Zo-Kalar
| Religion in NetHack |
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In dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack, Zo-Kalar is the lawful god of the Madperson pantheon.
Description
Zo-Kalar is a lawful god of holy holiness, and his minions consist of standard Archons.
His crowning gift is The Sickle of Thunderblasts, an artifact sickle that is lawful, intelligent and favors Madpeople. While wielded, The Sickle of Thunderblasts has +1d3 to-hit and deals sanity-based damage against all monsters (ignoring the effects of clear thoughts), with up to three times the damage at 100 sanity. On each hit, it creates a "blast" that deafens, stuns, awakens, and confuses the target monster for a number of turns equal to the hero's sanity divided by 5, and makes noise that wakes up other nearby monsters within a sanity-dependent range (base damage * sanity / 100). In addition, the "blast" also affects monsters adjacent to the target: this moves them up to SAN⁄20 squares (or up to 5 squares) away from the target, deals damage equal to SAN⁄100 (i.e. full base damage at 100 sanity, half base damage at 50 sanity, etc.), and inflicts the same status properties upon them as the target. The Sickle of Thunderblasts always returns when thrown unless the hero is impaired, can be multishot, and can be thrown from the main hand automatically by firing it.
Origin
Zo-Kalar is a deity from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, where he first appears in the 1920 short story The Doom That Came to Sarnath. Zo-Kalar dwells on the mountain of Kadath along with Lobon, Tamash and the other "Great Ones", who are the dream-gods of Earth - he was one of the three chief gods of Sarnath (not to be confused with the historical Sarnath of India), which was founded by humans some ten thousand years ago.
Sarnath was a mighty city that stood by a lake in the remote land of Mnar; not long after its foundation, the people of Sarnath attacked the ancient city of Ib, home to non-human creatures known as the thuum'ha who were hideous but otherwise peaceful. They destroyed the city of Ib, killed all of its inhabitants, and took their idol of Bokrug - a strange god known as the "Great Water Lizard" - as a trophy to be placed in Sarnath's main temple. The next night, the idol mysteriously vanished, and the city's high-priest Taran-Ish was found dead, having scrawled a single word onto the empty altar before expiring: "DOOM".
Over the next thousand years, Sarnath prospered and grew in size, splendor and beauty, and became resplendent with palaces, gardens and temples of immense size; princes and kings alike traveled many miles to marvel at Sarnath's beauty and pay it homage. On the thousandth anniversary of the destruction of Ib, nobles from distant cities were invited to a feast; that night, however, the revelry was disrupted by strange lights over the lake and heavy greenish mists, and the tidal marker was mostly submerged. Soon, many of the visitors were maddened by fear and fled, with it being unclear what happened to those who stayed behind: some of the survivors that were even willing to say what they had seen reported seeing the long-dead thuum'ha peering from the windows of the city's towers, and all that remained of the city otherwise was empty marsh and the idol of Bokrug, which had suddenly reappeared - since then, the city was never re-settled.
