Dungeon 6 Turn 39
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Lohk opens the chest. Three grave flowers spill out, as does a stalkroach. However, Ricki had noticed the creature’s antennae poking out, so she, Macadamia, and Daisy all immediately work together to decapitate the creature before it can fully emerge. However, even without its head it’s still able to throw a punch, because cockroach. Lohk takes no damage due to her high Def, despite the two rats still attacking as well.
Meanwhile, Lara charges the owlbear and takes a swing at it with her greataxe. She deals a large amount of damage, but the beast can soak a nigh-bookwormesque amount of damage. Lara narrowly avoids damage from its counterattack.
Macadamia: Pick up the grave flowers. Move out of the rat hole and then downstairs to the kitchen pathway.
Ricki: Move out of the rat hole, down to the kitchen pathway, and then use your action to move an additional screen to the entryway.
Lohk: Move out of the rat hole, down to the kitchen pathway, out to the entryway, then use your action to move an additional screen to the kitchen loot pile. Drop the oxidicer with our ever growing pile of loot.
Lara: Attack the owlbear again with your greataxe.
Explanation:
This gets the smalls moving back towards the owlbear and the hole behind it that leads to the kidney pincher so we can pull our ambush tactic. It’ll probably be another two or so turns before we can try it unfortunately, as I think we want Macadamia and Ricki to also drop off some items before we try for the ambush (the grave flowers and stake at the very least). Using Macadamia’s action to move next turn will get him back to the foyer after dropping off the grave flowers. Ricki can go drop off the stake and use an action to try moving the cupboard (with Lohk’s help if necessary), and Lohk can pop down to the basement to get eyes on the door before heading back to the foyer. This relies on the assumption that the cupboard items can be moved to the floor at the same time so we don’t end up splitting the loot pile. Afterwards they all can end their turn in the foyer, hopefully on the top floor away from the bat and ready to pull the ambush the following turn, assuming we’ve finished off the owlbear by then.
Shouldnt we kill the rats first? We are getting dangerously close to our permanent hp loss being 0 for the small characters. It is almost a 1 in 20 chance that one of the 3hp chars gets chosen the next 3 times. So that’s a time limit of 11 turns
We shouldn’t need to kill these rats. The last time we saw the door we were at 18 out of 24 small skulls darkened. Having killed 3 rats, we should be at 21 out of 24 small skulls darkened. We can now kill two of the bats with the kidney pincher and leave the bat in the entryway for our last skull to open the door. Since the conditions of the dungeon are somewhat likely to change when the door is unsealed, I think it’s better to control when we clear the last skull. Because the dangerous enemies that are our medium and large skulls both need to be killed and block access to potential loot, it seems best to leave the small skulls to be cleared at our leisure (or what passes for leisure in this hellhole).
We might want to have Lohk confirm that while she’s in the kitchen. I’ve tried to figure out the skull count on previous turns, and I’ve never been able to get the equation 1 skull = 1 enemy to add up. So I’ve been assuming that each skull represents a certain number of hit points instead.
I’ve also been assuming that we have to kill every. single. enemy, based on what we read on turn 26 (“From the mightiest beast to the smallest mouse, all bar the way.”) and on the fact that we’re trying to clear this place out so we can live in it.
All that said, I hope I’m wrong! With three party members at 3 hp, and one about to go down to 2, the final boss fight could be a real nail-biter if we can’t even start it until we’ve taken out the kidney pincher and all its minions.
Last time we saw the door was before we killed these rats, the bat beast, and the stalkroach. I’m assuming the pet master’s Venom bat doesn’t count for these purposes, but we’ll know more after Lohk checks as you suggested. Below is our current total by skull type with pretty good confidence on what was what.
Small Skulls: 18/24 = 9 skeletons, 1 skeleton dog, 2 squirrels, 5 bats, 1 venom bat
Medium Skulls: 12/16 = 3 centipedes, 2 dire rats, 3 wolf spiders, 2 lady baatles, 1 baatle, 1 scorpion
Large Skulls: 2/5 = Rat King, Bookworm
Since then we’ve also killed the bat beast, 3 rats, and the stalkroach. We’re assuming the bat beast is large. We know the rats are small because when the rat king spit out two rats they turned some of the darkened small skulls back to lit, and killing them reversed this. We’re also assuming the stalkroach is medium because this aligns with everything else we’ve seen, under the assumption that the plague rats are medium and one of the weird blue dog and the kidney pincher are medium. So that would give us a current skull total of
Small Skulls: 21/24
Medium Skulls: 13/16
Large Skulls: 3/5
The problem with dropping items anywhere but the kitchen is that we can pick up an unlimited quantity of items (up to our encumbrance) as long as they’re nearby. If we start dropping items other places it’ll take multiple actions to grab them to get equipped for the boss or sell them. We’ve managed to keep basically everything of note centralized, and I’d like to keep it that way to as much of an extent as we can. Basically the only items we need or would like to grab before selling/finishing the dungeon are in the tower and the library – the scroll of enchantment for the library and the gold sword/pet egg in the tower.
We really should bite the bullet and get the egg before we forget or before LSN has the pet master mysteriously dissappear on us. Pets add such good amount of variety and we’ve already missed so many.
Turn 40 coming up next. The ‘nearest to tomb’ worked so far, who do we put next in line to say hello to the ghost?
Gosh darn cockroaches.
But good to know that it’s not unblockable damage
could be because we saw it comming.
It’s just 4 damage. Ricki had 3 defense when she opened the chest last time, and we already had confirmation that Ricki could have defended through the chest of rats with sufficient defense (the one in the rat vault that we didn’t bother with) so I was pretty confident we could defend through this attack too. That’s why I had Lohk opening the chest even though she had 0 spaces. She had enough defense to tank 2 rats and a 4 attack stalkroach punch.
The amount of anti-undead thingies (flowers, stakes) make me think they’ll be useful to destroy the body (like, put flowers on the casket, stake body with stakes, etc). But then, there were a lot of undead here, all of which we already disposed of, maybe these were just meant to help against them?
. (wrong place)I just want to point out of all the characters that were attacking the Stalkroach, Mac was the only one with a slicing weapon.