Deep one (SLASH'EM)

h deep one
Difficulty	9
Attacks	Claw 1d6 physical, Claw 1d6 physical, Bite 2d4 physical

h deep one
Difficulty	9
Attacks	Claw 1d6 physical, Claw 1d6 physical, Bite 2d4 physical
Base level	7
Base experience	92
Speed	9
Base AC	5
Base MR	10
Alignment	−5 (chaotic)
Frequency (by normal means)	2 (Quite rare)
Genocidable	Yes
Weight	1500
Nutritional value	400
Size	Medium
Resistances	cold resistance, poison resistance
Resistances conveyed	poison resistance (~47%)
A deep one: can swim. can survive underwater. has a head, a couple of arms, and a torso. is poisonous to eat. is omnivorous. is normally generated hostile. can follow you to other levels. likes gold. likes gems. can pick up weapons and food. can pick up magical items. has infravision. can be seen through infravision. normally appears in large groups. may turn against you when tame.
Reference	SLASH'EM 0.0.7E7F2/monst.c#line807

For the monster in dNetHack and its derivatives, see deep one (dNetHack).

A deep one, h, is a type of monster that appears in the Lethe patch, SLASH'EM, SlashTHEM and Hack'EM. The deep one, h, also appears in SpliceHack.

Deep ones are a type of medium-sized amphibious humanoid that is capable of swimming, has infravision, can be seen via infravision, will seek out gold, gems, magical items, and other objects to pick up, and can follow a hero to other levels if they are adjacent. Tame deep ones may turn traitor.

Deep ones have two claw attack and a bite attack, and possess poison resistance and cold resistance.

A deep one corpse is poisonous to eat. In SLASH'EM and SlashTHEM, eating a deep one corpse or tin has a ⁷⁄₁₅ chance (~47%) of granting poison resistance, while in SpliceHack and Hack'EM doing so grants ¹⁄₆ (+16%) additional poison resistance.

Generation

Randomly-generated deep ones are always created hostile, and can appear in large groups. A deep one can grow up into a deeper one, though in SLASH'EM and SlashTHEM the change in body size will not break any currently worn suit of armor.

Deep ones can appear among the random h that are part of the first quest monster class for Cavepeople and make up ²⁴⁄₁₇₅ of monsters that are randomly generated on the Caveman quest.

Strategy

While they have only ³⁄₄ the speed of an unhasted hero, deep ones hit as hard as soldier ants and appear in large groups, making them deadly if they catch the hero in an open area such as the Oracle level. Players are advised to stick to corridors when fighting them, and encounters on earlier floors may require several rounds of fight-retreat upstairs-heal for a hero to take out the entire group. As deep ones' damage is spread out over three attacks, good AC is a very effective defense against them, and an AC of -10 or so should render them fairly nonthreatening.

Deep ones often leave corpses that can be useful as sacrifice fodder if they generate on a level with an altar, though they are quite heavy: virtually no heroes will be able to carry them upstairs to other floors, and some of the weaker roles may not be able to move them at all. Getting the most sacrifice value out of a deep one horde all but requires killing them on or near the altar, which as mentioned above is perilous unless the hero has good AC and damage output.

Origin

The Deep Ones are creatures in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. The beings first appeared in Lovecraft's 1931 novella The Shadow over Innsmouth, but were already hinted at in the 1917 short story "Dagon". The Deep Ones are a race of intelligent ocean-dwelling creatures, approximately human-shaped but with a fishy appearance, and the males would regularly mate with human women against their will, creating societies of hybrids along the coast.

Despite being primarily marine creatures, Deep Ones can survive on land for extended periods of time and possess biological immortality, never dying except by accident or violence. The Deep One portrayed in Dagon is of a vastly larger size than the roughly human-scaled beings seen in Innsmouth, and the wider Cthulhu Mythos implies that Deep Ones continuously grow throughout their lives, hence their size changing when they grow up in SLASH'EM and other variants.

Encyclopedia entry

For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei,
and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead.
Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death
into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones
could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the
forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present
they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would
rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved.

[ The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by H.P. Lovecraft ]