https://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20240825-133151.txt
Playing RNG combos until I get one to the Lair is all very well but sometimes it gets a bit repetitive. After MDAE (a book start that can barely cast its spells) I got MuCK (20 games to splat in an ice cave)… but then MiEn - another book start that never did cast its spells, 4 games to win; then TeSk (4 games to teleport in Snake into a little room with Vashnia’s pack), then MiAE, another book start that, as it happened, never cast its spells successfully - bad luck meant I miscast Shock every time before good luck meant I found a scale mail on D:1.
I really don’t like these Mi book starts that tend to end up as a choice between being effectively MiFi with worse stats and MiBe with worse stats. I’ve got MiIE home played pretty straight with Chei, but mostly just because I wanted to try it. In this case Trog turned up as the very first altar so it was an easy choice to be a bad MiBe. Before that, however, I got the Pargi sewer - I forget exactly how I beat him, but if memory serves I’d identified just enough potions to squeeze by.
I started out in Short Blades having found a halfway decent shortsword, and planned to transition to Long Blades later; found a buckler, started to train Shields. That all went out the window when I found a longbow on D:8 and thought, well, my melee weapon is barely adequate, my shield is tiny, Trog will keep me topped up with arrows - let’s go for it.
I did then slightly curse myself when a scroll of acquirement on Lair:5 offered me a +5 tower shield with {rPois Slay+3 Stlth+}; I decided not to take that but to stick to bows… and then the next acquirement I found (after Orc) offered me a manual of Shields, so I cursed myself again.
The game up to Lair, Orc, and D:15 was pretty plain sailing with almost no nervous moments - a couple of feisty death yaks in the Lair and a slightly nasty bit on O:2 was about it. Odd, since I had no rPois in Lair and that’s usually a recipe for trouble - but Trog saw fit to replace my longbow with a +4 longbow of flaming on Lair:2 and between that, Trog’s Hand for hexers, and the occasional berserk, I didn’t have any issues. I got shafted 3 floors from D:9 but got back up with no trouble.
An antique shop on Orc gave me a +10 plate armour with {+Blink rF- Slay+3}… the rF hole was a nuisance, but I could patch it over with a ring I then bought on D:11 with {rPois rF+ MR+ Dex-4 SInv}; nice to finally have rPois but losing a ring slot I had been using for +3 dexterity was hurting my stats and hence bow damage. However, I’d no armour even vaguely comparable to that, so on it went.
Snake was really not so easy - shock serpents were a big problem, fast venomous snakes, and the usual wall of naga meat on Snake:4… which I teleported away from to land on top of Vashnia’s pack. Not again, I thought, but this time I read fear and was able to get enough breathing room to deal with it. Kirke and Nikola also turned up but weren’t a problem (quaffed resistance for Nikola).
Swamp was better; I found a +6 scale mail with rElec Stlth+ which ideally I would have found before fighting a ton of shock serpents and Nikola. Even Lernie wasn’t a big problem thanks to a phantom mirror.
Things didn’t look too bad apart from the resistance situation - no rC, one pip of rF if I wanted to give up a big lump of AC… and bad MR. Trog’s Hand of course is a big help but will drain piety if you use it on every hexer you meet. I faced the usual choice between risking Banishment in Elf with bad MR and being constantly Marked in Vaults with bad MR. I thought, well, there’s fewer DE sorcerers in Elf than there are vault sentinels in Vaults; went to Elf:1 but it got very unpleasant so I was off to Vaults.
Vaults:1 had a nasty moment with a fire dragon, stone giant, and orc knight band - but then gave up a +10 chain mail with {Regen+ rCorr Str+3 Slay+2}. I still had not much in the way of resistances but at least now I could have decent dexterity. After that I cleared V:2 but then felt I was better equipped for Elf than before.
I was - Elf was completely fine, even the E:3 room of bastards going down easily to dropping clouds (I had both a lamp of fire and plenty of wand charges) in the corridor and then shooting at them - and for once the E:3 loot was excellent. A ring of the Octopus King {AC+1 EV+1 Str+1 Int+1 Dex+1 SInv} for a non-annoying SInv swap, +2 boots with {-Cast Dex+4}, and a ring with {MR++ Str+5 Dex+4} which besides being very solid in general neatly fixed any MR problems.
Down Vaults, which was easy enough going that I decided to go straight to V:5 (not least because Depths can be sheer murder without at least one pip of both rF and rC - too many giants and dragons). I arrived about to teleport and landed in a corner; one slightly bad moment with a titan but otherwise cleared without trouble, netting myself a +11 shortbow with {venom, rElec MR+ Str+2 Int+3} - finally a non-annoying rElec swap (although I’d use a ring later in Zot) - and gold dragon scales, solving the resistance problem just in time for Depths.
Depths:1 had a wizlab - Tomb of Dorothy. I was pretty nervous when I cracked open the first tomb and saw a guardian mummy - the undead version of it can be horrible - but by keeping on cracking tombs rather than waiting for full HP I had almost all the undead disposed of by the time the rest of the tombs opened automatically.
After that Depths was fine, netting the brooch of Shielding (which is {Ward, rN+ AC+4 EV+4}) and leaving me considering the big question on Depths:5 - what extended rune(s) was I going for, and was I going to abandon Trog? Trog had given me a decent selection of longbows, a claymore of freezing, and an antimagic claymore - there was little prospect of any more useful weapon gifts. I had about 1800 arrows, so I wasn’t going to run out. Berserk - well, as you know berserk can solve almost any problem but maybe also giving you a new problem that you aren’t allowed to berserk for, and the later in the game you are, the more other options you have that don’t have that kind of downside. Perhaps it was not too hard a question.
I went TSO - obvious choice - but on reflection I’ve never done Tomb with Zin and also I had a huge excess of gold so could have bought up Zin piety almost immediately. If I’d thought of that at the time, I’d probably have gone Zin.
I did the usual thing of clearing Crypt to build TSO piety and work off Trog wrath - and converted one of my longbows into +8 holy wrath. After that, though, Trog was still annoyed; I cleared the Vestibule next. Poor Geryon went down to about three arrows with that bow! Trog was alas still annoyed so, although I didn’t feel very well kitted out for it, I went to Slime, dropping lamp fire on TRJ in one of the corridors in its little house. For once TRJ didn’t back up in time and I could then just hammer it flat with a claymore and teleport - into Trog’s minions, oh no, which got pretty bad but not fatal, and Trog was mollified shortly after that.
At that point it was off to Tomb - Boris, Mara, and Mennas all went down without trouble (it is so nice to have a character who can just hammer away at Mennas and win easily) but I fumbled things badly in the inner area and HP: 23/269 [torment (10)] means that the best performing monster of the game is probably a greater mummy. There was another minor issue with a Zot trap between me and the stairs - I first learned Blink, took off my armour and -Cast boots, quaffed brilliance, cast it, landed on the wrong side - and thankfully then thought “this is stupid, me, you might arrive naked in front of another greater mummy!”. Much better to retrieve the +10 plate with +Blink and try that. I got over the trap after a tediously large number of attempts to find there wasn’t anyone waiting for me and I could change my armour back.
To Tomb:2 - except as little as possible; I arrived about to teleport, teleported, and landed in the chunk that has the hatches to Tomb:3 meaning I could avoid both the Tomb:2 ambush and the corridor of bastards on Tomb:1.
To Tomb:3! I’d collected every tree potion I could find and planned to stand around in treeform shooting and spamming Cleansing Flame. This worked well enough, but could have been done better. The bow wasn’t much use because summons stack up in front of summoners in no time. I had instinctively started the fight with my back against the wall, but actually I think I wanted to be surrounded, to let more monsters crowd around me for Cleansing Flame. Cleansing Flame seemed to be basically piety-neutral but did use up MP faster than TSO replaced it; ages ago I had stopped picking up potions of magic and so had none with me, a bad mistake. Instead I had to fill in a bit with the bow, the lamp of fire, the stone of tremors, and miscellanous wands. HP were more or less coming in as fast as they went out but there were a couple of worryingly big hits.
The whole thing was about reaching the point where I could no longer sustain it, so I read three scrolls of holy word one after the other, expecting to get a bunch of MP from that and be able to go on longer… but when the dust cleared, it turned out that was the fight basically over and I had made so much noise that there was barely anything scary left on the level.
It was nice of the mummies to leave two scrolls of holy word lying around in their treasure vaults to replenish my supply. I imagine them standing around going “I’m not touching them, Amhotep, you throw them away if you want!” “Seriously, did no-one think to get buried with a pair of tongs? Some oven gloves?”.
After that I fancied maybe another extended rune or two - it didn’t seem like Tartarus would be too bad and apart from one nasty moment on Tar:7 it wasn’t, with Ereshkigal going down nearly as quickly as Geryon had. I’d master Invocations here; I’d stopped Armour, Fighting, and Dodging just short in order to get an Invo title, and would master them in Dis. Dis was much the same story; Dispater lasted a few more rounds but also wasn’t any kind of serious trouble.
After that I thought I’d done enough and could go to Zot. I had a preposterous excess of gold this game so bought anything that might even concievably be useful - like arrows when I had 1,800-odd already. After all that Zot was not too bad - drac packs were no threat, I had an rElec swap ring for electric golems and storm dragons, moths of wrath consistently refrained from berserking stuff (of course, it helps if you can mostly kill them one or two turns after they come into LOS), the three total orbs of fire didn’t even turn up until the orb vault (and I had a second pip of rF on a swap ring and an antimagic claymore), ancient lichen didn’t turn up at all.
As such I cleared out one lung muttering “where is everyone” - in the Orb chamber it became clear the other lung was much more populated and monsters were trickling in from there, so as soon as I had some breathing room I quaffed my last haste, read fog, grabbed the Orb, and legged it. The orbrun was uneventful save that a seraph turned up on D:3 and started summoning angels like anything… but I evoked my stone of tremors to soften them up a bit and by sheer luck the seraph fell through a shaft so all the angels poofed out of existence.
Next is OgHu. Well, at least it’s not a book start.