Dungeon 3 Turn 7
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Ricki and Kamau work together to finish off the sun thing, though Kamau takes a final 2 damage in the process. The strange creature’s armour remains behind after its glowing head explodes, battered from the fight but still in usable condition. Kamau picks it up.
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SOLAR ARMOUR, TARNISHED
Armour
Def+3, or Def +4 against holy damage. 10% chance to break after being attacked.
Weight 4, Cost 30
That’s amazing armor. Hopefully it doesn’t auto aggro the other sunheads. I think we should go activate bats at the exit to deal with the skellies now. I don’t think chests have ever contained more than 2 items so as long as Ricki has space we can follow after Kamau and swap later.
Kamau: take dagger, torch and buckler from Ricki. Give Ricki thieves tools. Move down ladder and through door towards exit.
Ricki: trade as above, check for traps on chest then open chest.
Ricki: Give Kamau the dagger, then open the chest
Kamau:
Go down the ladder, back through the door, and throw the knife at the bats so they can fight the skeletons next turnWait a turn, we don’t need to rush and we should protect Ricki a little moreKamau: Open chest, pick up loot. Equip armor, trade thieves tools and sword for Ricki’s torch and dagger, move down a room.
Ricki: Unlock middle left door.
For the record…
Counterattack: 0/3 (20%)
Careful Thief: 1/3 (50%)
As long as Kamau starts next turn in the entrance room, even if upstairs, he’ll be able to wake the bats. Rushing down might be good though, if skeletons started moving while we were busy.
Interesting, other sun-heads will be easier to handle, though we still need to worry about losing light. Wonder if fists are still holy, though defense 6 Kamau wouldn’t notice.
You’re assuming sunheads deliver holy damage. Seeing that the armor *defends* against holy damage hints that’s not the case. Why would you defend yourself against the kind of damage you’re dealing out?
Sunheads’ ranged attack is a beam weapon, and when engaged in melee they stop using it. If it were an area effect the armor would make sense, but it’s not. As Xykon said: “Incidentally, here’s a pro tip for you: if you’re going to use area effect spells, craft yourself a magic item that makes you immune to that type of damage.”
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0653.html
Holy damage is generally associated with light, and in this case I interpret the armor as a construct designed to house this holy spirit of light. From another perspective, the armor needs to be designed to survive contact with its wearer – I’d expect armor for a fire elemental to be particularly resistant to heat.
both the sun people as well as the undead pope (or other undead we still have to encounter) might be able to deal out holy damage (that MIGHT be un-holy in case of the undead pope, but iirc there’s good and evil gods in D&D, so another option could be that the undead pope’s god is evil, but still provide holy damage to his followers).
The armor works *better* against holy damage? Shouldn’t it work better against undead damage, or something? The sun thing is there to…defend against holy attackers?
Lost EIGHT of our party’s total of 24 possible hit points. That’s one-third, against this single
monsterfoe. Look how many others are left in the dungeon. Imagine Kamau loses 2hp in each fight hereafter, and that’s 5 monsters capability total. Choose fights carefully and deliberately.Unfortunately it seems fighting is pretty much all there is to do in this dungeon. I’m all for clever solutions but this whole place is just tableaux of combat encounters. Oh well, spend our hp, grab some treasure and retreat. Kind of sucks that LSN spent all that time designing this content we’ll never get to experience, though. That pet rat would have been super cool.
This area has the chandelier and probably a bell to interact with at least. Not to mention at least 3 more rooms to see yet. I think the rat would have been terrible since it could accidently get one shotted and then Kamau would instantly leave.
Yeah but you know the bell is going to be behind a boss monster. Which we have better saved up a ton of hp to deal with. But fighting our way through the dungeon is going to attrition us down. Regardless of Ricki’s Grit if she takes 3 more damage the dungeon is over. And you know there are going to be traps on those chests and doors that will take off Ricki’s hp.
Correct – choose fights carefully. We won’t be opening every one of these mini rooms. In this case, we got some amazing armor; Kamau’s soaking 6 damage per turn now, and that low break chance is the only thing keeping him from basically soloing the rest of the dungeon. As long as we find our objective, that’s another level up, and it has also been hinted that there’s a friend to be found here.
Looking at the layout on the map, I agree now that the winch looks like it’s connected to the chandelier. I think that the lever will drop the chandelier, but resetting the lever won’t lift the chandelier back up – it’s a ratchet on the gears. We’d need to use the winch to raise the chandelier, and if the lever isn’t reset then the chandelier would drop again the moment you let go of the winch. The winch might even take multiple actions to raise the chandelier, bringing it partway up each time.
The chandelier and winch look to be made of the same material as the solar armour. I wonder if we could put these sun spirits into the “candles”…
As for sun-head HP… now that we know the armour itself is +3, that implies at least 4 defense with 1 base, and since Kamau dealt nonzero damage with the sword (so 5 attack), I’ll assume 4 defense with that 5 attack. With that, it took 1 damage first, then 3 damage with Ricki’s assistance, and another 3 damage finished it off – that’s 5-7 HP, likely 5 as that seems to be a reasonable number.
Alternatively, perhaps the spirit itself has 0 defense as the 5-damage attack was still “modestly” effective, and with that it’d be 2 damage, then 4, then KO with 4 for 7-10 HP.
Side note, if Counterattack had triggered even once, then Kamau’s extra attack would’ve likely destroyed it outright. An extra 5 damage after breaking through those defenses is brutal.
Also, the armour is valuable. 7.5 gold per slot isn’t bad, we could carry up to three out with 4 slots left over to save our sword and other good equipment.
Don’t forget that at least for non-treasure items, the cost is halved when stuff gets sold. So that’s 15 gold for 4 slots for each set of tarnished solar armour. Still, nothing to sneeze at. 😉