Guardian naga hatchling

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A guardian naga hatchling, N, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. It is a juvenile naga that is identical to the golden naga hatchling.

A guardian naga hatchling has a single bite attack and possesses poison resistance.

Eating a guardian naga hatchling corpse or tin has a 15 chance of conveying poison resistance.

Generation

Randomly generated guardian naga hatchlings may generate as peaceful towards neutral characters. A guardian naga hatchling can grow up into a guardian naga, and can also hatch from guardian naga eggs.

Guardian naga hatchlings are only randomly generated within levels and branches that are biased towards monsters of a particular alignment.

Strategy

Guardian naga hatchlings are somewhat slower than a player character, and are generally non-threatening. Their corpses can be a valuable early source of poison resistance if you can keep a meat-eating pet from eating the corpse before you.

History

The guardian naga hatchling first appears in NetHack 3.0.0.

Origin

The Nāga (feminine "Nagi") are a supernatural race of half-human half-serpent beings that can occasionally take human form, and hold cultural significance in the folkloric traditions of many South Asian and Southeast Asian cultures over the past two millennia. Nagas also appear in Dungeons & Dragons.

Their most common depiction is that of a snake with a human head, which the default tileset of NetHack draws from—other iconographic depictions portray them as human from the waist up and snake from the waist down, wholly human with snakes on the heads and necks, or even as common serpents. Various south and southeastern Asian cultures also portray Nāgas as having multiple usually-serpentine heads.

Variants

dNetHack

In dNetHack, guardian naga hatchlings have a 25 chance of generating with appropriately-sized snakeleg archaic plate mail and an archaic helm.

Encyclopedia entry

The naga is a mystical creature with the body of a snake and the head of a man or woman. They will fiercely protect the territory they consider their own. Some nagas can be forced to serve as guardians by a spellcaster of great power.