Dungeon 6 Turn 7
————
Ricki attacks the nearest dire rat, defeating it in a single strike. Her newly-arrived pet wolf spider attacks the other one, dealing minor damage. The rat hits back, as do the two squirrels, who throw acorns without leaving their positions. The wolf spider takes 3 damage in total.
Ricki had been expecting more help with this fight. She wonders what happened.
Lara goes back to the basement to retrieve the keys she saw after leaving her cigarettes in the kitchen. Without Ricki to point the trap out, she steps on the trap door and falls to the room below. Fortunately her heavy armour protects her from the remaining wolf spiders, and she grabs the keys without issue. She sees they are labeled “master bedroom”. She also notices one of the medium skull-shaped glyphs on the door goes dark at just that moment for no apparent reason.
Lohk (after leaving her potion in the kitchen), Daisy, and Macadamia attempt to go through the hole and join Ricki, but they also fall through a trap door. They land on a floor trigger which explodes, dealing 2 damage to Daisy but not harming the goblin or kobold. The sound of the explosion also causes a hidden rat king to emerge from underneath the bed! It notices the three hapless dungeoneers and prepares to attack next turn!
Lara wonders what that muffled “boom” followed by a slightly less muffled “bah” was all about.
So we learned that Ricki does needs to be present to alert allies of traps. Did we seriously go 5 dungeons without doing that? I swear some characters must have avoided traps without Ricki before
I don’t think Ricki ever pointed out the traps in this room…Edit: She did. Turns out people suck at remembering traps.
On the bright side, the Squirrels don’t have rabies! 😛
I think she did somehow. We already repeated many times about sidestepping the trapdoors and pressure plate. It may be though that in the last turn 6 we forgot to repeat it all again.
I’ve just checked. All the serious upvoted plans with actions had at least some general warning about traps, even calling them trap-doors. So it is all about Ricky, as the text says: Ricky never left the room behind the hole, and since we tell people what to do, but we can’t pass any knowledge to them, and only Ricky can detect traps.. It also seems that the knowledge about how a trap does look like does not “stick” to people’s brains, and has to be repeated by Ricky all the time again and again. It’s a wonder this has not kicked us in our asses earlier. I think that earlier just by accident all the inventory shuffling caused Ricky to go back and meet people, hence we didn’t notice. It may also have something to deal with how well a trap is hidden. I suppose only highly-obvious things like broken glass can be called out without Ricky’s detection skills.
She definitely did, otherwise Lara would’ve fallen through the first time.
Now that we know this is a requirement, Ricki could’ve popped back through the hole, pointed them out, then gotten back with Dash. Oh well.
We were vaguely warned about this by Lara in the Kobold warrens. I took that commentary as a chance to let us know we’d really disarmed the trap, but it was also I guess a warning that characters are dumb and forget where stuff is.
Ooooh, you mean that moment when Ricky merrily stepped on a pressure plate and said it’s inactive?
Yep! That moment started with Lara being like “where were those things again?”
We had boots before, plus the pressure plates in the Warrens were useless after the trapped chest was opened. We also haven’t done too much splitting up.
Alright. Lesson for the future. Ricky had 2 mov, so she could have came back here, remind everyone about traps, then go back do her things. BAH!
And it actually exploded. For 3 dmg apparently, and character’s DEF was protecting against that, just like when Kamau was hit with a bold. Poor Daisy with her tiny 1 DEF.
I don’t remember how much dmg does a rat-pile do. KingMarth notes say it has 5atk 0def and hp ~10. I think it was immobile? We should get Daisy out of combat and reach. Just go back to the locked door, and don’t join the combat for now.
Then Mac attack it in melee with 3atk, and Lohk with ranged/frost with 2atk. Rat pile will be killed in 2 turns. Mac has 5 def, Lohk has 6 def, they won’t be hurt immediately. Mac may be hurt a bit when a tiny rat is spawned after the pile is hit.
Daisy can later try biting any rats that spawn due to us hitting the pile, but only later when the rat pile is dead. Not now.
When they defeat the rat pile, if noone opened the door yet, I suggest moving the bed close to the hole in the ceiling. They won’t be able to open the chest and move it onto the bed without Ricky though, but I think the bed and Daisy on it would be enough. With Daisy down to 2 HP I would actually keep her safe in that room until we heal her with meat/etc.
The Rat King deals 5 Damage and Pets don’t get attacked unless they’re attacking. It can’t do anything to us,
so we can ignore it.Edit: Forgot the kill everything door for a moment. I vote for everyone but pets attacking!
The rat king is definitely not immobile, we lost an action to that when I thought we could pick off a regular rat at a distance without pulling enemies over. I just realized we also missed an opportunity to ranged attack a centipede and pull them into the known trap, oh well.
I guessed 10 HP, but they’ve taken at least 8 HP in damage and my bias has been to guess low HP. I’d suspect something more like 15. I initially guessed 5 HP from how it definitely has 5 attack and thus might have been 5 rats stuck together. Dealing lots of damage at once is preferable, each individual attack spawns a rat.
Ricki: Kill other dire rat. Send wolf spider to kill a squirrel.
Lohk: Loot the chest. Try to climb back out through that hole you fell through, on a party member or pushing the chest over.
Macadamia: Attack the rat king.
Lara: Join Macadamia and attack the rat king.
8 damage wasn’t enough to clear a rat king, we’ll see what we manage. I’m guessing each monster under the bed is a different type of enemy.
We risk wolf spider death here, which isn’t great but I want that potential healing to go to Daisy before something else causes trouble.
EDIT: I wonder how the rats spawned from the rat king would work with the door. If they don’t light up skulls but do put them out when killed, then we could farm our kills here. That’s probably why we can’t, not sure if clever or boring.
Won’t attacking the rat king cause small rats to spill from the pile and attack? We need double duty attacking the pile and the small rat. It will take forever to kill the rat king. I believe one of the reasons they were in the Vault was to make us waste turns fighting them. We are under similar time strain here considering the specter.
Hmm, not supporting this anymore, animals tend not to switch targets so this would expect to kill the wolf spider rather than just risking it.
We technically haven’t tried to open the skull door, so we might not need to kill all monsters, but clearing the rat king is likely to advance dungeon progression and also let us relax a little when getting people out of that room.
So the NPCs will be unable to avoid the traps they have already avoided if they aren’t told by Ricki on that turn to avoid them again even if the chat instructs them to avoid them on that turn? Do we have to trigger/disarm traps before we can trust the NPCs in a trapped room?
This does provide a reason to disarm traps, otherwise it would be more efficient to just always avoid them.
HEAL DAISY
Frankly, this can wait. Unless Daisy gets into another AoE effect, she just has to NOT be ordered to help us in combat, and she’ll be totally safe and fine. And for now, we don’t see any AoE traps or enemies around. Also, we’ll need healing if we use any perma-enchantment scrolls. So.. I’d wait with that.
(Yeah, I know, meat, but there’s a stove, and we may finally try out cooking the meat to see if it can heal non-pets as well)
Maca: Attack Rat King
Lohk: Attack the little rat that spawns, or if you can’t do that, loot the chest.
Ricki: Go through the hole, stick your head down the trapdoor, point out the pressure plate just in case it can be triggered again, then point out the trapdoor to Lara as she climbs up, then go back through the hole & kill the Dire Rat
Lara: Drop into the bedroom with Lohk and Maca and attack the Rat King, avoiding the other trapdoor and the pressure plate that Ricki will be pointing out for you, and do your best to commit those to memory (what memory?)
WolfSpider: Eat the dire rat corpse. Why not, right?
Daisy: Hide under the bed and lick your wounds.
Will Ricki disengaging trigger the rat attacks? If so, you may be risking the wolf spider.
Wolf Spider can’t be targeted if it’s not fighting — that’s how pets work. Which is why I don’t have it attack this round.
This will do 10-15 damage to the Rat King (whether we get night eyes here, and if the heavy pick crits). Hopefully 10 is enough to kill a Rat King. Worst case where the king survives and we’re not allowed to pick off the adds before they’re able to join combat, we’re looking at 7 damage next round.
With luck, the wolf spider can heal from rat corpses, but if not, it’s not like we have anything better for it to do. I’d rather not sacrifice it now, when the fight is safe, when we could profitably have it soak damage fighting a skeleton-pack.
Poor Daisy, we’ll get you some raw meat asap, just gotta do a couple things first.
As long as we split attacks, that 7 damage won’t hurt anyone. The rat kings in the Vault were a problem because either Ricki was on her own with one or Kamau was taking all the hits before we got heavy armour.
“HEY I WARNED YOU ABOUT THAT PRESSURE PLATE”
While it won’t change the game rules, and won’t suddenly make team members remember all the traps we ever pointed out — I really want to see that line happening, and hear their response 😀
I have not seen it mentioned yet, so: killing the Dire Rat darkened a medium skull. I believe skeletons had 4 hp vs a dire rat’s 3, so skull size does not look to be HP based. It may be based on base attack value, skeleton’s have a base of 1, so small skull, dire rat has a base of 2 so medium skull. Centipede may be a base 2 with extra poison damage.
With this hypothesis, big skulls may be a 3 base attack, which fits with the owlbear. Wolf Spiders would be a medium with 2 base attack.
It’ll be interesting to see how rats and squirrels affect the skulls.
Can we get some key speculation going? We’ve got a tower key and now a master bedroom key. The grandest bedroom in scope we’ve seen is the one that the large bat is in, in the tower, so that COULD be the master bedroom. It’s possible the entire screen underneath the entrance is the master bedroom, as there is a locked door blocking access to it. Another possibility is that the master bedroom key is actually the “master” key that opens all bedrooms.
So far as the tower key goes, the entire complex that holds the big bat is in the tower it seems. The tower key could open the locked door blocking access to the bat, but it also might open the door blocking access to the tower as a WHOLE. There is a ladder accessing the tower, but there’s also a door leading out of the library and into a room below the screen the big bat is on. I’d really like to try the tower key on the door leading out of the library.
I think the Master bedroom key opens one of the doors leading to an areas that we have not explored yet. I would guess that it is the one next to the library.
My speculation on the keys as a whole is that there are 6 in total, one in each room except the entrance, for the six doors that we currently see. I kinda expect there to be a 7th locked door with the key being behind the picture in the entrance, but that is just a random guess.
If you break the dungeon into two groups of three rooms, not counting the entrance, so library, supposed master bedroom, with tower on top, and unexplored room, workshop, and kitchen, they will form the same corner pattern. The kitchen key looks to go to the tower and the supposed master bedroom would line up with the workshop. So my guess is that the key we see in the library will open the door to the unexplored room next to the workshop, the tower key will open the kitchen, the supposed master bedroom key opens the workshop bedroom, and the key in the unexplored basement room will go to the library.
Request to Combatdoctor: Could the map include a “last updated” entry to indicate the most recent turn included? Even fancier would be to have each room marked with when we last saw it, but it’d be nice to know at a glance if the map hasn’t caught up yet.
Great idea. I was thinking something like that when we did warrens, but I forgot to say that. It’s a quite important info and easy to trace. Current vals (and history):
And: The chest in the first room behind the centipede has been looted, the keys next to the skull door have been fetched, the three (!) other occurrences of two white things below beds should be “enemy” instead of “trap?” (or not even marked, as in the Big BAT room).
The two rat holes in the library: When did we confirm that they are connected to each other vertically? They can be linked horizontally to the right instead, can’t they?
Thank you for maintaining the map!
Every rat hole has been connected by a straight grid-aligned line. Also, last turn:
Ricki wiggles her way up the vertical tunnel, going a lot farther than she’s used to with these secret passages, but somehow not taking any extra time. She emerges into a room seemingly higher than any of the others already found.
This room must be directly above the skull door room, and while it could be even further up, we can fix that when we have information to the contrary. For now, it fits there.
That isn’t evidence of the library holes not going right, since the room Ricki is in is at least one floor higher than the library. That being said I really think they go up and down.
Thanks, I forgot about those.
You’re right, besides what Marth said, I had incorrectly placed the newest room on the same level, and was thinking “well now we know what room is horizontal to it, there can’t be any other option”. While it most likely is still correct, the logic behind it is faulty, so I will remove the arrow until we truly have confirmation.
Great idea, I’ll update it once I get off work (lol)
Late observation: did you notice that the dog-skeleton, the one that was beheaded by Mac, actually disappeared? I was totally expecting for it to stay, and that we’ll see a skull by the wall and the rest where it was. But LSN decided to remove it instead, like a dead enemy, or like a used-up consumable item. How odd. There may be more to these skeletons. I think cleaning them up is a good idea.
Since we already have full hands of murdering everything, and running around with keys, and whatnot, I somewhat doubt the dogs will wake up and add to the skeleton pool. However, it’s quite possible that we’ll see a gray-ish puzzle-questionmark-chest that will require disposing of all such skeletons. So why not do it in the meantime, low-priority. For example, if an action would be otherwise wasted, kick some bones out of boredom.
On that same token, I’d really like to get a better picture of the total enemies in the dungeon before destroying too many dogs.
Good point about it disappearing. .maybe they are linked to mystery chest requirement
I’m suspicious of the raw meat on the table with the fly swarm. Might be a good idea to test it on the wolf spider to see if it gets sick.