Toggle Background Color
PREVIOUSLY, ON SLASH'EM: Update #2
We left off having just entered the level that has Minetown, off looking for its altar.
New to SLASH'EM, Minetown has a handful of dwarf thieves. They're similar to nymphs in they can steal stuff from you and teleport away, but are as slow as other dwarves and will also may just try to stab you instead of stealing.
This one didn't get far, so I kill him and take my knives back.
Gnomish wizards are generally the first enemy spell caster you'll run across. They can hit you pretty hard with the monster spell psi bolt, but are pretty inaccurate. The "Your head suddenly aches painfully!" means it rolled for fairly high for its damage.
Just behind him is TEAM ANT Soldier ants are usually appear in groups and are fast, poisonous and hard hitting and very much so deadly to low level characters. On nethack.alt.org, the online nethack server, soldier ants are the #1 cause of death, sitting up top with 9.27% of total deaths.
Don't fuck around when it comes to soldier ants.
This one kills me out of wolf form, but I heal up on Elbereth and kill him when wolf form triggers again. Thankfully this ant was acting alone.
Once in Minetown proper I book it straight to the altar. The Minetown altar is a guaranteed temple, which means it has an attendant aligned priest. The strange forbidden feeling means the altar isn't my alignment (this one is lawful). Sacrificing on an altar not your alignment is an attempt to convert it, which is bad when there's a priest there ready to kill you if you do so, but I can use it for BUC testing just fine. You can buy divine protection (which lowers your AC) from priests of any alignment by donating 400*experience level, but I don't have the cash for it.
Stupid thieves managed to steal one of my lamps
This will not stand
So. Time for the good stuff. First I turn back into a lycanthrope for use of my hands.
Altar testing for BUC is as simple as dropping stuff on it while non-blind. Amber is blessed, black is cursed, no flash is uncursed. Altar alignment doesn't matter for this.
ALL THREE of the lamps I've found are already blessed 
Undead Slayers start with holy water so it wouldn't have been a big deal to bless them, so I guess that saves that.
Oh Izchak, you know just what I like. I'll leave this lamp here for now, but its nice to know its there.
The lighting shop in Minetown is technically the only guaranteed shop in the game, and will always have a male shopkeeper named Izchak. He's named after Izchak Miller, one of the founding Nethack Devteam member who passed away in 1994.
I find myself a nice quiet corner to get to work in. I engrave-test one of the wands I picked up, and it auto-identifies as digging
Most wands in the in the game can be determined by [E]ngraving something with them. You'll want to write something in the dust before attempting to write with the wand, because three very important wand - make invisible, teleportation, and cancellation - will make whatever is engraved in the dust disappear. If there's nothing there, it doesn't leave a message.
So. Magic lamps. You can #rub magic lamps to release the djinni within it. When they're blessed, this has a 80% chance of granting you a wish, and a 5% of each of the other 4 outcomes (becoming a pet, becoming a peaceful monster, saying something and disappearing, or becoming a hostile monster.
Smoky potions act in a similar way, they have a small chance of releasing a djinni when quaffed (1/(13+2x) by default, where x is the number of djinni created so far)
I seem to have not taken a screenshot of my first wish, but it was for a blessed ring of polymorph control, which I put on right after. Without it, I'm going to keep randomly turning into a wolf and back. With it, I get a message asking me if I want to turn into a wolf, which I can decline. This is very, very important, because now I can play the game close to any other character.
Note that lycanthropes are special case polymorphers. Any source of polymorph with only turn me to a wolf or back, even with polymorph control I'll never turn into anything else. Another of the SLASH'EM races, vampires, work the same way (vampire/vampire bat) as well as two of the new classes (Flame/Ice Mage and (baby) red/blue dragons, depending on XP level)
Second wish also successful 
When wishing for things, you can attempt to wish for a specific number (such as enchantment, or # of items for stackable items). 2 or 3 generally work, but this has a chance of failing and simply giving you the default number (+0 or a single item)
Success! Dragon scale mails are the best body armour in the game. They're lightweight, have the highest possible AC reduction, aren't metallic (important for spellcasters), and grant you an extrinsic based on their colour. Silver is reflection, which is one of the two most important extrinsics in the game, along with magic resistance (which is gray). SLASH'EM has two new colours of dragons: Shimmering (displacement) and deep (drain resistance). Reflection reflects most direct spells on you back at the attacker as well as some other stuff, magic resistance prevents hostile magic effects and nullifys a bunch of nasty monsters and trap.
Drain resistance is much more important in SLASH'EM than in vanilla. There's a handful of new draining monsters but also a wand of draining, which ignores both reflection and magic resistance. There's a couple artifacts that grant it, as well as amulets of drain resistance and deep dragon scales.
Both Lycanthropes and Undead Slayers start the game with natural drain resistance, though. So whatever.
I test out the boots my little dog stole for me. They don't do anything noticeable when I put them on, so I attempt to #jump. Because this gives me an option to select a target and not just a "You can't jump very far" message, these boots are jumping. Jumping costs some nutrition, but can move you a couple squares in one go.
I keep my third lamp to the side for now and check out what else Minetown has.
Polymorph control in action. Its so beautiful There's a hardware and general store, but nothing interesting there.
Gold golems drop gold when destroyed. They're also fairly tough.
This one and a pony are teaming up on me, so I choose to turn back into a wolf when it prompts me. Until I get a decent weapon wolf form is a better fighter and gives me some extra death protection.
Unicorns There's three different colours of unicorn, one for each alignment. Avoid killing ones of your alignment, but the other two are fair game. They're hard hitting, but will never come to you to attack you, unicorns always try to stay a chess knights move away from you (so they're very difficult to hit with ranged attacks). They also teleport around a lot.
Unicorns will always drop both a corpse and unicorn horn (unless the unicorn was dead and brought back to life, it won't drop a second horn). The corpse is highly nutritious and can grant poison or sleep resistance. Unicorn horns are magical tools that are must haves. Applying a horn can cure a whole bunch of stuff like food poisoning, attribute loss, temporary blindness/confusion/stun/hallucination. Uncursed unicorn horns will attempt to fix one thing at a time, while blessed horns attempt to fix everything each time. In SLASH'EM, enchantment does change unicorn horn effectiveness, +0 has a 30% chance to work, it maxes out at +6 and 90%. Any weapon can be safely enchanted to +6, so this is mostly a matter of sparing the scrolls for it.
On the way back upstairs, I get enough marks to train up my dagger some more. The way most skills in Nethack work, is there's four different levels: Unskilled, Basic, Skilled, and Expert. For weapons, Unskilled gives penalties to both to-hit and damage, Basic is neutral to both, and Skilled and Expert grant bonuses. What skills you can get to what level depends on your class, for Undead Slayers daggers are the only melee weapon they can get to Expert. You get marks by using the applicable weapon to hurt things (or the weapon practice technique). Any skill your class can't use will always be used as Unskilled.
Every class starts in Basic with whatever they had in their initial inventory.
Nymphs are very annoying, but usually generate asleep. This one is asleep and I leave it well enough alone.
Advancing daggers to skilled gives me a chance to throw multiple at once. Useful!
I find an elvish dagger on Mines:1, and it'll be my main weapon for now. They do slightly more damage than regular daggers.
Back to dungeon diving, there's our first floating eye. Floating eyes are huge jerks. They have no attacks, but attempting to attack one in melee WILL paralyze you for a long time and cause a random newt to wander up and kill you.
They're not very tough, and the melee thing can be worked around in various ways. Ranged weapons work fine, so does blinding yourself with a blindfold or towel (or other, less useful blinding methods). We're actually immune to their passive attack with reflection right now, but it doesn't hurt to be safe with these fuckers.
Floating eye corpses grant a very useful intrinsic in telepathy, which is why they're important to kill. Intrinsic telepathy does nothing normally, but shows us the location of all brained monsters when blind.
Checking out the armour shop, now that I can actually wear the stuff, I find a cloak of displacement and gauntlets of power. The gauntlets work slightly different than in vanilla, they set your strength to 18/** and then increase it by +1 per enchantment.
(Strength is special in that between stats 18 and 19 its calculated as a percentage, for some old D&D reason)
I also get tired of getting hungry all the damn time, and use a third lamp for a ring of slow digestion. This changes our nutrition intake from 31 every 20 turns (20 base, 10 from regeneration, 1 from ring hunger wearing poly control) to 12 (10 from regeneration, 2 from ring hunger) Its a pretty significant difference. Thanks to regeneration we'll never be as low hunger as other characters, but this ring is a huge upgrade.
And that's it for our lamps! At least until I go get the one I left in Minetown
NEXT TIME, ON SLASH'EM:
We find out how much wood woodchucks can chuck!