Toggle Background Color

PREVIOUSLY, ON SLASH'EM:



One-Eyed Sam and his merry band of shop assistants prepare their wares for us.

There's a series of engravings burnt into the floor leading up to his shop

pre:
Pets are not allowed in the shop
Thieves will be killed.
Sorry about the mess. Remember, ask if you need help!
Don't even think about stealing anything.


HEH

CONTINUING, ON SLASH'EM



This is what One-eyed Sam's stats look like. He's strong enough that if he wanted to he could pack up shop and go ascend by himself. He really hates shoplifters. The Black Market is a special level only available by portal and you can't take pets through the portal, so the main easy way of shoplifting is out. Its also no-teleport.



Everything here is ridiculously expensive. Not that thats a problem, I don't plan on paying for any of it.



First thing's first, slowly dragging all the loot into a couple of central piles to sort through. I make one pile for potions/wands/rings/scrolls and another pile for everything else.



Manglers (the guy in the door there) are close to upgraded rothes. Somewhat slow but they come in packs and do reasonable damage.



That was one loaded wax golem!



I noticed a kamadan coming, so I scribbled Elbereth and waited for it. They have a sleep gas breath attack, and sleep resistance is one of those ones I don't have yet.



Oh hey, Sam has Snickersnee. Its marginally better in SLASH'EM than vanilla due to artifacts now doing set damage (so instead of +1d8, it always does +8) and because you can two-weapon two artifacts now. Useless to me though.




Eventually I get all of the loot that I care about into a pile. This is just the consumables pile, its huge.



I haven't been really identifying stuff yet, so I have no idea what scrolls are identify. Price-IDing things still works in the market when you account for inflation, though - VERR YED HORRE is the only scroll cheap enough to be identify.



Yep. Sams charging me for reading his scrolls but I don't care



A little bit of potion dipping later to bless all of them, and...




Healthstones are a new gray stone that affect health regeneration based on BUC status. They're always generated cursed. I stuff them in my bag for later until I can bless them.



I've gone through the shop and shoved everything I'm going to steal into game MVP the bag of holding. This is all of Sam's scrolls, potions, the wands and rings I care about (there wasn't much, notably levitation and conflict) and a couple odds and ends bits of armour and tools. I also shove all my armour and weapons into the bag too, I won't need them for this next part.



See, Sam himself has quite a bit of ascension-quality gear, and I want them badly.



I've talked about it before, but doppelgangers have the #youpoly command that triggers self-polymorph, and at level 9 the intrinsic polymorph control to turn into what I want.



This is the first I'm showing it off, and this is one of the things why doppelgangers are ridiculous.

Giant shoggoths are part of the new Lovecraft monsters, and are just about the strongest thing you can turn into. They're fast, have multiple big acid attacks, have intrinsic regeneration, can eat metal, are acidic (notably, so I don't have to worry about those cockatrices wandering about), and so on.

Their attacks: two 5d10 claw attacks and a 8d10 engulfing attack, per round.

On the downside, they're blind which is bad if you don't have telepathy. They also cant wear any rings or armour, and have no hands so they can't open doors or use tool. Bad traveling form, but amazing combat polymorph.



Yeah, I think we can take him.



His assistants all get mad when you attack him (or attack any of the other assistants) but who cares.



Two rounds of attacks and he would be dead, but he always has an amulet of life saving At least it identifies it for us.







Gray dragon scale mail, speed boots, a shield of reflection, a bunch of money, and the artifact long sword Thiefbane. Yoink!

Thiefbane has a bunch of nasty effects including a 10% chance of beheading any @ with any action. Shoggoths aren't @s (and don't even have heads to behead) and thus are immune to that. Sam always starts with all of this.



Success!



Shoggoths also have both teleportis and teleport control.



Nobody will bother us in the temple just upstairs, so now I'll take the time to actually go over most of the loot that I crammed into my bag.







I go dig into the fountain to turn it into a pool of water to dip my scrolls/potions into. I have a pair of water-walking boots, so I can just stand on them and spam #dip



I end up with 40-someodd blank scrolls (but only one magic marker sadly) and a whole bunch of potions



Sam had FIVE potions of gain ability for me. A bless and some quaffing later, and my stats go from that...



To that! The extra strength means I do more damage, the constitution means I regenerate HP more often and for more hitpoints. The healthstones I got (which I bless as well) act as +2 bonus CON for determining how much HP I regenerate when blessed. INT and WIS are mostly for spellcasting, which I'm not doing. Charisma affects how much you get charged in shops, as well as the effectiveness of nymphs/foocubi special attacks on you.



Aww, only +6 and not +7 for my Bat



A winter wolf spawns to helpfully give me cold resistance.



I do some light alchemy to upgrade Sam's potions to full healing. #dip potions of healing into (speed/gain energy/gain level) to get diluted potions of extra healing, then #dip those into (gain energy/level) to get full healing. You'll need to mess around with BUC and diluted status to make sure all your potions are in one stack to use the minimal amount of resources.



I bless and quaff all the full healing potions it results in. Each one is +8 to my max HP, for a total of +48, so I can stop being nervous about having so little health.



Some more blessing and enchanting later, and this is what I got before moving on. Its most of an ascension kit right there, equipment wise, but there's still a lot of dungeon left. If this was vanilla, we'd be very close to the castle and preparing to enter the late game. Here, the castle is still probably another 25 levels downward.



I start backtracking to visit all the special levels we skipped over. I still don't have a tinning kit to eat all these giants but I do find a second downstairs besides them that I missed earlier.



The Wyrm Caves! Another one-level branch that has a bunch of dragons in it. I have a dragon scale mail right now already, so I'll come back later when I have a tinning kit for these guys resistances as well.



First up: The Chaos Quest. Far too many liches and a smattering of other undead, but I can take care of part of that real quick.



Sam had a blessed scroll of genocide. L Vecna is a new lich who's the boss of this very level.



That means somewhere on the level, a monster drank a smoky potion and released a djinni. Good thing monsters are too dumb to get wishes.



All the assorted vampires and their friends are killed uneventfully, leaving Vecna and I alone to fight it out. He won't start attacking me until he sees me, and I put on a ring of invisibility so he can't actually do that right now.



He's tough, but if anything less of a threat than arch-lichs. He won't teleport away from me mid-fight to heal up, there's no upstairs for him to run to, and his spell selection is limited to just psi bolt - strong, but he doesn't have summon nasties or curse items or other mean spells.



I engraved Elbereth in the dust before attacking him, so his only actual action turned out to be attempting to flee. I killed him before he even tried to attack me.



He drops his hand when you kill him, which grants half physical damage, hungerless regeneration, and apparently cold resistance just by carrying it around. And also the Key of Chaos I guess, but that's bonus at this point.



The Neutral Quest is next. Sure hope you like gas spores.



Because there sure isn't much to this level asides from them.



The Beholder is the boss of this level, up in the top left. He has a bunch of gaze attacks, but if you're blind he's a chump.



I do find a wand of enlightenment on the level, which shows all the intrinsics I have so far. Still missing sleep, fire, and shock for the Big Five.

"You are protected" refers to the divine protection I got from donating to the priest a bunch



Anyways the Beholder goes down without hitting me at all, just like Vecna. Unlike Vecna, the Eye Of The Beholder artifact he drops on death is useless.



You can #invoke it to lose some luck to damage all monsters in line of sight. I leave it where it is, shove the key in my bag, and leave.

NEXT TIME, ON SLASH'EM



We go do the Lawful Quest, the alignment quest that exists as one giant series of gotchas.