Strange behavior of a shopkeeper.

[Blasphemous]

Not sure if this is a bug, but here it goes:

You pick up the heap of 2 uncursed cave fisher corpses (unpaid, 152gp).
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper, attacks the chaos servant. 
The chaos servant attacks Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper. 
The chaos servant misses Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper. 
The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion misses you.
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper, does not seem to be amused.
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper, cringes in pain!
The chaos servant attacks Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper.
The chaos servant misses Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper. 
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper, attacks the chaos servant. The chaos servant is killed!
The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion misses you. The cave lion fails to hurt you.
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper, does not seem to be amused.
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper, cringes in pain! 
The cave lion misses you. The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion fails to hurt you.
The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion fails to hurt you.
The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion misses you.
The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion fails to hurt you. The cave lion fails to hurt you.
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper critically hits you. 
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper hits you. 
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper hits you.
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper, does not seem to be amused.
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper, cringes in pain!
Kethreldios, the dark elven shopkeeper targets a vital spot and hits you. You die...

What happened was I have led the cave lion to a shop in order to have the shopkeeper kill it.
It happens when you pick up an item and a monster is standing in the shop entrance, a known feature.
However the shopkeeper refused to attack the lion.
Then I went deeper into the shop, the cave lion followed me and a chaos servant showed up and stood in the entrance (still blocked by the shopkeeper).
At that point I dropped the unpaid item, shopkeeper stepped aside and I picked the item again.
The shopkeeper attacked the chaos servant which was now standing in the shop entrance.
At the same time, somehow, the shopkeeper became hostile to me, though I didn't do anything.
What the hell happened?

I did nothing to anger the shopkeeper, though I suspect he might have went berserk after being poisoned.
I decided to reload a save file from an earlier moment because this was the first time ever I have encountered something like this and I think it is a bug.

Here's what the layout looked like:

 
     #.#
######C#
#....@.#
#...@f.#
#.....]#
########

[auricbond]

Might be the 'blind rage' that triggers when an enemy is injured. They'll become hostile to you regardless of the source of damage. Not sure if it's intentional but it seems a bit unfair/illogical at times.

[Blasphemous]

There was no message about blind rage so unless it can happen without the message appearing, that's not it.
I've had shopkeepers blind raging before but that is pretty clear when it happens, especially since I have colored messages that change the color to red.

[auricbond]

Maybe you were in a blind rage and so didn't see the message.

[gr3ybird]

I have led the cave lion to a shop in order to have the shopkeeper kill it. It happens when you pick up an item and a monster is standing in the shop entrance, a known feature.

This known feature sounds more like the bug. If NPC's aren't hostile enough to attack each other already, they shouldn't fight just because they bump into each other on the same square.

EDIT: But, yeah, I do hate blind raging if that's what caused this. It's not because of the increased damage, I just don't get how pretty much turning off the AI for an actor can ever == good ai. Hostile/nonhostile flags should still stay the same when blind raging, definitely for a humanoid.

[gr3ybird]

I just remembered how the blind rage thing kept happening with a series of farmers I was playing and their dogs, who go beat up by bad guys and then attacked the farmer. It's just wacky.

[Blasphemous]

This known feature sounds more like the bug. If NPC's aren't hostile enough to attack each other already, they shouldn't fight just because they bump into each other on the same square.

EDIT: But, yeah, I do hate blind raging if that's what caused this. It's not because of the increased damage, I just don't get how pretty much turning off the AI for an actor can ever == good ai. Hostile/nonhostile flags should still stay the same when blind raging, definitely for a humanoid.

I guess it's just an implementation to prevent monsters from blocking the exit and thus letting PCs with class powers that allow them to swap places with hostiles move out of the shop with full pockets.
The shopkeeper will not however attack a creature in the doorway if that creature has already been attacked by the PC, even if the PC missed the attack, so in this case classes that can swap with hostiles can still pull this trick off.

[gr3ybird]

Something does seem weird about the shopkeeper ai here, though. I guess the 'not amused' string means that he shifted to hostile towards the pc. So, either there's redundant printing of that string, or he is going back and forth between being friendly and hostile here.

Another weird thing is that string seems to be associated with the poison damage, which definitely was not the pc's fault. And it precedes the poison damage string, which is weird because it seems like the damage should be causing the shift to hostile.

Was the chaos servant friendly to you? Maybe that hostility is applied to all actors on the pc's 'team'.

[Blasphemous]

No, the chaos servant was hostile to me, that's why it was heading towards the shop - it wanted to attack me.

[divij]

i have had a similar but slightly different issue with shop keepers! i usually bring raging ogres from the ogre cave to dwarftown to kill ruun and they manage to do that 100% of the times (you cannot attack the ogres though)...this does 2 things....thundrar immediately moves from the lever, so if you have tp+control, you can tp in 1-2 turns and handle the lever (warning: he will rush to the lever if he sees you, so dont try to just walk to the lever, you need to tp). 2ndly, almost all the residents of dwarftown go to try to kill the ogre and instead all of them get slaughtered (noob gamers!) = many pickaxes and other loot. however, sometimes, if ruun starts bleeding and dies from it, the residents of dwarftown, including the shopkeeper get hostile on me....but im not responsible for ruun bleeding (ok i kind of am in an indirect way...cause i lead the orge to ruun and...but we digress). the point is, this is a random behaviour (atleast i dont know what triggers it, and it is also non-sensicle!) finally, this one time the shop-keeper got aggro on me, so i tpd away....and he calmed down by the time i came back!