Leprechaun
l leprechaun 
| |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 4 |
| Attacks |
Claw 1d2 steal gold |
| Base level | 5 |
| Base experience | 59 |
| Speed | 15 |
| Base AC | 8 |
| Base MR | 20 |
| Alignment | 0 (neutral) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 4 (Uncommon) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 60 |
| Nutritional value | 30 |
| Size | Tiny |
| Resistances | None |
| Resistances conveyed | Causes teleportitis (50%) |
|
A leprechaun:
| |
| Reference | monst.c#line553 |
A leprechaun, l, is a type of monster that appears in NetHack. The leprechaun is a tiny humanoid that is the only member of the leprechaun monster class: leprechauns are gold lovers that have intrinsic teleportitis, and can be see via infravision. A hostile leprechaun will try to keep their distance from the hero unless they have any gold in their open inventory. If a hero attacks a leprechaun that is not paralyzed, asleep, confused, or blind in melee, the leprechaun has a 1⁄7 chance of moving one square away instead of being hit, causing the hero to "miss wildly and stumble forward" onto that square unless they attacked by force-fighting.[1]
A leprechaun has a weak claw attack that can steal gold from a target.
Eating a leprechaun corpse or tin has a 1⁄2 chance of granting teleportitis, which is the highest of any corpse that gives the property.
The following information pertains to an upcoming version (3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that the information below is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate it.
Per commit 2591a21c, leprechauns that steal a hero's gold with their attack have a chance of burying it in the ground after teleporting if their destination is in a non-shop room out of the hero's sight.Contents
Generation
Randomly generated leprechauns are always hostile. Leprechauns are normally generated asleep.[2]
Leprechaun halls are special rooms filled with sleeping leprechauns at level creation, with each one on top of a pile of gold in a similar manner to a treasure zoo.
A leprechaun is always generated with an amount of gold equal to (LD)d30.[3]
Leprechauns are the first quest monster for the Rogue and make up 96⁄175 of all monsters that are randomly generated on the Rogue quest. Several leprechauns also appear on each floor of the quest at level creation: 9 to 11 leprechauns are generated on creation of the home level, including four that are each stationed near the locations where the down stair and mimics imitating the down stairs can generate; five leprechauns are generated on each of the filler levels; and eighteen are generated on the locate and goal levels.
Strategy
While they are often relatively harmless, leprechauns can use offensive wands against you, and can also generate with defensive items like a wand of digging that can make it difficult for you to recover your gold or the wand in question. You can prevent them from robbing you by using ranged attacks, or else by dropping or stashing your gold, before chasing them down: keep in mind that they also can steal gold from directly under your feet, though they are less likely to teleport if you have more gold in your inventory than there was on your square. They are also much easier to cut down on no-teleport levels.
Amusingly, using conflict in a leprechaun hall will cause them to steal from each other, but it will soon prove annoying as this scatters them across the level.
Credit cloning
Leprechauns can be exploited for credit cloning: Drop all but one of your gold coins in a shop, then lure a leprechaun inside; once it picks up the pile of gold, then let it either steal your last gold piece or teleport out. Once you kill it to retrieve your gold back, you'll still have your credit—since you can only do this once per leprechaun, you should do it with as much gold as possible. While less repeatable than credit cloning with a pet and a sack, this technique has the advantage of requiring neither.
History
The leprechaun appears in Hack for PDP-11, which is based on Jay Fenlason's Hack, and is included in the initial bestiary for Hack 1.0. From these versions to NetHack 3.0.5, leprechuans use the L glyph. Leprechauns in earlier versions have slightly different behavior: they will still attempt to attack heroes that close in, even while trying to also keep their distance.
The message clarifying the leprechaun's ability to make heroes miss and stumble is added in NetHack 3.6.2 via commit bf10a70d.[4]
In NetHack 3.6.1 and earlier, leprechauns are special-cased to have a lower monster difficulty than the algorithm would otherwise produce; without this special treatment, their difficulty would be 6. A comment in makedefs.c indicates their lower difficulty is because "they have many hit dice so they can hit and are hard to kill, but otherwise do little damage"[5]. When difficulty was changed to be an explict property in NetHack 3.6.2, leprechauns' lower difficulty was carried over.
Messages
- You miss wildly and stumble forward.
- A leprechaun dodged one of your attacks.
Origin
The leprechaun (Irish leipreachán or luchorpán) is a diminutive supernatural being in Irish folklore, and is often classified as a type of solitary fairy; leprechaun-like creatures only became prominent in later folklore. They are usually depicted as little coat-and-hat-clad bearded folk with a tendency towards mischief, and later leprechauns are portrayed as shoe-makers who have a hidden pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The association with gold is often carried over to portrayals in media such as NetHack, where they always generate with gold.
Variants
In variants featuring an object materials system, leprechauns are commonly given the additional ability to steal gold items other than money.
NetHack: The Next Generation
In NetHack: The Next Generation, the Key Level is a special level that contains several leprechauns.
SLASH'EM
SLASH'EM introduces the leprechaun wizard, a stronger form of the leprechaun that possesses slightly better AC and the ability to cast mage monster spells. Leprechauns can grow up into leprechaun wizards, and both hit as +1 weapons.
dNetHack
In dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack, leprechauns are fey and take extra damage from iron weapons.
The wards Thjofastafur stave, Elder Sign and the Cerulean sign can repel leprechauns. Carving Thjofastafur into a wooden weapon will cause that weapon to warn of them while wielded.
Leprechauns may appear in the court of a throne room ruled by a gnome king, gnome queen, dwarf king or dwarf queen.
DynaHack
In DynaHack, many leprechauns are generated within the nymph level at its creation, and are heavily favored for random monster generation on that floor.
xNetHack
In xNetHack, leprechauns are capable of stealing gold items as well as gold pieces.
EvilHack
In EvilHack, leprechauns are capable of stealing gold items as well as gold pieces.
Encyclopedia entry
The Irish Leprechaun is the Faeries' shoemaker and is known under various names in different parts of Ireland: Cluricaune in Cork, Lurican in Kerry, Lurikeen in Kildare and Lurigadaun in Tipperary. Although he works for the Faeries, the Leprechaun is not of the same species. He is small, has dark skin and wears strange clothes. His nature has something of the manic-depressive about it: first he is quite happy, whistling merrily as he nails a sole on to a shoe; a few minutes later, he is sullen and morose, drunk on his home-made heather ale. The Leprechaun's two great loves are tobacco and whiskey, and he is a first-rate con-man, impossible to out-fox. No one, no matter how clever, has ever managed to cheat him out of his hidden pot of gold or his magic shilling. At the last minute he always thinks of some way to divert his captor's attention and vanishes in the twinkling of an eye.
by Nancy Arrowsmith & George Moorse ]
