Difference between revisions of "Riders"
(major rewrite: clear separation of facts and comments/strategy, short introduction with all else in sections) |
m (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse moved to Riders: The four horsemen are the mythical version; NetHack more commonly (and concisely) calls them Riders.) |
(No difference)
| |
Revision as of 23:37, 4 August 2006
Three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Death, Famine and Pestilence (all &) - appear in NetHack as monsters on the Astral Plane. They are collectively known as The Riders, even though they are not riding anything.
Contents
Common traits
All riders come back to life after being killed: after 12 turns, a rider corpse has a 1/3 chance of revival on each turn[1]. Eating their corpses doesn't get rid of them either; it gets rid of you quite effectively, though. This is a YASD that usually occurs only once.
Teleportation has a special effect on riders: if they are zapped with a wand of teleportation, they are teleported to a square adjacent to you. This is a very bad idea.
The only way to permanently banish them is to kill them, then fill every square on the level with monsters so that when they revive, there is nowhere for them to go. You know a Rider has disappeared when you get the message "You feel less hassled"[2].
Death
Death has a HP-draining melee attack, and uses the touch of death. Zapping a wand of death (or casting the finger of death) at it heals it.
Famine
Famine has a hunger-inducing melee attack.
Pestilence
Pestilence has a Disease-spreading melee attack.
War
You are War.
In the game, only Death, Famine and Pestilence are named. If you #chat to Death, you are told, "Who do you think you are, War?", though the punctuation is ambiguous. However, a comment in the source[3] is definitely not ambiguous:
/* Riders -- the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ("War" == player)
*/
Strategy
Of the three riders, Pestilence is widely considered to be the most dangerous. Hence a common Astral Plane strategy is to identify which altar is guarded by Pestilence using telepathy, and then explore that altar last.
Acid blobs are a good candidate for filling up the Astral Plane in order to dismiss the Riders, as they can be create en masse with a scroll of create monster.
Mythology
The horsemen are characters in Revelation, the last book of the Bible.
- They were to have met in the garden of the Chapelle Expiatoire at five o'clock in the afternoon, but Julio Desnoyers with the impatience of a lover who hopes to advance the moment of meeting by presenting himself before the appointed time, arrived a half hour earlier.
So opens The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibanez, as translated from Spanish to English by Charlotte Brewster Jordan. The book is in the public domain; you can read it at Google Books. Since the mention of the four horsemen in the Bible, they have appeared in many other places: in the book quoted above, in the books' various motion film versions, and also in roguelike games including ToME and NetHack.
Related patches
GreyKnight has written a rudimentary patch which occasionally replaces the Riders with some or all of the Seven Deadly Sins.
