Hacker Part 1 – Dungeons of Doom

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Play style: Random character, everything default.

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Text in green is fiction from outside of the game.
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Hacker is a Valkyrie. From the Nethack guidebook: “Valkyries are hardy warrior women. Their upbringing in the harsh Northlands makes them strong, inures them to extremes of cold, and instills in them stealth and cunning.”



She is Lawful and Tyr is her god.



She is very strong (St:18/03), quite agile (Dx:14), got good health (Co:15), not so bright (In:8), not the wisest (Wi:9) and not very charming (Ch:8). She has no gold pieces, 16 hit points (how much damage one can take), 2 power points (used for magic), AC: 6 (armor class, 10 is unprotected), experience level 1 and she has been around for 5 turns of game time.

Hacker has been dreaming strange dreams about adventuring lately. When asking around she heard about the Amulet of Yendor. One legend even mentioned that the one who finds the amulet would be granted immortality by the gods. It is rumored to be somewhere beyond the Valley of Gehennom, deep within the Mazes of Menace. In the morning, she gathers her gear, eat what may be her last meal outside, and enters the dungeon... (a short summary from the guidebook)



This is her gear. She is more or less naked, although the shield gives her an AC of 6. Her sword is magical with a +1 to hit and damage bonus and the dagger is good for throwing.

She is standing on the stairs leading back up. She brought her pet, a kitten, with her. In the room there’s a fountain, a corridor and a door. She has heard that fountains can be magical and give great benefits, but they also can be deadly dangerous. When her kitten moves she sees 27 gold coins on the ground. She picks them up, happy to have found her first treasure already. She doesn’t touch the fountain and tries the corridor instead. It’s a dead-end and she searches for secret doors but finds nothing. She then tries the door and it’s unlocked.

In the corridor behind it an orcish dagger suddenly hits her. She takes one more step forward and encounters a goblin. She attacks the goblin with her +1 long sword but misses and the goblin hits her and injures her. (12/16 Hp) The next strike hits the goblin, killing it. It drops an orcish helm. She picks it up, but doesn’t wear it. It could be cursed.



She moves into the next room and steps on a teleport trap and gets teleported into another room. A grid bug attacks her. She easily kills the grid bug. From the detailed info about grid bugs: "These electronically based creatures are not native to this universe. They appear to come from a world whose laws of motion are radically different from ours.” There’s another one and it suffers the same fate. In the next room she finds an unlabeled scroll and a statue of a sewer rat. She encounters a newt and kills it. She knows that she has to save her food rations as long as possible so she has to eat some of her kills in the dungeon. She is eating the newt, and it tastes horrible, when a fox turns up. She kills it and finish eating the partly eaten newt corpse. She then tries to eat the fox corpse but it’s rotten. Her kitten is gone, probably on her own adventure, chasing after some rats or something.

She gets to a door and opens it, and there’s her cat, 10gp, a large box and a stairway leading down. The large box is locked so she kicks it until the lock breaks. She hears a muffled shatter from inside the box. Hmm, something broke. Inside she finds a scroll labelled “YUM YUM” and a yellow gem. She could try to read the scroll now and see what happens but that might be dangerous.

Before she takes the stairs down she wants to explore the whole dungeon level. She kills a lichen and eats it. Suddenly she gets cold inside. From the shadowy corner of the room one pair of cold and dead eyes gazes at her. It’s a zombie from a kobold corpse. Without thinking she strikes at the zombie, killing it before it had the time to move. She then notices a goblin far away in another room. Because she doesn’t have any missile weapons but the goblin might, she waits around a corner. The goblin never shows up so she continues another way around. She has now recovered from her wounds(16/16 Hp).



There’s a boulder in one corridor and she pushes it until it’s stopped, but it’s a dead-end. She encounters one more kobold zombie but her sword misses it. It hits her for a lot of damage. She has time to attack once without the zombie attacking her because it moves so slowly but she misses again. She misses a third time but now the zombie hits, and she is critically injured. (4/16 Hp) She retreats with ease from the slow moving zombie.

She enters a dead-end corridor and searches for a while, regaining some health. (8/16 Hp) No secret door, so she takes the next corridor leading to the room with the goblin she saw earlier. There it is, just a few steps inside the room. She rushes straight at the goblin, and then takes a left to give the kitten room to attack. While doing so the goblin manage to hit her. (6/16 Hp) She kills the goblin and advances to experience level 2 with a boost in health. (17/26 Hp) She also finds 53gp.

She continues onward. No sign of the kobold zombie. She encounters two sewer rats and places herself so that the kitten can take on one of them. Hacker misses but the kitten kills her rat first and then Hacker’s rat. Kittens are really good against rats. There’s 47gp on the floor.

In the last room she finds a neutral altar to Oden and a statue of a newt. There's no use sacrificing at another gods altar, but it can have other uses. She steps at a teleport trap and ends up in another room. She returns to get the kitten and heads down to dungeon level 2 (Dl2). (the picture is taken using the original smaller tiles, click it to get the bigger picture)



In the second room of Dl2 she fights a newt and finds a white spell book and 29gp. She reads the spell book and feels a wrenching sensation and the spell book crumbles to dust. She gets teleported and freezes for a short while.

In the next room she finds a purple spell book, a pear and a statue of a kobold zombie. She reads the spell book and memorizes the runes. She learns the 3:d level spell “cause fear”, but she has no chance to use it. Valkyries are bad spell casters.



Next she finds stairs leading down and a fountain. There are a lot of dead-end corridors so she returns to the room with the stairs. She kills a green mold but its acid splashes her. She advances to level 3. (28/32 Hp)

By the stairs she reads her scrolls hoping for magic mapping. The unlabeled scroll is blank. When she reads "YUM YUM" her +3 shield crumbles to dust. Hmm, maybe it’s a bad idea to read unidentified scrolls. Oh well… she is now AC 10 and hungry. She eats the pear and it’s delicious but she is still hungry so she eats a food ration and the food really hit the spot.

On Dl3 she finds a black potion and 47gp. There’s a locked door and she kicks it in anger (for the loss of her shield) three times before it breaks, revealing an empty room. She finds 61gp in next room and an altar to the chaotic god Loki. There’s a yellow mold that she looks at with detailed view.



She drops an unidentified orcish dagger on the altar to check if it’s cursed. Altars make blessed or cursed objects glow. Nothing happens but a giant bat attacks. She kills it and at the same time the kitten attacks the yellow mold. The kitten staggers and misses the yellow mold and Hacker sidesteps to get a line of sight to throw a dagger at the mold. She hits it, killing it. Although the kitten seem to avoid the yellow mold corpse, Hacker is low on food and tries to eat it. “Ecch – that must have been poisonous! It tastes terrible. Oh wow! Great stuff!” Suddenly the kitten looks like a pirate and the dagger looks like a scroll.



The next second they morph to a cyclops and a mace.



She continues down a corridor with her kitten behind her, morphing into insects, spiders, puddings etc. At one time she tries to strike a jabberwocky, but it doesn’t hit her back, so it was probably her kitten. She missed it though.

She looks into a room and sees two objects and two creatures, but they morph all the time so she isn’t sure what they are.



She throws daggers at the closest creature. The first dagger misses the frost giant, the second dagger kills what is now a grey-elf. She advances and when she reaches the spot where the creature died she can feel with her feets that it is a lichen corpse. She picks up her daggers and throws them at the second creature. The kitten, she believes it is, comes up from behind looking like a microscopic space fleet. She misses with both daggers but hits the second creature with her sword and she is caught in the gas spore’s explosion. She advances to level 4 (20/39 Hp) still hallucinating.

A third creature enters the room and she kills it with her daggers. She’s not sure what it was but it surely looked like the horned devil when it died. She finds a potion. She ventures out into a corridor and kills a baby silver dragon? Suddenly her kitten disappears and another creature shows up in front of her. To test if it’s her kitten she #chats with it and “the killer bunny purrs.”, revealing that it probably is her cat. She hears some noises. (there’s no sound in the game, all sounds in the dungeon are described by text messages)

She opens a door and she’s not sure if the creature behind the door is the kitten so she chats with it and "the lichen squeaks" so she kills it. She finds the stairs down. She is tired of hallucinating and tries her two potions hoping for an antidote. She tries the black one first. She feels strong, smart, wise, agile, though and charismatic. Hmm, she actually got one point extra in all attributes except strength that went from 18/03 to 18. By checking her “discoveries”, a page listing everything she has encountered so far, she finds out that it was a potion of gain abilities. It must have been blessed. Next she tries the dark green potion. She feels better, totally healed from all wounds, but is still hallucinating. A few steps later she stops hallucinating and "everything looks SO boring now."

In the next room she first doesn’t believe her eyes, there’s an eye floating in the air.



She bypasses it and throws her daggers at it, hitting with one of them. She waits for the floating eye to move so that she can get to her daggers. It moves very slowly and the kitten attacks it but gets frozen by its gaze. Hacker picks up her daggers and throws them again, hitting with one. The problem is that she by mistake threw her long sword and she is now unarmed. An acib blob moves into the room complicating matters even more. Luckily the acid blob is also a slow mover. After a long wait the eye moves again and Hacker tries to get to her weapons.

She picks up her weapons one square from the acid blob when a giant bat enters the room. She takes one step away from the acid blob and wields her long sword just in time to meet the giant bat.

She hits it two times while it hits her six times and she is wounded. (26/40 Hp) She kills the giant bat with her next strike. She then throws a dagger at the acid blob killing it. She recovers her dagger and throws both daggers at the floating eye, killing it. She advances to level 5 and feel tough. (getting Co: 17) (36/49 Hp) She eats the floating eye and "feels a strange mental acuity". She eats the giant bat corpse and gets stunned. She now moves in random directions and the kitten finally awakes. She staggers around and hits the kitten by mistake, and it yowls. She relaxes and rests without moving until the stun goes away and she feels a bit steadier.

She chats with the kitten and "it mews". Maybe it’s angry or hungry. She meets a peaceful hobbit. She chats with it and it asks her about the One Ring. The kitten bites the hobbit obviously angry or hungry. The hobbit wields an elven dagger, but the kitten bites it again and it dies. Hacker picks up the elven dagger while the kitten eats the hobbit corpse. Hacker drops the dagger at the altar and it's not cursed. An elf zombie turns up and Hacker throws daggers at it while the kitten bites it. It dies.

Hacker is on her way own to Dl4 but can’t find her kitten. She meets a pony and kills it with one blow. It had four attacks each turn. She kills a gecko and eats it. It was rotten and everything suddenly goes dark. She is blind but can now sense (see) that her kitten is in another room. It must be that strange mental acuity she felt after eating that floating eye. She senses how the kitten comes to her but when she can see again the sense of the kitten disappears.

Dl4. She finds an ebony wand, 101gp and some stairs down. She finds 52gp and a boulder that blocks the corridor. She pushes it back and finds that the corridor splits in two behind it. She hears someone cursing shoplifters and finds a shop. It’s “Kadirli’s used armor dealership”. Just what Hacker needed! She’s got a total of 453gp. The bronze plate mail for 533gp is to expensive. She decides to buy a banded mail (120gp), an apron (106gp), a pair of leather gloves (10gp), an orcish cloak (53gp) and a pair of hiking boots (66gp). She tries to sell her spell book but Kadirli seems uninterested.

She returns to the altar on Dl3 to see if any item is cursed. At the altar two hill orcs attack her but she slays them and gets two more orc helms and one orcish dagger. She returns to the altar and drops the orcish dagger on it. There’s a black flash, so it’s cursed. She drops one of the orcish helmets and there’s an amber flash, meaning it’s blessed. She puts it on. It’s a blessed +1 helmet and she gets AC: 8. The banded mail is uncursed +0 and gives AC: 2 and the apron is +1 and blessed giving a total AC of 0. Just when she is about to wear the apron she is hit by an orcish dagger but can’t see any orc. She takes a step forward and notices a hill orc and throws a killing dagger at it. She advances to level 6 (53/59 Hp). She gets back to her items. Everything else is normal so she wears it for a total AC of –2. She can’t wear the orcish cloak because she already is wearing the blessed apron. She moves over to where the last hill orc died and finds two tins, and one more orcish helm. Three giant rats come from the other side of the room. The kitten and thrown daggers kill the rats. Hacker is hungry and eats her last food ration.

Jump to Hacker Part 2


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