Barrow wight
W barrow wight 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 7 |
| Attacks |
Weapon 0d0 drain life, spell-casting 0d0 mage, claw 1d4 physical |
| Base level | 3 |
| Base experience | 90 |
| Speed | 12 |
| Base AC | 5 |
| Base MR | 5 |
| Alignment | -3 (chaotic) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 1 (Very rare) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 1200 |
| Nutritional value | 0 |
| Size | Medium |
| Resistances | Cold, sleep, poison |
| Resistances conveyed | None |
|
A barrow wight:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line1881 |
A barrow wight, W, is a monster that appears in NetHack. Barrow wights are wraith-like undead that will seek out items such as weapons and armor to pick up, and will follow you to other levels if they are adjacent to you.
A barrow wight has a weapon attack with the ability to drain life, the ability to cast one mage monster spell during each of its turns, and a claw attack. They possess poison resistance, sleep resistance and cold resistance.
Contents
Generation
Randomly-generated barrow wights are always created hostile.
Barrow wights appear among the random W that are part of the second quest monster class for Wizards and make up 6⁄175 of the monsters randomly generated on the Wizard quest.
Barrow wights are always generated with a long sword and a knife.[1]
A barrow wight does not leave a corpse upon death.
Characters that die at the hands of a barrow wight and leave a bones file will arise as a named wraith instead of a ghost.
Strategy
Barrow wights move at the same speed as an unhasted, unburdened hero, and can be more troublesome than expected: their monster spells typically include stun, haste self, cure self, and psi bolt. They will often throw their knife (and any other projectiles they comes across) upon spotting you. Though their melee attacks are not particularly strong, they can drain levels and still cause significant damage using their long sword; their spellcasting can also potentially prolong a fight, and may be even more trouble when fighting multiple foes. Alert players, especially ones that can stay out of melee range, can handle them fairly quickly and without too much trouble.
Once a barrow wight is destroyed, the long sword may be of interest to lawful characters looking to dip for Excalibur. Barrow wights are also a source of knives for characters that seek to utilize them as projectiles, e.g. Healers and Rogues.
History
The barrow wight first appears in NetHack 3.0.0.
Origin
A "barrow" is a burial mound, such as the ones used in Neolithic times, while the word "wight" generally refers to a form of undead; the latter word describes a living human being in its original Old English usage, and has since come to be used within fantasy works such as A Song of Ice and Fire and Vampire: The Masquerade to describe immortal ghost-like beings. The earliest example of the modern wight is in William Morris's 1869 translation of the Grettis saga, a work of Icelandic family prose; here, haugbui (referring to undead monsters Glámr and Kárr) is translated as "barrow-wight".
NetHack derives barrow wights from J. R. R. Tolkien's world of Middle-earth, which in turn bases them on Nordic folklores such as the ones translated by Morris, and they are typically depicted as wraith-like evil spirits; in The Lord of the Rings, the hobbit Frodo and his company narrowly escape a barrow-wight with the aid of Tom Bombadil, who then arms the group using "barrow-blades" and ancient swords from the wight's treasure-hoard (the basis for the barrow wight's NetHack starting inventory).
Variants
SLASH'EM
In SLASH'EM, barrow wights are a decent monster form for early Dopplegangers due to their resistances and level-draining attack, though their carry cap is somewhat low. This also applies to SlashTHEM and Hack'EM.
UnNetHack
In UnNetHack, barrow wights are slightly more common.
If a hero is killed by a Nazgul, they will rise as a barrow wight instead of a ghost if a bones file is created.
dNetHack
In dNetHack, notdNetHack, and notnotdNetHack, a barrow wight's long sword has a 1⁄5 chance of being made of silver and a 1⁄5 chance of being made of gold - it also has an independent 1⁄20 chance of generating with the "lesser holy" object property.
Barrow wights are a tempting source of long swords for lawful characters to dip and turn into Excalibur, since creating Excalibur this way retains any object properties and object materials: silver weapons naturally deal +1d20 silver damage, while gold weapons raise a blessed weapon's holy bonus damage to +1d20 and raise a cursed weapon's unholy bonus damage to +4d9; the lesser holy property adds +1d8 holy damage for blessed weapons with the property that is separate from the normal +1d4 damage bonus.
Encyclopedia entry
When he came to himself again, for a moment he could recall
nothing except a sense of dread. Then suddenly he knew that
he was imprisoned, caught hopelessly; he was in a barrow. A
Barrow-wight had taken him, and he was probably already under
the dreadful spells of the Barrow-wights about which whispered
tales spoke. He dared not move, but lay as he found himself:
flat on his back upon a cold stone with his hands on his
breast.
