beem: Cassandra[1/1]: An Ash-worshiping prophet who forsees your doom! When you first see her, you split the difference between your current doom and 100%. (if you had 0%, you now have 50%; if you had 50% you now have 75%). She casts doombolt and swiftness. Upon death, monsters from the floor are teleported near you, or created near you if there aren’t enough. She wears an amulet half the time.
The stone arrow hits Cassandra!!
You kill Cassandra!
Vehumet accepts your kill.
Cassandra gasps with her dying breath, “I… tried to warn you…”
Foes suddenly leap out to ambush you!
Fannar, Maurice, a cyclops and 2 centaurs come into view.
Fannar is wielding a +0 quarterstaff of freezing, wearing a +1 robe of cold
resistance and wearing a ring of protection from cold. Maurice is wielding a +0
dagger of venom and carrying a wand of warping.
The centaur wields a +0 shortbow. The centaur shoots an arrow.
The arrow hits you!
LOW HITPOINT WARNING * * *
Fannar casts a spell at you.
The bolt of cold hits you!!!
Ouch! That really hurt!
You die…
Maybe the description should add “and they all get a turn as soon as they appear.” Or should that have been obvious?
If they were awake and wandering around, they may get a turn. It wasn’t done intentionally I think.
It may interest you that Cassandra was changed before you made this post (and possibly before you ended that game, though the server may not have had the latest version yet)! Monsters are always created now rather than recalled from elsewhere on the floor so they shouldn’t immediately get a turn anymore.
The on-death Word of Recall, while incorporating the floor Cassandra was
found on in a meaningful way, had variance that a number of players found
very unsatisfying - if a scary vault was on the floor, it was possible to
pull very out of depth monsters (and if they were already awake, they might
even act immediately). It's not clear to me that this was materially worse
than a teletrap (and Cassandra's kill rate has not been outsized so far),
but clearly not fun to a number of people, so let's try something else.
Killing Cassandra now creates several random bandless monsters (of the
current Depth + 2) at some nearby distance that is out of the player's
sight (but traversable to those monsters) and gives those monsters unerring
knowledge of the player's location. In addition, all stairs on the floor
will become sealed for a short period of time (to prevent the obvious
answer of immediately leaving the floor and ignoring them). This should
still give the player a scary problem to answer, but one that is literally
incapable of damaging them immediately (and likely not for several turns),
allowing the player some time to size up the situation and a wider variety
of viable responses.
In addition, there is now a small chance that her amulet may be a randart
with Bane on it. (While Bane does not generate normally on amulets, since
there's not additional compensation on them, simply being an early randart
may make it highly tempting nonetheless.)