The Lead-filled mace meets the frozen lake

[ScooterSkittles]

I had a sweet thing going on. A gnomish priest named Kulongalong with almost 2 pages of spells, and a bunch of spell books he was lugging around so I he could take advantage of his talent "Good Book Caster", and a lot built up stats. I've never taken that talent before, but thought I'd try.

I'd also recently stubbled upon some Seven League Boots.

It was 68 days after I'd entered the chain. I'd been practicing the mace and flail for the most part, and had started using "Big Punch", the lead-filled, 800 stone heavy, artifact mace. I'd blessed a scroll of familiar summoning, and cast the spell from the scroll while in the top level of the cave where all the monsters level up with you so it becomes really really dangerous. Anyway, what I've noticed is that this often provides an especially powerful familiar. Sure enough, a friendly Death Ooze appeared. I used him most notably in the dwarven graveyard, push him ahead of me so as to activate traps instead of me, and face the two main bosses there. I was lucky that none of the traps teleported my ooze friend.

We cleared out that place with little or no trouble. I left him at the top of the Caverns of Chaos, went so deep I encountered Kelevaster, didn't have a amulet of Life-Saving, so decided to keep venturing in the hopes that I'd find it. I took my unnamed ooze-pal and we climbed over to the tomb of the high kings. At the bottom of the huge, natural cave, I found a lake of water filled with red, glowing chaos piranas. I put down a bunch of my stuff, keeping only my eqipped items and a few spellbooks, like Frost Bolt (or divine equivalent) so I could cast them from the book when freezing the lake. My idea was to have the death ooze fight the undead king that I knew was in the room in the midst of the lake, but I didn't get that far. Some of the lake was frozen, so I stepped out onto it to freeze more water beyond it. It began to creek and crack. At first, I was wondering where my calculation was flawed... then thinking maybe it won't break. I relaxed as I looked at my hitpoints. It was over 250, so even if I did fall in, I should be able to claw my way out. But no, the ice split and shattered and I fell in like a wet noodle into a blender. The chaos piranas had been impatiently waiting, and dig into me in a flash. After a quick moment, I was at -3 HP. Dead.

Noooooooooooooo! I checked the stuff I head and realized my blunder. I didn't even count my equipment... I just assumed that dropping everything else except 5 spellbooks (still too many to have, jeez) would be plenty. I had armor weighing 288s, and of course "Big Punch" with 800s.

Goodbye Kulongalong. You were super cool...

[Silfir]

Ouch.

Yeah. Check weight with the "@" or Alt-q character information screen in the future. For the record, you can have 2000 stones of weight with you and the ice bridge will hold.

[Josh]

:b is a good option as well. It displays your current inventory weight, as well as what weight levels you will go to burdened/strained etc.