Forum:My YASD stories (Slash'EM Extended)
bluescreenofdeath's YASD stories
Well I just hope this is the right place to post these things, as I really like telling stories. Especially if they're about a YASD I had. These are about my own variant Slash'EM Extended (which is, obviously, based on SLASH'EM), so players of vanilla or other variants won't necessarily know about all the new features in this fork, but it's available for download in the article linked above. :)
I'm going to add a date of death to those characters if I can remember it.
February 19th, 2014: losgehts, lawful male doppelganger Flame Mage, killed by a chillbug
Well, this run wasn't going great. Low strength made it hard to kill anything with that quarterstaff, low mana regeneration prevented me from spamming flame sphere/force bolt. Found a silver mace and used that for a while, then bumped into something in Minetown while blind. Despite using the "move, don't attack" command, it got angry at me. Tried to run back to the stairs when something was blocking the passage; turned out to be a monkey that had stolen a lizard corpse and an egg. After nuking that annoying monkey I managed to reach the stairs without the annoying enemy (it probably was a watchman) catching up to me.
Tried to get to Sokoban instead. Got hit by some annoying hallucination (can't remember what that was, but maybe I accidentally ate some corpse that causes hallucination) on the Oracle level, killed some hallucinogen-distorted whatevers and ate their corpses. "Ulch - that meat was tainted! You feel deathly sick." Tried to pray to Earth. He didn't help me. Tried to polymorph into something that was sickness resistant (gnome zombie). Still not healed. Polymorph again. Back to doppelganger form, but still sick. Polymorph into "doppelganger". Finally got rid of that sickness, whew! That was way too close for comfort. By the way, I was low on health too, so a system shock would have killed me as well.
Okay, found the stairs down... only to find out the level was a maze. Argh. It might take forever to find the Sokoban stairs there. And I didn't find it quickly. Somewhere in there I made the mistake of praying again, causing Earth to make me relearn my lessons and taking a ton and a half of experience points in the process. Damn it. Got down some more dungeon levels and found a shop with over a dozen of spellbooks, and I had a scroll of earth but didn't remember which one it was thanks to a goddamn mind flayer sucking 3 points of intelligence off of me. Anyway, kicked all the spellbooks away from the entrance, then randomly read a scroll (I think it was ELBIB YLOH or something now).
It actually was the earth scroll! Now that the shopkeeper was buried in a shower of boulders, I grabbed and read all the spellbooks while shooing away some large mimics using Elbereth. Thanks to poison damage I was down to 4 STR (and no unicorn horn; the only unicorn that had appeared was a co-aligned one somewhere in the mines) so I didn't stand a chance even with my +4 silver mace. But I got the slow monster, cure sickness, healing and extra healing spells as well as some others. Now I just needed to dig out using my pick-axe and everything would be fine, right?
Wrong. I didn't expect the damn shopkeeper to be able to jump out of the boulders! BAM, everything that I wasn't wearing was gone, and the shopkeeper dropped down the hole with me, happily blasting me with my own wand of fire now. And while I was resistant to fire thanks to being a Flame Mage, that didn't stop him from vaporizing my oilskin cloak, damn it! I tried to cast a fireball in his face but ended up damaging my plasteel armor, and since I was out of mana now, I made a run for it. A pile of killer coins appeared, thankfully blocking the shopkeeper from closing in on me as I ran through a corridor, and when I found the down stairs, I used it.
However, now I was on another maze level with almost no equipment, and there were chillbugs and elven rogues. Thankfully they stole my ring of shock resistance and not the one of regeneration, but the chillbugs were doing more damage than what my healing spell could bring back, so even with the power surge technique I didn't stand a chance. Well, actually I nuked two chillbugs with my fireballs and seriously injured the remaining elf, but my armor was thoroughly burned now. One more hit and it would be vaporized. I tried a dust-Elbereth but the narrow layout of the maze (and probably more monsters lurking behind the visible ones) meant the chillbug continued to wail on me, and as I said already, my healing spell could not save me. The chest with all of my important scrolls and potions was gone too, that shopkeeper bastard had it in his inventory now. When I was down to single-digit HP, all I could do was to whack away at the chillbug in the vain hope of killing it, or rather, hopelessly cast that weak force bolt spell at it that kept missing anyway.
R.I.P. It turned out there had been another chillbug behind that one too, as the "creatures vanquished" screen showed I had killed 2 chillbugs but 4 had been created, and I know they are generated in packs. I could have tried Elbereth but one of the annoying elfs was close by, too, so he would have killed me instead. Argh. Well, that game was borked anyway, maybe I'll have better luck next time.
--Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 11:45, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
