Hey ADOMers, I've been playing for about 10 years and I wouldn't call myself a particularly noteworthy player. I've only had two victories and never done an ultra. But I registered here for the first time because thanks to a whole lot of persistence and some careful well-researched play, I've managed to do Brimstone Man without save scumming: just a whole lot of luck, a pinch of skill and the dragon gold doubling exploit.
Unfortunately, I started this run in October 2010 and, combined with the fact I rolled literally hundreds of Brimstone challengers, the exact details for the opening somewhat escape me. But I'll put down what I can piece together and if you want to ask anything, obviously you can and I'll answer as best as possible. Why would I start in October and not finish it? Because I was at a quandary and didn't think I was going to be able to pull it off and I couldn't bear the thought of having a level 25 crowned character and not succeeding. In the end, I decided I'd take a brief break from ADOM and before I knew it, my Master's took over. But yesterday while laying in bed, I remembered the challenge and decided I would head straight for the ACW and come what may. Now, for the actual interesting parts. From what I remember:
Par (excuse the boring name, as I said, I rolled hundreds if not thousands of Brimstone candidates during the couple months beforehand... call me a junkie) was just another gnomish elementalist to me. So I got to the tower and went about my business and I believe I found a fire drake corpse from a tension room after using only one prayer (and likely frost bolting some other suckers along the way). I wasn't impressed yet: I'd got this far a few times before and it usually ended in starvation. But what hadn't happened before is an altar on TF:3. So, I hatched my plan: get gold off dragons, sac for piety, get crowned (maybe even multiple postcrownings), hopefully get other good equipment along the way and then go for glory. In any case, I did eventually get crowned a Champion of Neutrality and got an Iron Crown of Havlor (could've been worse) for my trouble and of course, immunity to shock. I was hunting for a wish and I did try pickpocketing repeatedly but it never turned up anything of use: all the good items I got aside from the Crown were from drops. But there wasn't really any strategy beyond just killing things with frost bolt, milking dragons for money, occasionally sacrificing more powerful monsters and once I found a spear of devastation, killing the worms/lizards etc. in melee. Problems I had:
1. Frost Bolt castings. Once you get to the 20s, you realise you simply don't have enough castings to get you up a level from it alone. I tried my best to develop missiles, but I only ever got a few scurgar (OK, reviewing the .flg does show some crossbows and quarrels that I probably should've used, but eh. Missiles were never much of a damage source for me.) and in the end, pretty much never used them. So, I meleed. But I simply wasn't strong enough for elementals and grues - even vanilla fire giants often came close to killing me (let's not even think about those extremely experienced fire worms...) Still, through a combination of a knife of endurance for regeneration, sacrificing and sparing frost bolt, I got by.
2. Food. Without food preservation, it never came consistently and I wasted by my guess a good 8-9 prayers on it. And they promptly get expensive.
3. Mana Battery corruption - no wands of wishing, digging, paralysis etc. for me. Thankfully I managed without. I did get pretty lucky with corruptions otherwise though (teleportitis saved my life once or twice, antenna didn't matter).
4. Doubling the gold was harder than expected. Sometimes the pile seemed to burn up as soon as I dropped it. Other times it got destroyed by a breath attack either before or immediately after dropping. Sometimes dragons never picked it up and this usually resulted in the pile burning up. Not too big a deal though.
So, there I was. Level 25, crowned and under normal game circumstances with good equipment, probably good enough to take on the ACW. But I had no source of digging, no source of confusion resistance, no healing and what seemed to me to be an insufficient number of frost bolt castings (~80) and no other means of killing him. But I had no reliable source of food and couldn't keep using prayers on it forever. I knew I could borrow my deity's pickaxe, but I had never done it before and thought it was extremely expensive in piety and I wanted some prayers for the fight for emergency healing (prayers I didn't need in the end, of course). So I took a break for what ended up being nearly a year. When I came back, I checked my piety and noticed it was very close. I also noticed I was only 20k experience off level 26. Getting there got me to ~300 frost bolts. I decided that would be enough and in all likelihood, the random artifact probably wouldn't help anyway. So off I went. In the end I had to pray twice for a pick axe (first melted while I fought a stone giant). I planned on having two shields, but then decided trading a source of fire resistance for a ring of invisibility and my trusty endurance knife would be best. So, I dug a direct line to the altar and cast frost bolt a lot. After a while I noticed it was no longer hitting anything: ACW chickened out to the top right corner of his domain. Getting in his line took some time, but with a lot of applying first aid while waiting out confusion and frost bolting everything in my path, I got to him again. I got hit by a bolt of energy for ~100 damage which freaked me out and made me work hard to keep another monster between him and me, but eventually he went down. ACW aside, I took hardly any damage (invisibility was the correct choice), but I got out of there immediately instead of clearing it out: I knew better.
Well, I guess that's about it. There's a couple of brief annotations in the .flg, but there's not really anything else to say. All you need is a quick corpse drop, an altar and the patience to double gold/level up to the mid-20s. Sounds simple, but in reality I accept there was a hell of a lot of luck in getting that to happen and not getting giant rocked to death while still a fledgling. And barring wishes, skipping out the gold doubling would also make it considerably harder, if not impossible (maybe with food preservation, but even then I'm not sure you'd have enough food from saccing monsters or time to pull it off). I confess I was not either man enough or good enough to try it without.
Thanks for reading and apologies for the length: I am tremendously good at rambling on. I have the .svg at the point where I immediately left the tower with the orb and can attach it if anyone wants it. For now, I just have the .flg. Enjoy!
Brimstone Man - Complete!
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