***EARLY GAME*** Let me just start by saying that priests are not the best role out there. I mean, I'm not about to renounce the clergy, but being able to tell the blessed and cursed status of stuff doesn't really make up for the fact that we have little in the way of useful weapons skills. Sure, we can spellcast, but to do that effectively, you want to be a wizard. Sure, we start with holy water, but it's not that hard to obtain most of the time. Really, the only thing that made the trip worthwhile, was doing it chaotic. In a short skirt. There were some deaths to start, of course. Rita of March 6th, 2007, made it to Minetown, only to end up blinded (without telepathy) and hungry and stumbling around. Killed something, felt a gnome corpse and ate it, only to die shortly thereafter of food poisoning. (Must have been a gnome mummy; she left unimaginative bones.) Then the Rita from May 15th, 2007, who started with a spellbook of ID, but suffered an ignomaneous defeat a couple days later, on level 10, at the hands of an energy vortex. Still, third time (that's me!) is the charm. Kinda. I, Rita the (soon to be) High Priestess, descended May 19th. The astute will notice this was before Julie, and even Laurie. My progress was slow, more due to layout than anything. (After all, short skirt means you can run quickly. Though it did get cold.) Mines entrance was level 2, as was a general store. Another general store on 3. Oracle on level 7, forcing a retreat (always a nasty in the Oracle's room, no way around it this time). So back to the mines. Gnometown on level 5 was the one with the spellbook store - this was good, all I could do from the start was cure sickness, and detect food. However, I still wasn't smart enough to learn spells (stupid books, don't they know who I am?), and the altar was lawful. Priest of Shan Lai Ching (guess he was taking a break from hanging with the monks) didn't appreciate how I was showing off my legs, but did give me protection anyway. With improvement in my armour class (that didn't do much for my looks), it was back to the main dungeon, and level 8 - Sokoban entrance, altar, and large hardware store. NOW things get interesting. Complete Soko to get amulet of reflection. A very pricey bag in the store was indeed a bag of holding. Set up a stash by the altar, which is made more interesting with the presence of a jewelry store on level 9. Use holy water to bless scrolls of ID, start identifying stuff (like rings). Sacrifice corpses too (did I have to convert the altar? oh, who remembers such trivialities) and get Stormbringer. Finish the mines for the luckstone, which is in the vampire maze. NOW I'm looking good, both physically and ability-wise. Moving on down (still wary of energy vortices), level 10 had a throne room of nasties that I very gradually whittled down over the next while. Level 12, more chests, and level 13, a lawful altar - but DL8 would continue to be my stash for the rest of the game. Level 14 had my Quest. Level 15 had a dopey little throne room on the right. Level 16 was more primitive. Level 17... oh, do you really care? Let's get to the good stuff. So I get to Medusa's level, level 25, breathing hard. She's way over on the left; before even considering taking on the titan, I go back upstairs. Give my feet a quick rub and a dunk in the fountain on 24. (So much walking! I'd prefer wearing high boots, but you take what you can in this dungeon, and speed boots are more helpful.) For the next while, I set to work clearing things out a bit more between 10 and 25, getting more protection, IDing more things, etc. Finally ready, I off the titan. Now I'm faced with a problem. Still no means of levitation or water walking, and there's this large flood outside. Have kicked sinks and cleared out the jewellery store to no avail. Advance polearms to skilled and off the eels at least; a scroll of earth got me outside. (Tricky work there, since without a ring of warning, you can't hit them and see them at the same time. But I'm just that good.) Backtracking, find Ludios on level 20 and play with the soldiers there. Eventually at the point where I can start the Quest. So this Quest is something new. LOTS of graveyards here. Discovering a polymorph trap on mid-level is a bit troubling (as was the one on DL23) since I have no magic resistance. I'm not sure I want to kill everything either, since the more XP I get, the harder the bad guys are going to become, and I can't get past level 25. Finally fed up at being unsure how to proceed, I cast sleep on myself and return to the game in a few months. ***EARLY GAME, PART II*** I return with a plan. Since wands of cold can freeze water, I grab the two I've acquired so far and return to level 25. I then dig down into the floor to drop onto level 26 - if I can't find a ring here, hopefully I can freeze my way back. It's now a fight in the mazes. On level 27, I kill a xorn which embeds a wand of teleportation in a wall. Cute. Then level 29 is the Castle. Lacking a handy cockatrice, I have to fight my way through... long story short, I survive (obviously). Same problem as before now - no levitation to get back if I drop down to the valley of the dead. Growing irritated, I stomp my way back up, offing Medusa and freezing my way across her level. (If I didn't have permanent light from a magic lamp by now, I'd be seriously annoyed instead of irritated.) At this point my memory is fuzzy. In some order, I do visit the valley (while using potions of levitation?) and finish the Quest (more on that soon). I get grey dragon scales, and use those to give me magic resistance, which I'm pretty sure was from the dragons in behind the castle. But possibly that was after facing off with Nalzok at the bottom of the Quest. I admit to having a total blonde moment there. I figured I'd take him out with a wand of death I'd acquired, but as he's a demon and already dead, it had no effect. (Duh, hi!) Think I tried to teleport out, but for some reason that failed too. Forced to fight all the nasties he was bringing gave me some scares, making me use potions of full healing, but I got out then beat Nalzok in the upstairs graveyard. Sweating profusely (from the lava as much as the battle), I dragged my bruised body, with it's burnt and torn robe back up to my stash - killing anything that ogled me closer than two squares away. Really wasn't in the mood. I'd allow Incubii to admire my cleavage later, after I got cleaned up. To be honest, Gehennom was almost anticlimactic after the mess that came before. Almost. Yeenoghu paid a visit on level 31, which was already Asmodeus' level, so that wasn't fun. There was a forced magic trap to walk through on that level also. But the Mitre of Holiness made me smart, and I draped my robes alluringly to catch humanoids off guard too. Juiblex level 34, Baalzebub level 37. Yawn. Arch lich and Master lich on level 39. Yikes. Now, thank Huan Ti I had magic resistance by now, but that was one battle I could have done without. I hadn't actually found genocide yet to wipe out those nasty spellcasting and summoning critters. Fortunately, a cockatrice corpse provided an out. Took a break after that, both from Gehennom and the game; there was also Orcus on level 40 to deal with. Vlad's tower was on level 42. Two other battles of note. One on level 46, which had the portal to the Wizard's tower. Now, my life wasn't really in danger (nor was it when I took out the arch-lich on that level later), the problem was a peaceful gremlin who kept spawning more gremlins which made it impossible to really manoever. So I killed the peaceful gremlins, which apparently ticked off my god, and Stormbringer started blasting me. Stomped back up to level 8. Sacrificed stuff to mollify Huan Ti. Stupid god. Came back down. (More on gremlins later.) The other battle of note was me struggling back to the stairs on level 48 with one of those blasted master liches on my case. Of course, by this time, Julie was working on ascending and feeling bored, so I'd decided *not* to genocide L's, to be different. But they are really a pain. (Statues of master liches can be found on 48 and 49.) The lowest level was 50. ***MIDDLE GAME*** With all the exploring done, it was time for the mid game. During which I polypiled, enchanted up my armour, increased my HP, finally took out the leprechaun hall on 24, the graveyard on 20, the throne rooms on 10 and 15, and the graveyards in the Quest, as well as made myself some new pets. (Cerise was looooong dead.) The pets were mostly a side effect of my walking on magic traps to increase my cleavage (excuse me, my charisma) and up my magic maximum. Which is where I had another little snafu. Ended up taming a lizard and a peaceful gremlin in Medusa's mazes. Then headed back up. I was walking (well floating) out on my ice bridges by the time it occurred to me... gremlins and water, tame or not, are a PROBLEM. Quick panicked dash to upstairs. Blow magic whistle. The room is crammed FULL of the suckers. I go up, bringing 9 with me, then go back down... there's still, like, over a dozen there. Smacking my forehead repeatedly, I wade through my mess back to level 23. Only two things redeem this. First, the gremlins gift me with kelp fronds, which are tasty but really hard to acquire, since they hide in water. (I ascend with those.) Second, I make a discovery at the polymorph trap on DL23. When useless gremlins polymorph, they produce... useless baddies, because the baddies remain at 1 HP. I'm serious. I used my stethoscope to check. "Oooh look! Red dragon!" The glass piercer bites the red dragon. The red dragon is killed! Yeah, so I don't have any sad feelings from those deaths. I manage to get my lizard back up to DL8 - he polymorphs (along with my useless stuff) into a woodchuck, which is novel enough that I keep him around until he's offed by a peaceful elf. (Woodchucks can eat away walls, it seems.) Then I get serious, create a familiar, morph it into a balrog, and introduce the balrog to a few people. That would include the Oracle (sorry buddy), the watch captain then the priest in minetown (not so sorry - I convert that altar, and get gifted with Orcrist), the peaceful priest halfway down my quest (new spellbook there?), and a number of peaceful creatures (like ogres) who have become an annoyance. Also convert the first altar on my Quest, which is not as easy as it sounds, because creating monsters there just tends to just create undead, who don't sacrifice so much. What else...? Oh, right, Kops. Since I'm chaotic, I stole from the store on level 3. Then offed lots of Kops. The position of the stairs was such that the owner couldn't find his way out of his store either, until I went to check on whether he could summon more coppers. Instead, he followed me out of the store (they can do that?). I paid him off, amused to learn he was "out for blood, not money", but was mollified nonetheless. Repeated the experience with a potion shop much further down. This time, the shopkeeper could find his way out, but met my balrog. Got lots of cream pies out of that. Got lots of naughty thoughts involving cream pies too. (Of course, if my god had been lawful instead of chaotic, he'd have disowned me LONG before I started throwing pies at incubii who admired my charisma 18 cleavage. Again, chaotic priests is a slight saving grace.) The balrog pet meets it's end as I'm dancing around a magic trap on level 37... purple worm got him. Also meet my first true sandestin: have taken to travelling with a ring of protection against shape shifters, what with liches being a form they can take. (Weird looking guy.) Back at DL8, I morph into a xorn to eat some rings too, which gives me teleport control (my main plan, and a new way of getting that intrinsic) and some extra protection, but nothing else is digestible. Bah. One final setback. I mow a path through the Wizard's zoo and up to his tower, just to do some house cleaning. There's a master mind flayer tooling about in one of the rooms. (Haven't genocided them for the same reason I haven't genocided liches.) I decide to take him out with the blessed +4 ranseur I used to take out the eels back at Medusa's. Bad plan. I forgot that (a) this is a two handed weapon, and (b) one hand of mine is occupied with my shield of reflection. (I'd taken to wearing the shield most of the time, because while it severely cripples my spellcasting, I lost two rings of levitation and some other ring to one blast from a wand of lightning earlier.) By the time I work out the problem though, the mind flayer has sucked my brain. I destroy it. With extreme prejudice. You don't f*ck with my mind! I fumble with my +3 unicorn horn a few times to restore my abilities, then re-spellcast identify on everything around me. I refuse to let this setback make me look totally stupid. Of course, the major crippling blow is the loss of maps, and I'm forced to run the gamit with my spell of magic mapping in order to recall how to get through this damn dungeon. (Exceptions being: The Valley resists mapping, and Jubi's level was mostly lit by now.) Some of the fun having worn off after that experience, I prep my end game. Make sure all the excavated gems and such, along with misc. amulets, are up in a box on level 1. Check. Make sure I know all the necessary spells (remove curse, magic missile, extra healing, cure sickness, etc). Check. Incidentally, in a final prayer, I was gifted with a spellbook of sleep... what happened to spells I don't know, like levitation or finger of death? Geez. Anyway, make sure I have all the gear I need, rings, wand of death, cursed scroll of teleport, etc. Check. Then there's the thing I forgot to check. I go back down to the Wizard's zoo. There's actually a number of peacefuls cluttering the area, so I create familiar - it's an air elemental, neat. He offs a giant, a gremlin (hate those), an elf and such... I need to heal him a few times during that. Then I go up. Oh, right, because of the flayer I never took out the moat creatures. I do that, then deke back down to pick up my elemental and off that one cockatrice. No corpse. I'm facing the Wizard the hard way. Rather than shoot direct, I try to dig parallel. It seems to work, and I off the vampire, but maybe my light blinded the Wizard or something, because he woke up as soon as I drew line of sight with him. So, wand of death. He drops an amulet of strangulation (?) and there's a CHEST in here (?!). That's new. There's a spellbook in the chest, but it was some spell I knew, so I ignored it. Whistled my air elemental in and teleported down to level 50. ***END GAME*** I end up really close to the vibrating square (which I'd marked with a katana). Great! That's when I realize what it was I forgot to check earlier. The Candelabrum and Bell are still at Vlad's. (How many blonde moments am I allowed?) I trudge back up to level 42 mumbling "shut up" to any bad guys who snicker. Feel nervous once, and stuff is cursed another time. With ALL my gear, using a second cursed scroll of teleport, I go back to level 50. This time I'm not as close to the square, but soon enough, I open the final sanctum and head down. I've barely taken a step when two arch liches appear and start menacing me! ...riiiiight, other ascensions had genocided those twerps long before this. I try to get back to the stairs, because I don't want them escaping up. They summon nasties. On the plus side, one is a cockatrice, which leaves a corpse. On the down side, by the time I have two statues of arch liches, my air elemental is toast. I continue in. Not much of note through here; there's a T-Shirt lying around, which I stow away but don't end up using. The Wizard returns as I'm clearing out the graveyard, so I whack him with the 'trice corpse too. Then I try to cast light but a slip of the finger has me creating another familiar, a steam vortex that keeps picking up the boxes I'm trying to loot. Sigh. I get into the main temple area; there's a master mind flayer in with the high priest, oh joy! Dealing with these annoyances takes a while, but isn't a problem. The door always seems to be in the last corner where I look (upper right this time); with my shield off, I shoot bolts of cold inside until there's only the high priest himself to deal with. With my shield back ON (since Moloch likes shooting lightning), I deal with the priest. There's also a scroll of charging on a fire trap which I manage to purloin. Then it's back out. Mysterious force isn't much of a problem (look at me, I'm chaotic!), and a few cockatrices I'd kept alive helped make a few Wizard statues when he dared to show his face (including once on level 1). Think I only needed the wand of death once. (One 'trice I'd cornered in a dead end behind a formerly tame trapper. Did you know they also burp when they kill?) Grab my loot on level 1, then it's off to the planes! Wand of death to the Wizard. Incredibly, the portal out of the Plane of Earth is almost directly above me. I dig up to it, kill some things, dig left to off a giant and see if he has gems (didn't, but a scroll named READ ME is (re?)IDed as punishment), then prep for Plane of Air. I'm not going to be as fastidious about killing everything as people were in prior ascensions, because despite my high stats, there ARE still liches around, I cannot twoweapon, and the Wizard CAN still make my life a misery. (Remove curse is only so helpful; had to re-bless half my clothes and my luckstone before leaving the dungeon.) On the Plane of Air, I use rings of free action and levitation to bob up and over the clouds, offing a djinn and a few other things that were bothering me. Aside from the constant engulfing by air elementals, it seemed almost too easy. Quickly on to Plane of Fire. Here, I decide to replace levitation with conflict. This is surprisingly effective, if spammy. Amazingly, the portal out to Water is only a little ways above me too, which is nice, seeing as there's three Archons on the level - but two of them are waaaay over on the left. I decide to at least take out the closer Archon. Unfortunately, just as I manage that, the Wizard returns, and evades a wand of death. I melee with the Wizard, who reads a scroll of create monster, which creates another Archon, who blinds me, and now I'm stunned and whacking at things while I'm near lava. Take a breath, control blind myself, unihorn, off the Wizard, then the Archon, then these fire elementals who've wandered over. Taking stock, I find the Wizard stole the Amulet (jerk - I take it back), and the first Archon had Demonbane (I take it too). I also find I'm no longer Satiated, and decide to float left, off that hellhound, and eat it's corpse. Of course, the corpse knocks me out... another Archon makes it's way over to me, blinds me (while I'm unconscious?!) and summons more nasties. Growing ever more peeved, with the heat now giving my hair split ends, I go on a bit of a killing spree, which serves to leaves me panting and irritated. On the bright side, I get a new wand of death. Before anything else can come over here and bug me, I head back to the earlier portal, eating part of a food ration that a salamander dropped. And then we're on the Plane of Water - where the dampness doesn't help my sweaty, tangled mass of hair at all. Removing my shield, I zap some things with magic missile, but that only makes me hungry, so I finish off that food ration. I also drop my crystal ball, which is depleted (and only used here, scrolls served otherwise). A path to the final portal turns up fairly early, relatively speaking. I remove conflict before I enter, and get a Guardian Angel for the Astral Plane. Who is TOTALLY useless. (I'm sorry, but she was.) Blinding myself to get a read on the place, I'm on the right, with Pestilence, Famine's in the middle, Death's to the left. Of interest, a demilich with the latter two, and a master lich. Who teleports over right away, and summons nasties. I love you too. I beat on the lich, but one of the things he gated in was a purple worm, and I'm swallowed. I pop on my ring of slow digestion, then hit the worm from the inside twice, only to be expelled with the surprising message: "Brrooaa... You land hard at some distance." Rubbing my behind, I see that the worm isn't in my immediate vicinity because of all the other things attacking. Joy. I hack the master lich into dust. My "Guardian Angel" has taken out an Olog-hai, but then she hits a fire elemental and is killed by the backlash, of all things. Hack, hack... finally I'm clear to head right, and naturally Pestilence is there to meet me in the doorway. After I unlock it for him. Lazy jerk. Wand of death! I take Pesty's potion of sickness from the corpse, then beat on Eve the cavewoman, who's in my way. I've also put conflict back on because, with the Angel gone, I want everyone to feel the same misery as me (if not experience the same bad hair day). Eve goes down, an angel moves in... I can't teleport her out without losing Eve's stuff. Of course, it turns out that Eve had absolutely useless stuff anyway, and the delay means I have to off Pesty once more. Sighing, I proceed into the area of the altar. Turns out to belong to Chih Sung-tzu, who's neutral. Well, that's even more useless. Accidentally take a swing at a peaceful priest on my way out (because of conflict and Stormy), so I lock him inside rather than lose my telepathy. On the way out, I have to off Pesty once more. (I also "hear a door unlock and open", which is never good.) Head around to the middle. Maud is there, some other priestess character. Surprisingly, because of conflict, she's beating on Famine - and KILLS him. However, she acts too smug about it, then her look tells me she thinks I have lousy hair and am showing too much cleavage, so I kill her off. That'll teach her. She's carrying a piece of cloth, armour I've never seen before... an ID spell shows it to be a cursed +7 cloak of displacement. (+7? Are you kidding?) Mine now, I stash it. (Must keep my robe to spellcast.) Of course, I had to take my shield off to spellcast ID at 0% fail, and now some healer is sniping at me from the altar area with a wand of lightning. Re-engage the shield, then kill Famine again with my wand because, I don't know, he thought he could sneak up behind me, or something. I try to continue in, and the demilich there summons more things. For crying out loud... at least there's stuff between me and that master mind flayer. Then a purple worm eats him, ha ha. At my first opportunity, I get through the door and lock it behind me. This allows me to deal with the healer and cavewoman inside. To try and cut down on the number of messages, I also remove my ring of conflict... things turn and flee! (Oh, so this IS my altar! Rules change.) The player characters are felled. This time, they actually net me a number of gems, which is nice. (Alternatively, which is about damn time.) There's also another new cloak (turns out to be magic resistance - tough to get in this dungeon!). A quick blinding shows that there's only one other player guy tooling around with Death, so I don't think I'll do a repeat of Julie's near suicidal run to the left. However, I do reopen the door before both Famine AND Pesilence get there, zapping them with death on my own terms. With them out of the way, I get to casting. Casting create familiar, that is. I make a tame Olog-hai, two small dogs, a master mind flayer (uh, yeesh), a black dragon, a kitten... by this time some Angels have come in and are annoying me, both physically and by taking up space that could be used by my pets. A giant also throws in a boulder, which lands under the Angel of Shan Lai Ching. Geez, can't a girl have some fun with her new pets in peace? I take out one Angel... then Pestilence again, who revived quick. (He got in one hit on me, but I cast Cure Sickness.) Then I blow my magic whistle, trying to get as many of my pets around me as possible. I'd like the mind flayer, the dragon and the Olog-hai with me, but after a few blows, they're having difficulty manouevring around the priest, boulder and Pesty's corpse. I also think they've started munching corpses (to wit, "the kitten eats a red dragon corpse"). Famine also looks like he'll be coming to re-engage. After a pause to consider, during which I pick the Amulet back up and rake my fingers back through my hair (which will get a good shampoo at first opportunity), I decide to simply gain the immortality I so rightfully deserve. #offer What do you want to sacrifice? [EX or ?*] ? You offer the Amulet of Yendor to Huan Ti... An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance... The voice of Huan Ti thunders: "Congratulations, mortal!" "In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!" You ascend to the status of Demigoddess... Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq] (n) Rita the High Priestess St:18/** Dx:23 Co:18 In:22 Wi:22 Ch:18 Chaotic Astral Plane $:0 HP:804(850) Pw:336(694) AC:-38 Exp:30 T:152692 Burdened Vanquished creatures: The Wizard of Yendor (6 times) Pestilence (5 times) Famine (thrice) 9 arch-liches a shopkeeper The Oracle 25 aligned priests 115 ghosts 169 wraiths **are you kidding?! 122 soldiers 121 gremlins **bastards 112 leprechauns 178 human zombies a woodchuck **heh 80 Keystone Kops 5952 creatures vanquished. Voluntary challenges: You never genocided any monsters. You used 3 wishes. You did not wish for any artifacts. Goodbye Rita the Demigoddess... You and the black dragon (**what, was everyone else chowing down?) went to your reward with 7229014 points, You were level 30 with a maximum of 850 hit points when you ascended. You made the top ten list! No Points Name Hp [max] 1 11550446 Julie-Ran-Hum-Fem-Neu ascended to demigoddess-hood. 530 [839] 2 7953758 Laurie-Tou-Hum-Fem-Neu ascended to demigoddess-hood. 628 [628] 3 7229014 Rita-Pri-Hum-Fem-Cha ascended to demigoddess-hood. 804 [850] I didn't think I was a Julie anyway, but that's not bad for being a priestess.