Dear Fans,

tl/dr: I know next to nothing about this game and I love it!

[warning, spoilers ahead]

I discovered and first played this game last May, 2018. Like most probably I found it frustrating and difficult, feelings that were compounded by my aversion to guides, wikis and (somewhat) forums. In many ways, the internet has made games like these too easy with all the answers revealed, but I digress.

My early characters never made it far, never even reaching Dwarftown. And then I decided to play it on my twitch stream and save-scum my way to victory. I knew I wanted a wizard so I selected that and left everything else to chance. I ended up with a female, mist-elf, wizard. I named her Sirendel because it sounded Tolkien-esk. I had no idea at the time of the limitations or advantages of the mist-elf. Looking back at the dates on the save-games my commitment to the game was spotty at first. A couple of days in August, four days at the end of September, one day in the middle of November, and then nothing...

A few days after Christmas (the 28th) I made a commitment to finish this game and let my viewers know that we would be playing this exclusively until the end. Back in November we had left our little Sirendel waiting in Dwarftown. She had completed some of the early dungeons, made her way to the western side of the map, found the plentiful food source at the arena, conquered the Pyramid, and had just discovered Dwarftown. Somewhere along the way she drank from a magic pool and was now permanently invisible. That fact, more than anything else, may have contributed the most to our success going forward. For one thing, without it we probably never would have learned the effect of the Ancient Mummy Wrappings, but when you yourself are invisible it's a lot more obvious.

So on we forged, delving deep into the CoC. We found Khelvestar who gave us some direction. Aggressive usage of the Magic Map spell found us the Water Temple and our first major battle. We tunneled our way in and burst through the wall casting fiery destruction in all directions. Looking back, this may have been the first time where we felt like we had the strength advantage over the opposition. They fell in droves as we crossed the moat to the central island and then....oh god the water elementals. We died, and died, and died again. Sometimes to the water elementals, sometimes to that dammed snake. I'll be honest, it took us a few deaths to realize that it was not a "normal" snake, and maybe a few more before we realized that it was the boss. We developed a plan. We entered the room and moved our way carefully to the left, aggravating as little as possible. We cleared the southern side of the room and then tunneled our way through the side of the temple to the altar and....ran. It worked perfectly. We managed to pull the Chaos Serpent without waking the elementals. We kited him back into the tunnel and prevailed. As a bonus, he was carrying what we needed and we didn't need to reenter the temple at all.

Then we ate the Chaos Serpent corpse and....wtf are corruptions!? Living Mana Battery? What is this? YOU DRAINED ALL MY WANDS?? Seriously game????

This battle was the turning point for my feelings about the game. What up to now had seemed like a capricious RNG fest (just keep starting characters until the RNG eventually rolls you n lucky items in a row, then win) became a game with multiple solutions and strategy. We had made it to mid-game.

Deeper we went. Along the way we found a fire-proof blanket. A few levels later we found a burning flight of stairs. Surely they must be related...but they weren't. No matter what we tried, we could not get up the stairs. And then we got another corruption! What was causing this!? This one was bad. Lightness or something like that, all I remember is that all our stats were trashed. We started the game with only 8 toughness, losing any of it sucked. I don't remember whether the game prompted us to do this or not, but eventually we retreated back to Dwarftown and asked the king (?) there about the stairs. He told us it was time to enter the Tower of Eternal Flame. And so began our second strategic challenge.

This one was tougher. The continuous destruction of our equipment just seemed insurmountable. Eventually we interrupted our attempts to explore when we noticed that the giant storm to the west was gone. We met the Ice Queen, completed her quest and received her AMAZING potions of corruption removal. We then took a quick look at the other areas in the north-west, finding the Ring of High Kings. Back we went to the ToEF. I don't remember the exact sequence of events, but during our assault on the tower we learned many things like a) that we could safely leave items on Barbarian island, b) that sacrificing 30K gp on an altar would let us turn water into holy water, c) that blessed things survived longer in the ToEF, how a Djinn ring works (we needed another Fireproof Blanket). Eventually we managed to defeat the tower by blessing our potions of corruption, removing all our corruptions, blessing our fireproof blanket, and finally, stripping butt naked and entering the ToEF with just a fireproof blanket and a wand of digging. It still wasn't a walk in the park, but we already had a strategy of kiting the boss and it worked well again. Web was a help.

Now we had two orbs and headed back into the CoC. I should note here that I was usually leaving certain critical items behind on Barbarian island. Things that I was worried might get destroyed like our potions of Holy Water, the new ring, the potions of corruption removal, etc. That worked against us eventually, as we had to return to the surface for that ring at one point. Even though we had cleaned ourselves of corruption, the trips up and down the CoC were taking their toll again. All of our corruptions were returning. We worked our way past obstacle after obstacle, the Eternal Guardian, the Cat Lord, the F'ing Bunny Guy, the Orb of Earth, the Orb of Air and finally the bottom.

Wait a minute, why are there spots for 5 orbs? For some reason I remembered Khelvastar saying four orbs, but chat found his text for me (I won't look stuff up because I'm avoiding spoilers). Damn, there are 5 orbs. Well, down into the Unreal Dungeon and....OMFG what a pain in the ass! Mister Biskup, if you are reading this, I once made a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon with a trap on every square. I was twelve years old! Okay?

This fight was a bitch, but we had a lot of tools (spells) at our disposal now. We learned that we can essentially cast spells forever as long as we have Cure Critical Wounds and a lot of food. We tried to take out the Wizards first because they would spawn new mobs. Sadly it wasn't until the end of the fight where we figured out what was causing our mana problems. This fight will be different next time. We died many times but eventually won through due to the magic of save-scumming. Finally we had our last orb.

We placed the last orb and descended to level 49. We cut a short-cut through level 49 and descended to 50. And this is where the story comes to the end. So many monsters, so much corruption. We had been stacking up corruptions for a while, but now they were coming every 20 or 30 turns it seemed. We were winning the battle mind you. We where making progress down that hall slowly but surely, step by step. But then, without warning, we ran out of Cure Critical Wounds.

That was the end. Without the ability to heal we couldn't proceed. I could restore to before we entered level 49, but frankly that probably doesn't solve the problem. We have so much corruption and so few spells that I don't think we can win through. I have two choices, a) retreat out of the dungeon and try to find more spells and a solution to our corruption or b) start a new character and try to get here more efficiently. I'm torn honestly. The more I think about it though, the more I like the idea of retreating Sirendel, who is quite capable now, and seeing if we can't just explore the world a little more, forgetting about the CoC for a while. I mean, we have gills and can breath water!

Thank you for reading. For those who are interested if you want to watch a newbie struggle with the game, I stream on twitch as any2ldo, usually from 5:00pm-9:00pm PST during the week and earlier on weekends.

-Dan