Magic 8-Ball
| ( Magic 8-Ball File:Eight ball.png | |
|---|---|
| Base item | eight ball |
| Affiliation | unaligned |
| When carried | |
| When applied | |
| When invoked | none |
| Base price | 5000 zm |
| Weight | 20 |
The Magic 8-Ball is an artifact that appears in EvilHack. It is unaligned, and its base item is an eight ball.
Generation
The Magic 8-Ball cannot be wished for, and reverts to its base item if left in bones.
The Oracle is always generated with the Magic 8-Ball during the creation of her level.
Description
The Magic 8-Ball is implied to be the source of the Oracle's knowledge. It grants warning while carried, and can be applied to divulge a random rumor - the rumor will be true or false based on the artifact's beatitude: true if blessed, false if cursed, and an equal probability of each if uncursed. Additionally, there is a 1⁄100,000 chance that applying the blessed Magic 8-Ball will grant the user a wish, which causes it to disappear afterward.
Reading the Magic 8-Ball randomly generates one of twenty responses that have no effect.
Strategy
The Magic 8-Ball is highly sought after as a source of slotless warning, which can be used to spot lethal hostile monsters such as beholders, gelatinous cubes, water elementals, and the various zombies - many of the listed monsters and others considered especially dangerous cannot be seen with telepathy.
Many players consider it worth killing the Oracle for, either directly or through the use of a pet: while even some of the strongest pets will struggle to directly withstand the Oracle's wrath and kill her without dying in the process, directly angering the Oracle means contending with her spellcasting abilities and magic missile passive, as well as her gaining mobility and the ability to break boulders obstructing her path.
Origin
A Magic 8-Ball is a plastic sphere made to look like an oversized billiards eight-ball, used for fortune-telling or seeking advice. It was invented in 1946 by Albert C. Carter and Abe Bookman, and is currently manufactured by Mattel - originally designed as a paperweight, it has since become a popular office toy and children's toy. The Magic 8-Ball contains a blue twenty-sided die with white letters in a pool of blue liquid; the user asks a yes–no question to the ball, then turns it over to reveal an answer in a window on the ball.
In fiction, the Magic 8-Ball is often used for humor, with it giving very accurate, very inaccurate, or otherwise statistically improbable answers. The standard Magic 8-Ball has 20 possible responses when read: 10 affirmative answers, 5 non-committal answers, and 5 negative answers. The artifact in EvilHack uses these standard responses when read, and one of them is used as the encyclopedia entry.
Encyclopedia entry
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