Kathryn the Ice Queen
Kathryn the Ice Queen, @, is the boss of the Ice Queen's Realm in EvilHack. She is a powerful human sorceress under an evil curse - upon her defeat, the curse is lifted and she becomes the much more powerful and peaceful Kathryn the Enchantress, @. She is unaligned in her Ice Queen form and lawful in her Enchantress form, and is completely unkillable: she cannot be tamed, genocided, or polymorphed into in either form.
Descriptions
| @ Kathryn the Ice Queen (No tile) | |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 36 |
| Attacks |
Weapon 3d4, Touch 8d8 cold, Spell-casting 3d8 clerical, Spell-casting 3d8 mage |
| Base level | 32 |
| Base experience | 1561 |
| Speed | 15 |
| Base AC | 0 |
| Base MR | 80 |
| Alignment | A_NONE |
| Frequency (by normal means) | Unique |
| Genocidable | No |
| Weight | 1450 |
| Nutritional value | 400 |
| Size | Medium |
| Resistances | petrification, sleep, cold |
| Resistances conveyed | None |
|
Kathryn the Ice Queen:
| |
| Reference | EvilHack 0.8.3 - monst.c, line 3302 |
Kathryn the Ice Queen is strong and possesses enhanced regeneration, flight, teleport control, infravision, and the ability to see invisible. She will also seek out magical items and other objects to pick up.
Kathryn the Ice Queen has a weapon attack, a powerful cold touch attack, and casts one clerical and one mage monster spell during each of her turns. She is capable of casting spells without cooldown, and will never cast the fire bolt, fire pillar or summon insects spells, instead using ice bolt, lightning and vulnerability respectively. Kathryn is more likely to weaken a character's cold resistance with the vulnerability spell; her geyser spell deals cold damage and can destroy potions in the open inventory; and she will also use the summon minion spell to create hostile snow golems.
Kathryn possesses stoning resistance, sleep resistance and cold resistance, and is vulnerable to fire.
Generation
Kathryn the Ice Queen is always found inside her castle on the third and final floor of the branch, and resides within the left inner chambers. She will always generate hostile, and is guarded by Bourbon and Ozzy; they generate peaceful, but will become hostile and protect her once she is attacked.
Kathryn the Ice Queen is always generated with an enchanted, erosion-proofed athame of frost, a pair of gloves, a pair of high boots, an amulet of reflection, a ring of slow digestion, and one of either a cloak of magic resistance or a cloak of displacement. If generated on her birthday, she will generate with roughly 4 times her usual HP and a potion of full healing.
Strategy
In addition to ascension-level gear, the Ice Queen has the full range of monster spells to cast at her disposal, with her spellcasting geared towards a cold-based offense; this includes using the vulnerability spell to weaken resistance to cold in particular. In short, cold resistance is especially important here (as well as for the branch overall), along with acid resistance to blunt the worst damage from her acid blast spells; weakened cold resistance will cause the characters HP to slowly deplete, so unless they are capable of passively out-healing the frost damage, it is best to defeat her quickly. Defeating Kathryn will transform her into her Enchantress form, also pacifying Bourbon and Ozzy if they are still hostile.
One of the quickest means of defeating Kathryn the Ice Queen is to use poisoned weapons and poison-damaging spells, since she lacks poison resistance. Unless a means to pacify her afterward is available (discussed in the other tab), do not use a scroll of stinking cloud for this purpose: this will anger her if the poison clouds defeat her and return her to Enchantress form well before they dissipate. Her weakness to fire can also be exploited by using several blessed fire scrolls or a Skilled-level fireball spell.
| @ Kathryn the Enchantress (No tile) | |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 104 |
| Attacks |
Weapon 10d10, Spell-casting 10d10 (clerical), Spell-casting 10d10 |
| Base level | 47 |
| Base experience | 2856 |
| Speed | 9 |
| Base AC | 0 |
| Base MR | 100 |
| Alignment | 15 (lawful) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | Unique |
| Genocidable | No |
| Weight | 1450 |
| Nutritional value | 400 |
| Size | Medium |
| Resistances | petrification, sleep, cold, fire, electricity, poison, acid, disintegration, psychic |
| Resistances conveyed | None |
|
Kathryn the Enchantress:
| |
| Reference | EvilHack 0.8.3 - monst.c, line 3315 |
Kathryn the Enchantress has the same qualities as she does in her previous form, and additionally possesses fire resistance, poison resistance, acid resistance, shock resistance, disintegration resistance, and psychic resistance.
Kathryn the Enchantress has a powerful weapon attack, and casts a powerful clerical monster spell and a powerful mage monster spell during each of her turns.
Generation
Kathryn the Enchantress always appears after her Ice Queen form is defeated, and will be generated peaceful unless the character is an Infidel. She retains whatever inventory she still possesses from her previous form.
Strategy
In this form, Kathryn has almost every resistance available in the game, alongside attacks and spells that can easily cleave through most of an ascension-worthy character's full healing-and-nurse dance-bolstered HP. As such, she is orders of magnitude more difficult than any other monster in the game, and is very difficult to defeat in normal play, immediately resurrecting at full HP if defeated: there is no benefit to attacking her, outside of bragging rights. If Kathryn the Enchantress is angered accidentally, she can be pacified by throwing a candy bar at her.
Due to her generation method she is not typically a threat, and setting her off is easily avoidable with careful play. However, she does not like Infidels in the slightest: if an Infidel defeats her in Ice Queen form, she will become the Enchantress as normal, but this incurs a -2 alignment penalty and she will remain hostile; she will then stand in place for 100 turns, after which she will un-paralyze herself and pursue the character if they have not left in that time frame. This should give an Infidel just enough time to loot the crystal chests, free and saddle the trapped pegasus, retrieve any eggs under it, and beeline for the stairs before they risk meeting death at her hands.
Origin
Kathryn is the daughter of EvilHack's developer, and her companions Bourbon and Ozzy, as well as her former companion Koa, are based on the family's German Shepherd dogs. The Ice Queen is loosely based off of Elsa from the movie Frozen - Kathryn was eight years old when work began on the Ice Queen branch, and had watched the movie with her father so many times that the number is too large to be represented here; Elsa was her favorite movie character at the time. As implied by the encyclopedia entry, she is also somewhat based on the White Witch, the main antagonist of the Chronicles of Narnia books by C. S. Lewis.
Encyclopedia Entry
"The White Witch? Who is she?"
"Why, it is she that has got all Narnia under her thumb.
It's she that makes it always winter. Always winter and
never Christmas; think of that!"
"How awful!" said Lucy.
Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches
of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees
shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked,
instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the
black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms.
Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared
away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on
to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky
between the tree tops.
[ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
by C.S. Lewis ]
