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LAST TIME, ON SLASH'EM



I run into a bunch of titans from not paying attention! Whoops!

CONTINUING, ON SLASH'EM



A trap door just outside the titan room drops me down a couple levels.



Another graveyard, this one with a whole bunch of wraiths.



Wraith corpses got changed slightly in SLASH'EM, they only give you a level most of the time now. There's a small chance of losing max HP/experience from them!

Cutthroat is a technique rogues get at level 15 that has a chance to instakill a monster (or otherwise do a bunch of damage) but requires a bladed weapon to be used. Which uh, the baseball bat I'm smashing people with is not.



More high level spells I'll never cast!



Another dozen cockatrice get killed off. While they can kill you with a bunch of gotchas, cockatrices are super slow and low hp so can be dealt with easily so long as you're paying attention.



Almost done with special levels before we get to the late game! This one is the Sunless Sea.



Some giant crabs spawn here, which I don't think show up anywhere else. This level has a bunch of random items and a guaranteed magic lamp, but the lamp is somewhere underwater.



I get around to eating the black dragon I tinned that one of those titans summoned on me. This one is disintegration resistance. Its not terribly useful because unless you're going out of your way to piss off a god the only disintegration attack is reflect-able, but hey.



All that spellcasting training has paid off in that I can cast detect treasure at a reasonable rate outside of combat, which lets me spot the lamp in the water. However, I don't need the wish or the permanent light and don't want to mess around to get it, so I ignore it!



Another giant room, but this time I'm paying attention and notice the two titans. But I also notice the storm giant (the one with the lightning bolt), who can grant me shock resistance, which is the only major resistance I don't have yet.



As I head over there I went down a staircase and found the Giant Caves to clear out first though.



This guy is the boss of it, mostly just has a big pile of HP



Amulets of flying are amazing. They give you the flying status, which is like levitation except better in every way. While flying, you can still manipulate items on the ground and head downstairs without issue.

My current amulet is drain resistance, but I'll probably swap to flying when I'm ready for the late game and keep draining as a switch, because flying is more useful than being annoyed at losing a level or two.



SLASH'EM also has toilets.

You can #sit on them when sick to cure it and lose some nutrition, or stand on them to #pray to the Porcelain God and if you're sick, stunned, or confused He smiles on you and cures you of it. A sink will always generate in the same room as them.



And two altars in case you wanted to #pray to other gods, for some reason.



I cleared enough of that giant room earlier to kill and tin the storm giant and remember to eat it. Shock resistance get And I've been chowing down on enough tinned giants to get my strength up to 18/36, too.

I've seriously used almost 40 charges on my tinning kit already. I love these things.



This is what detect treasure looks like on most levels. The random gems and gold are embedded in the walls and can be gotten to by digging. There's two downstairs here though, and you know what that means.



The Temple of Moloch! This is actually (finally) the last special level of the dungeon before Medusa!



So of course I use my teleportis to skip it and just go right to where I know the treasure room is.

....What? There's a bunch of summoners there I don't want to bother with.



Each of these piles has some gold, a candle, a random item, and a container. One of them had an amulet of life saving!

Life saving when worn will bring you back to life from just about any death, even non-hp loss ones like stoning.



Yeah no thanks I'm outta here.



I guess I'll show off a bit of the level. Lots of undead and demons.



The ghoul queen summons a green slime on me, who have an attack like the cockatrices stoning which turns me into a green slime. Enough of this!



Thats a fair bit of traps to find all in one room. A mumak gets me to level 16, showing it is actually possible to gain levels by combat XP in late SLASH'EM.



Wearing an amulet of change will consume it to change you into the opposite gender of whatever you are.



A zoo AND a graveyard that I don't feel like messing with.



Star vampires are extremely fast and have a bunch of life draining tentacle attacks, although drain resistance protect me from it. Like fire vampires, they're a Cthulhu Mythos space vampire and not a proper undead vampire.



Gypsy are the most interesting of the new SLASH'EM monsters. You can #chat with them and pay them to read your fortune. They draw from a tarot deck which has a bunch of potential effects, including granting wishes. Only one wish per gypsy, though, the second time they draw the wish card they'll wish they weren't there.

It costs a bunch of money, but you can pawn gems to them for credit. And they're reverse genocide-able, so with some scrolls and cash you can get a LOT of wishes.



Magic resistance protects against monster touch of death. In one of my favourite little NetHack things, so does hallucination (you have an out of body experience instead of dying)



Even with magic resistance magic traps can still do this to me



I'll never get tired of one-shotting soldier ants.



I'll just take the long way around you, thanks.



Shimmering dragons are one of the two new SLASH'EM dragons, whose scales grant displacement. The other are deep dragons, who grant drain resistance.



Oh good, we're finally at the late game.



Medusa can turn you stone, with a gaze attack. Like all gaze attacks, reflection and blindness make it trivial to fight her.



I swap out my drain resistance for flying, which will be extremely useful for pretty much the whole rest of the game!



Son of Dogmeat in: THE BIRDS



A bunch of dead ravens and occasionally other things, and I'm outside Medusa's door.



She runs downstairs to try and escape me but it doesn't help her much!



Killing Medusa in SLASH'EM will spring a peaceful Pegasus from her neck. Makes a good steed for Knights.



Oh, and uh. I may have omitted something about the SLASH'EM version I'm playing.



Normally you'd have a couple of maze levels here, then the Castle, then the Valley of the Dead, and then the rest of the late game. This is technically a maze level, but with water instead of the normal walls you'd expect.



The thing is, the version of SLASH'EM I have isn't the base version, its a version with the Lethe Patch applied to it.



Now the base SLASH'EM already has a good amount of the Lethe Patch content in it. There's no new monsters added from the rest of the patch for example, because all of the Lethe monsters are all in SLASH'EM already.

All the patch does is change all the levels post-Medusa (and adds some minor items. Silver tipped staffs are staffs that do silver damage, and scrolls of elementalism/demonism....can summon elementals/demons smile:



The 9 levels right after Medusa are the Lethe Gorge. The Castle is on the third level, the Valley is on the last one.

If you forget your Greek mythological rivers that makes sense, the Lethe is the one of the rivers of the underworld, the one of forgetfulness. All of the water below Medusa is thus water from the River Lethe, and stepping in it causes amnesia, which is not good! Don't go swimming down here!

Somewhere along the line I hit level 17 and my attack damage starts getting shown. I'm doing ~32-35 a hit.



Magic lamp!



Damn tourists



Three levels down, so I know we're at the Castle without looking.



Time to storm the Castle!

NEXT TIME, ON SLASH'EM



Storming the castle through the new side entrance!