Drain life
Drain life or level drain refers to one of the following:
Attacks
- the spellbook of drain life and the spell it confers
- the drain life attack of the artifacts Stormbringer and the Staff of Aesculapius and in SLASH'EM the additional artifact Thiefbane
- the drain life monster attack
- one possible effect of the seduction attack of an incubus or succubus
- a possible negative effect of prayer
- the SLASH'EM item, a wand of draining
Resistance
- drain resistance, which protects against drain life attacks.
Losing a level
- the player losing levels
Life draining / level draining in NetHack is relatively complex. The spellbook/wand, the artifact weapons, and monsters all provide apparently-similar life draining, and every source has the same effect if used on the player, but each does a different amount of damage to monsters. In addition both NetHack itself and the NetHack community use inconsistent naming, making any combination of the words "level"/"life" and "drain" interchangeable.
In addition, the level drain monster attack is affected by magic cancellation.
If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended page.
This page may need to be updated for the current version of NetHack.
It may contain text specific to NetHack 3.4.3. Information on this page may be out of date.
Editors: After reviewing this page and making necessary edits, please change the {{nethack-343}} tag to the current version's tag or {{noversion}} as appropriate.