Malakal: Part 2 - King Grognir's Castle
The Incredible Adventures of Malakal the Demonspawn Fire Elementalist of Vehumet
Part Two - King Grognir's Castle
... in which Malakal storms the moat of an orcish fortress.
We rejoin Malakal on DL:4 where he has just left the Temple and pilfered a blowgun off of a goblin.
I love finding blowguns. Combined with poison needles they make a great secondary weapon. Malakal uses the needles to finish off an Ogre that's been chasing him.
Malakal returns to the kobold mini-vault and gives them a nice warm welcome. He's strong enough to kill them now if he uses good tactics.
A great tactic - use conjure flame to prevent the kobolds from bearing down, and spam them with darts and needles.
Malakal kills them all with barely a scratch.
Inside the mini-vault Malakal finds a ring of protection from magic. You can never have enough MR.
Malakal finds a shop. There's not too much useful in here. He grabs the potions of paralysis and leaves the scroll of acquirement for later.
Malakal steps down onto DL:11 into a room with a bunch of bees and Psyche.
Psyche:
She is a unique magess that is generally unremarkable, but who can be quite dangerous if she spawns with a dagger of distortion.
Malakal has no interest in taking on this situation at this time. Back up the stairs he goes.
Fire Elementalist vs Ice Beast. Gee... I wonder who will win this one?
I enjoyed this immensely. It made up for Mr. Hawking having to run the second he saw one of these things.
Back down to DL:11 to take care of Psyche. The wand of fire gets rid of her before she can close, so I don't figure out if that dagger was in fact a dagger of distortion.
Awesome!
I know what this is... it's a monsther castle. They're vaults that show up in some games. They look like a castle filled with one type of monster; at this level of the dungeon they'll be orcs or gnolls, though later in the dungeon you can also get draconion castles (any other monster type?). Sometimes some good loot to be found. I really enjoy clearing them out - the flavour is cool.
That being said, wargs are not easy enemies. Time to get out of there, Malakal will try this later on his own terms.
Malakal spots Erolcha sleeping. He turns around. No need to push it, he can come back later.
Malakal learns sticky Flame.
Heh. Monsters die. Sticky Flame is awesome.
Malakal gains a level and is now level 11. His mutation is a second body mutation. Crap. He's going to be a monstrocity.
Malakal use-IDs a dagger and learns that it's a dagger of distortion. The distortion brand is an interesting one.
When it hits it inflicts one of: "1-7 bonus damage", "3-26 bonus damage", "blink", "teleport", or "banish to the abyss". When you unwield a weapon with this brand you suffer wild translocation effects - up to 43 raw damage, banishment, teleport+confusion, or more glow than your mind can comfortably imagine.
This is an interesting point in the game. I now have two choices. I can:
A) Have Malakal unwield the dagger and hope for the best. Worst case scenario right now would be a trip to the abyss. I've had it happen a couple times and I've never survived. There's always a first, but it's risky.
B) Have Malakal learn to love using a dagger.
Malakal is doing well. I chose B. Malakal is now a DsFE rocking daggers.
On the plus side, the brand has a good chance to either do a lot of damage or get rid of an enemy. Malakal will be sinking enchant weapons into the thing to make it worthwhile.
Malakal finds the entrance to Hive. We haven't seen the Hive yet.
The Hive is a very intersting branch. It's currently up for discussion with the devs what to do with it. It consists of two floors, the bottom floor of which houses the actual hive, a honeycomb style structure filled with bees, including both larvae and a queen, and food. There's a high chance to be surrounded if you actually go into the hive structure, but with rPois it's a fairly easy branch. There's no rune or anything at the end of it.
All that being said, Malakal skips it for now. He has no rPois and bees can pack a wallop when they attack in groups. Malakal is going to stick to his long corridors for now.
Back at the castle, which turns out to be filled with orcs, Malakal gets into a really bad spot with a Cyclops. He has to blink away to be safe.
After making his way inside the castle and killing the intial guards Malakal is sighted by the large contingent of castle dwellers which include an Orc Warlord.
Malakal backs away but only to make sure that any non-castle monsters nearby are dead. He doesn't want to have his retreat blocked by something.
The cyclops was still around, but this time Malakal takes it out. Sticky flame is a fantastic spell.
Instead of returning to the castle, Malakal decides to do some victory dancing. With about 3k experience in his pool he wants to get the blink spell up to a higher success rate. That will really help him survive down the road.
So he sets up in a safe area and spams the spell until the pool runs out.
Malakal gets his translocation skill up to 2. Not amazing, but enough to cast Blink at the great level.
With his new spell in hand, Malakal returns to the castle to finish clearing it out.
He kills the orcs and finds the warlord sitting in a corner. As he pulls back out (spamming sticky flame onto the warlord) he gets the warlord to the bring of death.
The warlord packs far too strong a punch. Preferring survival over dignity, Malakl has to retreat. He wasn't able to kill the warlord.
A little while later though, justice is served. The Orc Warlord dies and the castle is open for Malakal to sack.
And sack he does.
No real good loot though. Oh well. It was a lot of fun.
Before leaving the level Malakal has some business to take care of. He removes the Erolcha threat.
A cool little dungeon feature. The four open squares are all teleport traps. Nothing Malakal can do here yet (and it's just some gold).
We're actually going to leave on this feature. It's getting pretty late as I write this.
Next up Malakal will be hitting the Lair.
