Kraken
; kraken 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 22 |
| Attacks |
Claw 2d4, Claw 2d4, Hug 2d6 drowning, bite 5d4 |
| Base level | 20 |
| Base experience | 1574 |
| Speed | 3 |
| Base AC | 6 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | -3 (chaotic) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 0 (Not randomly generated) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 1800 |
| Nutritional value | 1000 |
| Size | Huge |
| Resistances | None |
| Resistances conveyed | None |
|
A kraken:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line2639 |
A kraken, ;, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. It is a strong animal that can be seen via infravision, and has the highest difficulty of the sea monsters.
A kraken possesses two claw attacks, a holding attack that can cause instadeath by drowning, and a powerful bite.
Contents
Generation
Kraken are not randomly generated, and are not a valid monster form for polymorph. Normally-created kraken are always hostile.
The Tourist quest generates two krakens within the river of the home floor at level creation. The fourth variant of Medusa's Island always generates a kraken within the small body of water on the main island at level creation.
The moat of each Fake Wizard's Tower will have a kraken generated within at level creation; the real Wizard's Tower generates two krakens within the moat surrounding the first floor's central tower on level creation, as well as four krakens within the moat surrounding the Wizard of Yendor's dwelling on the top floor.
Strategy
Like the giant eel and electric eel, krakens must be approached with caution and handled appropriately on pain of one potentially (and literally) sinking your run. Also like eels, krakens have no MR score and can be handled using wands, spells and scaring tools; fortunately, unlike both eels, krakens are very slow and possess subpar AC. A few charges from a wand of cold can be used to strand one quite easily and hack it apart at your leisure, and a wand of sleep can usually render it helpless - putting a kraken to sleep or scaring it will also cause it to let you go if it has gotten a hold of you.
Krakens and genocide
Krakens are usually a target for a scroll of genocide due to being capable of drowning players. Many of these genocides are often saved for the ascension run: a blessed scroll read upon entering the Plane of Water is used to wipe out all kraken and other sea monsters that are generated there, minimizing the risk of a player drowning and leaving relatively-trivial water elementals for them to contend with while they seek out the magic portal to the Astral Plane.
Kraken are also an occasional target of reverse genocide for their superb experience point value: they posses the sixth-highest base experience among monsters, placing them above even Orcus and the Riders, though they are worth 1000 less experience if you have magical breathing or are polymorphed into an amphibious monster. Krakens that are stranded outside of water immediately become scared and will try to flee - while not as actively dangerous, they may still lash out if they are cornered or else you are occupied (e.g. with digging using a pick-axe). This also makes farming them somewhat risky: kraken corpses will not revive via undead turning while on land, and scared kraken can still badly damage careless players.
If reading a genocide scroll of unknown beatitude, the kraken may be a viable target - a scroll that turns out to be cursed will give you tons of experience if you can defeat the generated monsters, while a non-cursed scroll wipes out a major late-game nuisance and lowers your risk of drowning.
History
The kraken first appears in NetHack 3.0.0.
Origin
The kraken (sometimes written as Kraken, pluralized as either "krakens" or kraken") is a legendary sea monster of enormous size that is said to appear in the seas between Norway and Iceland. The legend may have originated from sightings of giant squid, which may grow to 12–15 meters (40–50 feet) in length.
A product of sailors' superstitions and mythos, the first written description of the kraken in the modern era occurred in a 1700 Francesco Negri travelogue; a 1734 account from Dano-Norwegian missionary and explorer Hans Egede described the kraken in further detail and equated it with a medieval creature known as the hafgufa. Despite this, the first description of the creature is usually credited to the Norwegian bishop Pontoppidan, who was the first to describe the kraken in 1753 as an octopus of tremendous size and wrote that it had a reputation for pulling down ships.
The kraken is the subject of a popular 1830 sonnet written by Alfred Tennyson. In 1866, Victor Hugo introduced the concept of a great man-killing octopus to French fictional literature (or at least popularized it) with the pieuvre octopus depicted in Toilers of the Sea, which he identified with the kraken of legend. This in turn influenced Jules Verne's depiction of the kraken in 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which also drew on the real-life encounter a French ship had with what was likely a giant squid; Verne's depiction did not distinguish between squid and octopus.
The legend of the Kraken is the subject and source of countless stories and allusions to the present day, with numerous appearances in film, literature, television, and other popular culture topics. Among these appearances is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy - the encyclopedia entry for the kraken is an excerpt from The Fellowship of the Ring, which describes a kraken-like creature known as the Watcher in the Water.
The kraken of NetHack is likely based off the giant squid's entry in the 1st Edition Monster Manual of Dungeons & Dragons, due to sharing similar hit dice and the tendency to attack passing ships that is associated with mythical kraken; despite this, the default tileset depicts it as a serpentine sea creature, more similar to legendary monsters such as Leviathan.
Variants
UnNetHack
In UnNetHack, the Watcher in the Water is a unique monster derived directly from Tolkien's Middle-Earth setting as described above, and it appears as the primary challenge of the Ruins of Moria dungeon branch, carrying a magic lamp. Additionally, one of the random vaults is a "watcher in the water" room that may contain a kraken within its pools.
UnNetHack reassigns the vanilla encyclopedia entry associated with the kraken to the Watcher in the Water, and uses the Tennyson sonnet as the new encyclopedia entry for the kraken.
dNetHack
In dNetHack, The Wings of Garuda is a ward that can repel krakens.
The Watcher in the Water serves as the "mid-boss" of the Dwarf Noble quest, where it is a multi-segmented monster that impedes the player on the quest's locate level; the quest's levels are also based on the Ruins of Moria from UnNetHack.
SpliceHack
In SpliceHack-Rewrite, two krakens are generated on the Plane of Ice at level creation. A kraken can grow up into a thing from below.
SlashTHEM
In SlashTHEM, the Pirate quest generates krakens on each of its watery levels.
Encyclopedia entry
Out from the water a long sinous tentacle
had crawled; it was pale-green and luminous
and wet. Its fingered end had a hold of Frodo's
foot, and was dragging him into the water.
Sam on his knees was now slashing at it with
a knife. The arm let go of Frodo, and Sam
pulled him away, crying out for help.
Twenty other arms came rippling out. The
dark water boiled, and there was a hideous stench.
UnNetHack
"Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die."
