and then spawns a seemingly similar monster that can (unbeknownst to you) kill you in one hit on a critical.
Anyhow we kill him anyway because I felt like by ommel tooth plate would probably protect me and I knew I wouldn't take too many turns to get him since I had Ne'erc. Fortunately, he goes down. I also wanted to get the ommel urine he was carrying which buffs stats when consumed.
Not shown: me murdering all the dark frogs in the metal room above me. The frogs include the feared mystic dark frog, who is invisible and can teleport your equipment and you as well as slow and cast direct damage spells.
I resurrect my buddy the mystic dark frog as a pet.
Returning a few floors upstairs to murder the GC shopkeeper for his pick and to take anything I might want from his shop inventory. He is very tough (normally he is capable of killing at least one angel unless he gets unlucky), but at this point we are tougher.
We finally use some mirroring charges to mirror up some extra scrolls and buff up our equipment. Key scrolls are enchant weapon / armor and change material, which we are using to turn all our important armor into ommel tooth so it is extremely strong.
20 Intelligence means we can talk to the librarian in atnam to train our intelligence and wisdom a few more points
We murder the spider silk golem, a unique golem. He is very fast, hits hard and is invisble to sight, infravision and ESP (i.e. no way to ever see him by any means, although casting detect material -> spider silk will show the square he is standing on). He is great to kill as he drops a scroll of change material (rare, key scroll, although less important here as we already have one) and a wand of cloning (very rare, allows for permanent copies of most items unlike mirroring which is temporary).
Ivan the Communist, the guaranteed ally who can be found on GC:8. Not shown is his giant mutant bunny. They are both pretty tough, although generally not enough to kill the dark frog boss Elpuri alone. They also frequently get killed by random dangerous spawns on GC:8. Ivan's biggest weakness is his armor (his health is huge at ~600) and the fact that he can't heal. With some better equipment and some babysitting he is a beast although I've never bothered to bring him past the portal.
Us rubbing a lamp for a wish (lamps have ~ 1/3 chance of having a genie, who has ~2/3 of being friendly and granting you a wish). I think I wished for another wand of mirroring because the ones I had so far had low maximum charges (max of 1) vs. the potential max of 4 which is much more efficient to use the rare scrolls of charging on.
Apparently Ivan's bunny got killed; not sure what killed him but here he lays.
The unique orc. He is the first of the uniques that I think of as "high level", although the spider silk golem can be pretty tough. I don't know what his max damage on a crit is but it's enough to one shot characters with hundreds of hp.
We mirror up a clone to go fight him (which has identical stats and equipment to me, but only lasts for a few dozen turns). The orc marshal promptly murders him.
Ivan and I tag-team him, taking him down. As can be seen, a single critical nearly kills me from full health.
The fight with Elpuri. The friendly golem is an ommel tooth golem, which I created from a scroll of golem creation and an ommel tooth item. Golems can be created out of almost any material, and increase in stats exponentially for higher quality materials. Ommel tooth golems are the second toughest golem type you can make, and have thousands of HP and do pretty good damage. Two of them alone are enough to kill Elpuri if no other monsters intervene (sometimes one can handle him alone, but if Elpuri takes off one of the golem's limbs early he will probably win). In this case we have Ivan playing the role of the second golem. I stay back because Elpuri is strong enough to break items through chests and I don't want to deal with that.
Fourth shot has us standing on his corpse
I clone the resurrected mystic dark frog a bunch of times. This allows me to chat with each of them to get a ton of intelligence training.
I finally get up to 35 intelligence, which allows me to turn my limbs into angel hair as long as I harden them from cloth limbs (hardening takes less intelligence than a direct conversion and cloth has low intelligence requirements).
As one can see, my stats become outrageous. Strength and agility stats are linear in IVAN, so I now do approximately 4 times as much damage a hit and have 5 times the speed for a 20x increase in total DPS.
This is enough to spawn Golgor Dhan, the unique dark knight. He does an outrageous amount of damage himself, but because we are so quick and are wearing an amulet of lifesaving I decide to chance it and engage him in hand to hand combat...
...He dies screaming! My character is so strong he can dual wield Ne'erc as well as the orc marshal's ruby halberd.
We step through the portal to the deeper part of the Gloomy Cave to go hunt Oree, the demon king. There is no return save for the stairs next to Oree, so the game asks us if we are sure we want to continue.
And we promptly get killed!
The story starts at about line 6 of the above, which is where things start to go wrong. Because we are drunk (not sure why, maybe pool sipping or got hit on the head recently), our character moves a different way than the one we tell him. Because drunk is a hidden status effect and only causes random movement rarely, this can catch one off guard. Unfortunately, that random movement walked us right into a floating eye, which paralyzes me for a zillion turns and allows an orc general to saunter over and crush my face.
Fortunately, I had been getting killed enough times earlier that I had gotten used to just leaving my amulet of lifesaving on at all times and it pays off, so we are able to continue our adventure.
After recovering from that let set back, which now leaves us without an amulet of livesaving, we run into trouble again on the last floor of the Gloomy Cave, GC:12. A veteran kamikaze dwarf (carrying a big backpack full of gunpowder) goes off next to us doing 1) a lot of direct damage himself, and 2) a lot of follow-on damage when a bunch of our wands break. Those wands not only are enough to take off one of our arms, but also send Ne'erc flying several squares away and teleport us into the middle of a room where we are surrounded by dangerous monsters and casters.
We retreat to lick our wounds and conjure ourselves a new arm. In the interim, we are wielding Golgor Dhan's highly enchanted sapphire scimitar in both hands.
Quick shot of the bottom third of the "mage room" on the left. IVAN has several set piece rooms, including an orc room (bunch of orcs of increasing power + an orc general) a golem room (same thing with golems, has a valpurium golem, which is the toughest golem in IVAN and has ~4000 hp) and several others. The worst of those is the mage room, as all those mages have ESP and can see me through the walls when I get close enough and all start teleporting my equipment and lightning bolt / fireballing me through the walls. The mage room has about 3 times the mages that are visible below, including elder dark mages (toughest mage) and mystic dark frogs, neither of which are shown. We wisely skip this encounter, although it is doable with very careful play and some luck.
We step into Oree's lair. We immediately start surrounded by a slew of very tough enemies, but its not actually a big deal we just use our first turn to teleport away.
Summoning up some clone bros for Oree, whom we then proceed to go dogpile. He's actually a pretty tough monster, but you wouldn't necessarily know it due to how ridiculous our equipment and stats are.
He drops two unique items. One is a can of pepsi, the other is the Shirt of the Golden Eagle, which is mostly the best armor in the game (it's supposed to be, but in my opinion ommel tooth armor of great health is better). The Shirt is a holy artifact stolen from the temple in Atnam and the high priest petrus will give you the second ending if you return it to him (first ending being just return Elpuri's head).
We do return the Shirt to Atnam, but instead of giving it to Petrus we are going to murder him so we can take his place as the High Priest.
As before, we summon up some mirror bros...
And some golems for good measure.
Saunter up to Petrus with our possee.
And basically make a giant mess out of everyone. For some reason, Valpurus, king of the Gods, is basically fine with this as along as we sacrifice a bunch of the expensive crap from all the people we killed to him afterwards. Conveniently, he has an altar in the cathedral.
We sacrifice until Valpurus's piety is at the maximum and then gather up the Shirt, Petrus's sword, and Petrus's left nut and go sit on the throne (with a brief intermission to clear it of dead people so we can actually sit on it). Roll credits!