Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Lighting fires in UnAngband

Last night I had been rummaging around my pack in UnAngband looking for something to combat the trolls. On closer inspection of the flasks of oil I realised that they would possibly do fire damage if smeared on arrows and my sword. (Don't know why it took me so long to think of it, I'd been dipping my arrows in all sorts of things before). So off I trundle to the forest with oil glistening from every pointy bit.

While searching for trolls a goblin sprang up out of the bushes, to which I immediately ran through with my longsword.
"you have no more arrows (1d6 +0 +0) ".
?? Huh?.
There were a number of other messages, but this one caught my attention. I fobbed it off as something the goblin did and looked for useful things on the ground after the goblin's demise. Nothing but mushrooms. I step over to one and I lose another arrow. WTF??. That's when I 'l'ooked around to find that it wasn't mushrooms I was collecting, but fire. My oil coated longsword not only dispatched the goblin, but lit up a patch of the ground. "hey, that's cool".

I headed off to continue looking for the trolls when I noticed that the fire was following me. Back-tracking to see what was going on revealed that the fire wasn't moving, it was spreading. I'm in a forest. There's grass and trees. There's a fire that's spreading..... Uh Oh ...

I could easily outpace the fire front, but I was concerned at the size it was getting. One whole side of the map was alight. "Hmm", I thought, "I wonder if I can lure the troll into it. Would that still count as a kill?". Off I went through the forest with a swathe of destruction behind me. The message bar was delighted to inform me of unknown creatures meeting their demise in the conflagration. There were still some buildings through the forest and I poked into one to pick up some more potions, but took too long and the fire had me surrounded. If it's a true fire it would burn out eventually, so I rested a while until the message bar stopped with it's death notes. I stepped outside into a charred landscape. It was all gone. Save for a little pile of gold over there ... and a hat over there. Luckily the fire hadn't wiped out all the goodies left behind from its victims.

I spent a while picking up the "profits" of my devastation, but couldn't find a troll statue to signify my main goal had been achieved. It was cool though ....