(DCSS = Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup)
Found a suspicious vault locked by crystal doors (can only be opened by the player), read a scroll of revelation to see what’s inside.
Holy shit. A storm dragon, a hell knight, a deep elf annihilator?! Even on a fully cleared floor this party will kill you outright.
Mean game.


I’ve kind of stopped opening crystal doors until I’ve cleared at least another floor. I’m not sure, if you still get the same total XP when you do that, but just died a few too many times from crystal vaults…
They rarely provide anything really good for characters who can clear them while also forcing you to burn through lots of your consumables. It can be fun though, a nice way to remind yourself that this game has permadeath and you can’t just smash two buttons until victory.
No worries, I find plenty opportunities to remind myself of that. Currently playing a troll of Xom, because I’m dumb. And one time, the jackass teleports me into the middle of the fortress in Elf:2. Had to read 3 teleport scrolls, because they kept teleporting me just to different parts of the fortress, since I guess that fortress is quite large.
Apparently, I was too panicked to take a screenshot of that, but here’s another fun one from Xom’s teleportation shenanigans:
The most brutal part is that he always teleports you a variable number of times and you never know for sure, whether he’ll stop there, so I also have a version of that screenshot with
--more--at the bottom, where I still had hopes that he’d port me back out of there. He did not. 🫠Xom is always such a hellish ride lol! I didn’t play them since 0.32, need to check them out again with the new bazaars.