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 died in the Dungeons of Doom on level 16, 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)
February 22nd, 2014: letsdieagain, neutral female droven Valkyrie, died in the Dungeons of Doom on level 17, killed by an invisible quaton, while helpless
Yeah, I know what everyone is probably thinking, "first ascension role of any player"... well, suffice it to say that I didn't ascend, as evidenced by the fact that I died on dungeon level 17. In fact I didn't ascend ever and probably won't do it soon; my best game yet was one where I made it to the Gehennom and died there. Anyway, I quickly lost my starting pet and went down the Gnomish Mines alone, but a polytrap created a hell hound that was breathing fire, taking off huge chunks of my health. So I zapped my wand of "make monsters flee", ran back to the up stairs and didn't go back for a long while.
Now I wanted to do Sokoban instead. On the way I made the mistake to randomly eat a monster corpse while hallucinating, getting an "Ulch - that meat was tainted, cannibal! You feel deathly sick." message. It probably was an elven zombie or something like that, and I was sure prayer wouldn't work. But there was a potion of extra healing in my inventory, which I used to cure myself. When I had reached Sokoban, I read a scroll of punishment. No, really. Since I always read-identify unknown scrolls, it's quite likely that I end up reading some "bad" scrolls sooner or later, and this one randomly decided to give me an iron ball with a weight of 1600 (10% chance of that happening). It even was a +1 iron ball too, but since the Valkyrie doesn't have the flail skill (and besides, only a Convict can train it by swinging iron balls or chains anyway) I was swinging a silver saber instead.
The ball annoyingly hit me a few times when using stairs. But I made it to the treasure zoo which was filled with dragons and other nasty monsters, which were cleared by throwing lots of daggers. Got a bag of holding and started putting things inside. Now I went back to the level on which I had tamed a large cat, trying to find the down stairs on the Sokoban branch level, and that annoying level took forever to explore! After having explored about half the map, the cat stupidly attacked a jelly in melee and punched out its own lights, so I was alone again.
The down stairs was literally in the last corner of the level that I explored. However, since I had squeezed myself in Sokoban several times without even intending to do so (maybe I should change it into a prompt asking the player: "You can squeeze yourself into a tiny opening. Do it? [yn] (n)") Well, actually I just did that now while writing this YASD story, and it's working, yeah! No more random luck decreases for trying to walk on a boulder just because there happens to be a monster behind it and the character stupidly decides to squeeze! But for this valkyrie I knew that my luck was very bad now, so I decided to go back to the mines for a luckstone. A rust monster ate away the annoying iron ball but also vaporized my helm and boots, which was very annoying. Thankfully I would get a genocide later and use it to wipe out all rust monsters.
Well there was one coaligned unicorn on a lit level, and I had a cloak of invisibility too (which would later be replaced by a cloak of displacement), but all of my gems were junk. Argh. Anyway, the polytrap outta-depth abomination had changed back to a hobbit so I could proceed, taking off all my armor and then deliberately setting off the trap, which caused me to "feel like a new drow" anyway. Made it to Minetown where some interesting stuff happened. First off, I tamed a random horse and allowed it to kill many gnomes and other enemies to make it level up, intending to use it to rob some shops. The horse actually managed to remove some of those obnoxious watchmen so I could grab their stuff and sell it, but thanks to a cursed item the horse just would not step into the shop. There was a watchman corpse lying on top of the stack so I couldn't kick it away either.
When I finally made up my mind and tried to grab that offending item, my horse got taken out by some random gnome or something. Argh. So I couldn't rob the shop at all now. But then, something amazing happened. While I was exploring the level, carting stuff to the cross-aligned altar for curse-testing and then selling useless items to the general store, a random hobbit dropped a blue dragon scale mail on death. Yeah, that's possible in my variant, but the chance of that happening is really low. I quickly took it to the altar to determine it's an uncursed +0 BDSM (I just love that acronym :-), so I could ditch that splint mail I had been wearing for ages. My AC was well into negative values now. But it gets even better. It turned out that among the Sokoban rings there were the following ones:
Descending down the mines was relatively uneventful. Finally reached Mines End, and it was that nasty catacombs version with lots of vampires and undead, argh. Got level-drained by a vampire once but then my silver saber seared its flesh so I got my experience level back, then I fought more zombies and mummies than ever before and found a gray stone that passed the kick test. So I picked it up and continued exploring, but a trap door sent me to that incredibly difficult "digging" level where I had recently lost a promising samurai to Ruggo and his attack wand. Well, not this time! Using daggers and my silver saber, I defeated all of them. Ruggo had a total piece of crap wand this time anyway.
Going back to Minetown now, where I used the general store's services to identify my gray stones. They were a whetstone and two luckstones, all of them uncursed. Since I don't know what a whetstone is good for anyway, I put it and one of the luckstones into my bag of holding and went back to that unicorn to throw a whole lot of gems at it. Quite some of them weren't junk, so my luck penalty should be gone now. Went back down the main dungeon, encountering zoos and leprechaun halls, and there was also a cockatrice that dropped a corpse. Now usually you cannot do this, but my variant allows the player to do the following:
Yes, my character actually isn't dead! :D However, I lost my intrinsic speed and had to eat a lizard corpse to prevent death, which thankfully proved to be no problem as I just zapped myself with a wand of speed monster and found another lizard soon. Since the valkyrie really is terrible at spellcasting, every point of intelligence and wisdom counts, so my plan was to eat any cockatrice corpse that I came across, as long as I had lizard corpses and wasn't satiated to begin with. (Don't try to eat a basilisk corpse though, as that takes a lot more turns than it takes for the petrification process to finish, leaving the character with no way to survive!) Then I went back to the mall level where I had seen a shop with six wands that I wanted to rob. Well, one of them turned out to be slow monster, but the remaining ones were all unidentified yet, so I engrave-tested them all in the shop and read a scroll of teleport.
Told you about the valkyrie being terrible at casting, remember? I had four watchmen lined up and magic missile didn't even hit ONE! But it gets worse, as that continued to happen until I was out of mana. Well, screw that useless spell, let's get out my daggers and silver saber again. Killed a bunch of bastards and a bunch of kops, then made it back to the stairs. For a long time nothing interesting happened as I was happily killing stuff with my saber and daggers, and also throwing some gems to a cross-aligned unicorn which subsequently got killed for its horn. Actually the kobold level was a bit annoying thanks to a swarm of mobats taking off lots of health of me, forcing me to burn some healing and teleport wand charges, but I was also identifying the enchantment on some of my weapons by using the weapon practice technique. On a side note, is there any other way (apart from identify scrolls) to determine the enchantment level of a weapon? Anyway, check out what I discovered:
YEAH, baby! These were going to rip those monsters a new one, hahaha! So with my offensive power being even greater now, I continued slaying everything that tried to oppose me. However I ran into a zoo with lots of nasties, and I was wearing gloves of fumbling, causing them to wake up. Since I was able to throw up to three daggers in one turn, I accidentally hit a peaceful fire elemental and an acid blob with a stray shot. Now there weren't 5 blessed +8 daggers anymore, but only 4 blessed +8 daggers and one blessed rusty +8 dagger, argh. Anyway, I backtracked to the kobold level and allowed an elven rogue to take off my cursed gloves of fumbling, also slaying more of those annoying mobats, then went back to the mall level in order to rob even more shops.
That stupid shopkeeper who I stole the wands from proved to be annoying. Even though I was wearing a +7 ring of increase accuracy, my attacks and magic missiles kept missing him. And the bastard was hitting me with a rubber hose, taking a third of my HP total in a single round of combat. He would have killed me if I hadn't zapped him with a teleport charge, but this caused him to end up in the general store with the other (peaceful) shopkeeper blocking the way, and he wouldn't move as long as I was invisible. The hostile shopkeeper tried to fire his shotgun at me from inside but didn't manage to hit me, so I was standing in the entrance trying to pelt him with attacks. It's a shame I didn't have a lucern hammer or other polearm but in hindsight I think it wouldn't have hit him anyway. Even my silver saber (which was +1 and at expert skill level) missed him all the time, so an unskilled polearm would stand no chance to hit him, ever.
Eventually I tried to zap a wand of polymorph. It caused the peaceful shopkeeper (Inuvik) to transform into a hostile Inuvik the kobold warrior, who was firing his shotgun at me now (but kept missing anyway), but the other shopkeeper still was a shopkeeper. So I zapped the other shopkeeper again but somehow it just didn't seem to work, even though he didn't "sparkle" or "resist" or anything, what's up with that??? Since I had no way to take them down, I ran away with them following me, but got back to the shop in time to take everything that wasn't nailed down. Then I finally ran back to the down stairs and continued descending down the dungeon for real this time.
I spelunked my way into the deathtrap known as the chaotic quest, where a single cast of light revealed several vampires and liches lurking in the entrance room, so my instant reaction was to sit on the portal and go back again. On the next level I found the neutral quest and beat it, but when I wanted to leave, an invisible nymph spawned that stole some important items from me, and that bitch also had a nasty passive attack causing me to become deathly sick! Argh! My unicorn horn thankfully fixed it, but I had to burn a potion of see invisible and slay her with a hail of daggers since melee was out of the question. Anyway, by eating giant spiders I had finally scored the big hit in resistance roulette, meaning I was poison resistant now.
Everything seemed to be going well until I reached dungeon level 17. There had been a few graveyards on some of the previous levels but luring the wraiths to other levels hadn't made them drop any corpses, so I was still at experience level 11. Anyway, I entered a room when something invisible showed up, and hitting it paralyzed me, allowing the damn thing to hit me with impunity. Obviously an AC of -12 wasn't enough to stop it from killing me, and I first had to go through all of my inventory and killed monsters before I finally saw the gravestone. It said that I had been killed by a quaton, which is a new monster type "borrowed" from dNetHack. Well, now I know those things are dangerous, and will be more careful in future! But then I saw my attributes:
What the hell??? I seriously don't understand why my luck was that negative. How big is the luck penalty for murder as a neutral character? I mean, come on, I had thrown lots of good gems at unicorns! That's just not fair! But it might explain why I was still missing monsters now and then despite my accuracy bonus. Every point of negative luck acts like a -1 accuracy penalty, am I right? Well, damn it. I'll never get that lucky to randomly find a +7 ring and a bunch of +8 daggers ever again, probably. R.I.P. It turned out there had even been an amulet of life saving in my bag but I had been wearing one of magical breathing all the time... --Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 07:36, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
