Quote Originally Posted by sytar6 View Post
Are you supposed to just mine out the entire level? All these things seem tedious to the extreme.
Well, yes, it's tedious. Just depends how bad you want the wand. You could just skip Darkforge. Mining is probably faster than the random teleport method though (which I've used on occasion as well). You shouldn't need to mine the entire level... with efficient mining, you shouldn't need to do more than maybe 1/4 at most. The breeder method shouldn't be too bad though (although I've never actually used it). I'd probably just drop a couple of water traps around the level and set off a few gremlin bombs with some fluff balls. Then, camp yourself on the stairs, surround yourself with locked doors (or cast darkness) and wait for a few thousand turns and you should be good. Regardless, the wand is guaranteed in the sense that you can, in principle, always find it. Not always easily, granted. If you don't like tedious methods, then you just play without until you find the right items.

On your other point, you can just kill the beggars after you get the booze to keep the spawning going... Although having friendly wilderness monsters is a very useful thing, IMHO. Any time you get a wilderness encounter with a beggar, it means that you DIDN'T get a wilderness encounter with jackals or undead or whatever. This can actually make the wilderness much safer and less tedious for weak/doomed PCs. Annoying if you're high level and want to do some scumming or find a giant boar, I suppose (but you could just kill the beggars to fix the problem).

If you're really stuck, almost all of these problems can be fixed by playing a wand or scroll merchant