ADOM Update

Nine months later, I’m still playing Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM). The character I was playing back when I blogged about ADOM did win, but with plenty of “scum saving” in between. It means that if my character died or did something particularly stupid, I simply restarted at the last save. While that’s not in the spirit of ADOM’s permadeath setup, I felt it was a good way to learn more of the game.

 

After the success of the hurthling archer (level 41), and subsequently losing several other characters in early deaths, my second character to win was a drakeling barbarian (level 35, 96 days in the Drakalor chain). There was also a little scum-saving so I could learn to deal with the strange effects of being cold-blooded. This made the Tower of Eternal Flames quest exciting and nail-biting and the final level was a little harder because my character needed to recover from the cold in the penultimate level. For both these wins, I avoided big boss Fistanarius, used a magic map, a wand of digging, and a wand of destruction on the levers. Both normal endings; I’ve never done an ultra-ending.

 

At this point, I decided I will no longer scum-save even if I have a promising character that makes it to the mid or late game. And many don’t. The next character who almost won, a human necromancer (level 39), died fighting Fistanarius. It was very close and I should have healed but thought I could withstand one more blow and Fistanarius was on his last legs. Then there was the gnome assassin (level 37), who got killed by the emperor moloch – I was doing well on the Filk quest up to that point. My third win, and my first with no scum-saving was a gnome priest (level 39); this is also my highest score at 14,747,264 points. Then there were two deaths (level 27 and level 31 characters) to Katharamandus, the stone dragon. I hadn’t gauged the difficulty because my hurthling archer didn’t have too much trouble completing the Rolf quest. That’s the one and only time I finished what Rolf asked.

 

I had my fourth win this weekend, with a little scum-saving because I had a dwarf chaos knight, which meant a very different game. I had lost several chaos knights in the early game, and when this one made it to the mid-game, I wanted to keep going. I fed the Demented Ratling six artifacts, but had hardly any wild boar encounters and no boar head so I gave up on that quest and decided it would be okay to finish as a most stupid follower of chaos. My character was very powerful (level 40) and I’ve never gotten so many artifacts. I easily beat molochs and balors on the final level. Because the strategy was different, I learned a lot in this last game.

 

At this point I’ve played 60+ characters, always randomly generated by Fate. Interestingly, of the top eight high scores (the finishers and the ones who made it to the mid-game), seven were female including all four finishers. Not sure why; a possibility is that I pay more attention to the Appearance stat and maybe my characters saw less corruption overall. I created my next character on New Year’s Eve, my first on a special day. Fate chose a male gnome wizard; he’s a bit boozy but maybe he’ll survive. And maybe he’ll thrive.