Dungeon 3 Turn 11
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Ricki slaps herself in the face and uses her Grit ability. This dungeon is off to a rough start, but that’s just par for the course. She’s not giving up now. She’s not giving up ever.
Ricki trades her two bottles full of magic water for the buckler and torch, then raises the torch high so Kamau can see to take a swing at the stalkroach. It takes modest damage, but its tough carapace deflects most of it. It darts quickly past Kamau and skitters down the ladder into the room below.
“Welp. Chances are we’re going to see that thing again, so be careful next time you open a chest.”
Kamau: Grab the leather armor then climb down the ladder
Ricki: Climb down the ladder
What’s the overall next plan, guys? After we clear out the skeletons in the first room, where do we want to go from there? The three paths I can see are pulling the lever behind the sunhead, going through the doorway past the sunhead with the rusty longsword, or dropping down 2 floors past the three skeleton dogs.
I imagine the lever does something useful, and if I had to guess, it gives us a way to climb back up from what appears to be the chandelier winch, either dropping a rope or a ladder from the gap above. There’s obviously no proof, but I think it’s still a good option, and if this is what it does, we won’t take falling damage + can return to face the ghoul pope immediately. If not, we at least have access to the lever for when we need to use it, and I think the armor drop is guaranteed (if you check the Enemies tab, there are three enemies [King Rat, Snale, Thug] with 100% drop chances).
Fighting the sunhead with the rusty longsword should be okay as long as the armor lasts for the 2-3 turns we need, even after adding the +2 from the sword. This is also a good option and exploring is always a good idea. It’s turn 10 now, and it doesn’t seem like the skeletons moved (unless the ones in the first room were supposed to if not attacked), so we may have 10 more turns before the pope does something.
Fighting the three dogs will probably be okay for Kamau, the skeletons do 1 damage, I would hazard a guess that the dogs do 2 at most. What I’m most concerned about is the fall damage to Ricki. Dropping 1 floor does no damage, but I think 2 floors would deal one damage at least, and Remorse doesn’t care about where the damage came from. We could try to have Kamau and Ricki acrobatics to the floor with the flyguy, but I don’t know. And if Kamau were to be the only one to drop, then we’d be splitting the party (again), and we’re already 0/2 on that being a good idea here.
Dungeon Eyes Map
Then we must drop the lever! Scam past that sun guy, defend, get into the next room. Pull the lever!
Acrobatics, actually. If Kamau would be the first to go 1 floor down (grab onto the edge and hang/flip to underside instead of falling like a rock), then while already standing just 1 floor below, he could help Ricky to get there safely – she’d just do the same and he’d asecurate/grab her if something goes wrong. Even if it uses a major action instead of just some movement, I think they still could do it in one turn. Flyguy probably won’t react immediately either on them showing up. It’s slow, one level per turn, two turns at worst, but should be doable and should be safe.
So my idea is:
By the way, that blueish multi-legged monster behind the door resembles a basilisk from somewhere else. I don’t like his eyes, but I doubt it would permanently pertify our guys in dungeon just #3.
By the way, I’m curious about the rat-hole behind the centipede. Assuming all such tunnels are straight, then it doesn’t lead to anything visible, so it goes up.
Another observation: the cockroach runs away. Too bad I had no chance of saying it, but if we blocked the stairs down somehow, the only way it could run away is up and to the dogs. But since it went down, the only options are:
I suppose the first two and last two options are as just unlikely.
Don’t open it if we see it’s closed IMHO, we’ll get puched again.
Maybe Kamau could try lifting the lid just a little and thrust the sword several times right into the gap. But that’s just a fun activity. I suppose cockroach would keep merrily sitting in the chest until disturbed.
Or it goes to the right, into one of the unexplored rooms.
@Claudious mentioned (in the discord) that the black skeletons might be protecting a bundle of rope. I thought it was a buckler originally, but if you compare the size of this to the buckler we found at the beginning of dungeon 1 (holding the cheese) it’s way too big. We may want to consider taking on the black skeletons using the graveflowers and the holy water as our 4th option.
I don’t want to go for the drop past the skeleton dogs if we can help it. I agree that there’ll almost definitely be a rope for that open chimney, which could get us back out after we take the long way around.
I think our next move (depending on what has changed) should be to check out the rightmost room past the sun-head with a sword. That will tell us if the Ghoul Pope is just blocking our way to the alternate exit, and revealing more of the dungeon gives us a chance to find our objective. I think that the Ghoul Pope is like the King Rat last time, it’d be nice to get their loot but our primary goal should take priority.
This is going to be the Kamau show for a while. Ricki just can’t tackle uncertain obstacles by herself, even when armoured, at least as long as we keep getting hit by monsters we’ve never seen before for consistently slightly more damage than armour. The undead really haven’t been the problem in this dungeon.
We know the Stalkroach isn’t in the last chest in the room, so let’s go for it!
And get ambushed by another Stalkroach!Kamau: Attack the Spider.
Ricki: Wait somewhere safe.
Spiders tend to be poisonous. We’ve got a healing potion, and we know it works on poisons somewhat, but I’d save the potion for when we have to mend wounds after seemingly-mandatory things like levers or dogs.
Kamau: move down ladder and engage sun-head by lever.
Ricki: follow kamau down and move to room on the right. Stay out of trouble.
Same tactic that worked last time. We could spend 2 turns interposing to flip switch or just 3 rounds to kill and have backup armor. We really need to know what that lever does.
Also, as animated armor I don’t think it would change targets
Totally this, plus backup plan I wrote in other comment. And since Ricky has probably some free time, take or at least inspect that armour from the chest. It just popped out, we didn’t hear what it is exactly.
Backup armor is great, 90% is good, but not 100% safe.
I’d leave the sun-head by the lever until we see what is beyond the chandelier room. I’m also curious if anything happened to the chandelier itself with a sun-head dead.
Note that we now have leather backup armour, so getting a new set of solar armour would only cost 3 HP rather than 6 (and fewer if we get a Counterattack). I believe that two turns of Kamau + Ricki attacks will drop a sun-head, so from the upper floor of the entrance we could have Kamau head right and Interpose while Ricki dashes through to explore the next room, and then either Ricki backtracks to spend the two turns with Kamau to kill the sun-head with a sword, or Kamau just advances. We might not even need to return through that hallway, if we can unlock that shortcut back by the skeleton dogs.
Get the armor.
If the bats clear out the skeletons, it is perhaps worthwhile raging the next set of bats to attack. I’d like to see what the lever does first.
Wow, I totally missed the fact, that in the chandelier room with Pope/etc, there are 5 bats. Enraging them could actually allow us (um, that is, allow Ricky) to observe what the pope can do in battle. Nice idea, but the best to execute it when(if) we somehow block the entrace and get everyone (Ricky) into a safe spot for watching the show under.
We have 2 options. Either clear the sunhead on the way to the lever room, or clear the dire rat above pope, which should be no problem now that Ricki is so tanky. In fact, I just noticed that she has 4 armor?? I guess that means stalkroaches ignore armor. Or deal 5 damage, but this sounds unlikely for a lurking enemy. Would be lame if that thing can almost one-shot unarmed Ricki.
I’m far less enthusiastic about this plan now that three bats failed to take down a skeleton. The skeletons will probably win that fight, with the bats being just dodgy enough to still have one or two stick around to switch targets and attack us again when we try to fight the skeletons.
Please do not forget that we took a lot of damage, Kamau might leave.
Just two (2!) more points of damage to Ricki, and Kamau DOES leave. We should avoid any damage to Ricki even more than usual.
Kamau: start hacking at the boarded up windows. This is a solar temple. LET IN THE SUNLIGHT!
Ricki: set another boarded up window on fire with a torch. Where’s universal solvent when you need it?