What use is Summon Monster?

[BenMathiesen]

Hey folks,

I've been playing ADOM for a long time, and as spoiled as anyone can be... but I've never found a use for the Summon Monster spell. Has anyone come up with an interesting tactic that makes it worthwhile? Does it ever summon friendly monsters instead of hostiles?

I must admit I haven't experimented with it much either... I usually only get it at the Library, and by then my wizards have better things to cast. But maybe there's a reason a low-level caster should be excited to find this spell.

Any ideas?

Ben

[Spellweaver]

Items (up to the last version) and experience. Theoretically they can also block other monsters from you.

[JellySlayer]

I've heard of it being used to clear the first part of the Bug Temple. Cast summon monsters on top of the stairs and get yourself surrounded by goblins or kobolds or whatever. Descend and take them with you. Now you don't have to fight all of the claw bugs at once because you have a protective shield of weak monsters.

If you're desperate for food, I can imagine it being used to try to get some corpses quickly. I've used wands of monster creation for such purposes on rare occasions. It might be useful for pacifying levels, I guess. I've never tried before, but there might be some sneaky uses for it if combined with alarm traps: If you're planning on fighting a boss, make a bunch of alarm/fireball traps in a room and lure him there. Then summon monsters, and pull the summons all over the traps. Boss starts attacking the monsters that triggered the traps instead of you.

[Kyreles]

Meat shields to block casters. Notably the Ancient Chaos Wyrm.

[gut]

Not a direct answer, but I have a funny story about that. Before tup and I devised a
sensible strategy for luring jharod to the water dragon cave, we tried using summon
monsters instead. We built a cage of locked doors around the staircase, then filled
the entire level with monsters. The thought was to then track down jharod and cast
tp on him, thinking he would go to the staircase. Unfortunately, everything in the
world except that happened. The monsters were killing each other, creating other
tp spots for jharod (which he always went to), some monsters seemed to all-out
refuse to enter door tiles (thus creating more empty tiles, the summon monsters
spell doesn't work well if you are surrounded by hostiles, so you have to keep
moving (through a sea of hostile monsters) while casting it for it to work, it took
FOREVER to summon (nearly) 25 * 80 tiles of monsters, locating jharod time and
again ate up monster detect scrolls like nobody's business, and reaching him
again meant navigating the mob sea again and refilling it as you went, and after
finally getting it to work (after insane amount of effort), we realized it would be
maddening to repeat that 3 more times for VD:3, 2 and 1. It didn't take long for
us to devise the alternate plan after that though

Also, on topic, if Thrundarr gives you a troll berserker, why not try SM?

[anon123]

I have a story too. While bookcasting this a few levels before Dwarftown to see if I could get Thrundarr's first quest monster, and train Mana in the process (as it's a somewhat expensive spell), I summoned a group of acid vortices. Without acid resistance. Let's remember that the energy cost for bookcasting is 3000 points.

So add two more reasons to the list: training Ma, and killing PCs in a pretty stupid and deserved way.