The One Ring (EvilHack)
| = The One Ring (No tile) | |
|---|---|
| Base item | lustrous ring |
| Affiliation | |
| When carried | (none) |
| When worn | |
| When invoked | none |
| Base price | 7500 zm |
| Weight | 3 |
| Material | gold |
- For the defunct artifact in SLASH'EM and SlashTHEM, see The One Ring (SLASH'EM).
The One Ring is an artifact that appears in EvilHack. It is unaligned, and its base item is a lustrous ring.
Generation
The One Ring is not randomly generated, cannot be wished for and will revert to its base item if left in a bones file.
The One Ring is always generated within Goblin Town, where the cursed artifact is placed at a random spot in Gollum's Cave during level creation.
Description
While worn, The One Ring grants invisibility, stealth, automatic searching, and warning of wraith-class monsters. Peaceful or tame wraith monsters that see the hero wearing the One Ring will become hostile: in practice, this will mostly only apply to the Nazgul, which is the only monster of the class that can see invisible monsters.
Monsters will put on the ring if they do not possess a gaze attack and they are not currently invisible or wearing a mummy wrapping, and Gollum in particular will seek out the artifact on his level and try to steal it with his melee attacks if the hero is carrying it.
Strategy
The One Ring is a decent utility artifact for the early stages of the game, granting a somewhat useful combat advantage and means of avoiding monsters while warning of annoying barrow wights that can utilize monster spells such as fire bolt and drain levels with their melee weapon attacks. A hero planning to utilize the One Ring that is not a weldproof Infidel should be sure to uncurse it first.
Be careful around leprechauns while carrying The One Ring: as a golden item, a leprechaun that manages to land a gold-stealing attack on the hero can make off with the artifact, and while invisibility decreases the odds of the leprechaun hitting its mark, this is not a reliable deterrent.
Enterprising Nazgul-hunters can use the worn One Ring to keep track of any that generate on a level and avoid being caught off guard by their screams and/or sleep-inducing breath weapons. Conversely, vampiric and draugr heroes will want to avoid wearing the One Ring around Nazgul, since they can generate as peaceful towards their fellow undead.
Origin
The One Ring, also called the Ruling Ring or Isildur's Bane, is a central plot element in the wikipedia:Middle-Earth stories of J.R.R. Tolkien. It first appeared in the 1937 story The Hobbit as a magic ring that grants the wearer invisibility: Tolkien changed it into a malevolent Ring of Power and rewrote parts of The Hobbit to fit in with the expanded narrative. The 1954 story The Lord of the Rings describes the hobbit Frodo Baggins's quest to destroy the Ring and save Middle-earth.
The One Ring has more than a few known sources of inspiration, with scholars of Tolkien noting that he drew on the same core mythology as the ring-based plot of Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen; another source is Tolkien's analysis of the temple of the obscure pagan god Nodens in Gloucestershire, England, where one of the Latin inscriptions he studied contained a curse on the thief of a ring. Other parallels have been drawn with the story of the Ring of Gyges in Plato's Republic, which is also a ring that grants invisibility: though there is no suggestion that Tolkien borrowed from the story, both he and Plato address the same central theme of how the possibility of ultimate power can corrupt people, with Tolkien's work delving further into the questions of what type of moral groundings would be required for a person to resist such temptations.
The Ring was first introduced to Tolkien's works as a plot device rather than a central narrative theme. As told in The Hobbit, Bilbo found the Ring while lost in the tunnels near Gollum's lair; in the first edition, Gollum offers to surrender the Ring to Bilbo as a reward for winning the Riddle Game. When Tolkien was later writing The Lord of the Rings, he realized that the Ring's grip on Gollum would never permit him to give it up willingly, and therefore revised The Hobbit: in the second edition, after losing the Riddle Game to Bilbo, Gollum went to get his "Precious" to help him kill and eat Bilbo, but found the Ring missing. From Bilbo's last question—"What have I got in my pocket?"—Gollum guessed correctly that Bilbo had found the Ring.
Gollum sought Bilbo through the caves, not realizing that Bilbo had discovered the Ring's power of invisibility and was following him to the cave's mouth. Bilbo escaped Gollum and the goblins by remaining invisible, but he chose not to tell Gandalf and the dwarves that the Ring had made him invisible. Instead, he told them a story that followed the first edition: that Gollum had given him the Ring and shown him the way out. Gandalf was immediately suspicious of the Ring, and later forced the real story from Bilbo before persuading him to give up the ring—Bilbo obliged, becoming the first Ring-bearer to ever surrender one willingly. Meanwhile, Gollum eventually left the Misty Mountains to track down the Ring and was drawn to Mordor, where he was captured and partly set in motion the events that would lead to both his and the Ring's destruction.
Within the history of Middle-Earth itself, The One Ring was forged by the Dark Lord Sauron during the Second Age to gain dominion over the free peoples of Middle-earth. In his deceptive disguise as Annatar, or "Lord of Gifts", he aided the Elven smiths of Eregion and their leader Celebrimbor in the making of the Rings of Power. He then secretly and deceitfully forged the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, intending it to be the most powerful of all Rings and able to rule and control those who wore the others. Since the other Rings were powerful on their own, Sauron was obliged to place much of his own power into the One to achieve his purpose—this in turn left him dependent on it to survive, such that when it was eventually destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom (the only way it could be destroyed), Sauron loses his power and physical form and is reduced to a permanent shadow.
Encyclopedia entry
It began with the forging of the Great Rings. Three were given to the Elves, immortal, wisest, and fairest of all beings. Seven to the Dwarf lords, great miners and craftsmen of the mountain halls. And Nine. Nine Rings were gifted to the race of Men, who above all else, desire power. For within these Rings was bound the strength and will to govern each race. But they were all of them deceived, for another Ring was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged, in secret, a Master Ring to control all others. And into this Ring, he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One Ring to rule them all.
