YA(f)VP - Drawf Barbarian

[Zedrick]

Phew. I've been playing ADOM for about 10-11 years or so (before 1.0 anyways) and this is my first victory ever. Don't know why I finally succeeded, but I guess it's a combination of OK initial stats, club+shield instead of Vanquisher and plenty of wishes for missing stuff.

Did the usual stuff in the beginning: got the waterproof blanket before leveling up, killed the raider lord, saved the puppy and took Yrrig to his therapist (I like perfection, and usually quit if I fail any of these 3 quests). Then I went to the UD, found herbs and an altair, got precrowned with Nature's Companion (I think this helped a lot later on) and crowned with Scullcrusher. I'm not quite sure how good Scullcrusher is vs other artifact weapons, but by the time I found alternatives my skill with clubs&hammers was high enough for me to keep using it.

Went to the CoC, pacified the big room, did Thrundarr's quests and the pyramid... Nothing to write home about there. Then Darkforge, which was easy. I drank from all the pools there and and became invisible. Somewhere around this time I found a ring of Djinni summoning which I spend on fireproof blankets, as I hadn't found any anywhere else. Headed to the ToEF... which was fun. At the top of the tower I found a big tension room filled with.... Ice Vortexes!! I lured them to the right side and had them take out most of the firemonsters + damage The Ancient Chaos Wyrm, making it very easy for me to finish him off.

Had to go to the gremlin cave to get climbing gear, then I got the ring of the high kings, headed down to the Banshee, and... well, yes, this is a bit gamey, but I don't consider it cheating: lured her up to the animated forest. That got me another ring of djinni summoning and some other useful stuff.

After that... the normal stuff. My only real problem was the earth temple, where I was down on 1hp at one point. Found a 3rd ring of djinni summoning, plus a wand of wishing with 2 wishes. Spent two of them on scrolls of chaos resistance and the last one on a girdle of giant strength. Oh, I also managed to avoid all cats and got the cat-ring, which also played a big part in my win.

When I reached level 50 I was very nervous and consulted the guidebook. I decided to be a coward and use the wands of destruction-strategy instead of clearing out the entire level. I retrospect I think I would have been able to do that without much trouble, but still... after more than a decade of playing adom without a win, I didn't want to take any risks at this point.

Anyway, that went fine, the handles were closed and destroyed, and I fled to the surface. Found Blups mother for him and did the unicorn quest (just to be nice, I didn't really need it since I had Scrolls of Chaos restance left). Then I went home.

So. This is it. I'm not sure I'll continue playing ADOM (I will try to remember to do the postcard quest though!), since I've kept a CRT monitor just for this game and want to replace it with a TFT. I don't like windowed stuff or java-applications, so.... Well, there's always the Amiga-version, but it runs a bit slow even on my Amiga 4000/040. Oh well, we'll see. In any case: a big thank you to Thomas for countless hours of entertainment over the years. ADOM is as close to rougelike perfection as it gets.

Apparently the .flg is too big for this forum, so I've posted it here:

exilregeringen.se/olle_rat.flg