After playing Barbarians and Valkyries in Nethack for quite a while, I decided I'd like to try spellcasting for a bit, because that's a major part of the game with which neither of those classes really get to have much fun. The obvious class to play if you want to do spellcasting is a Wizard, so I had a go with those.
Most of my Wizards died in the early game due to poor AC and inadequate compensatory strategy. A very few managed to survive the high infant mortality, usually by means of happening to find some good armour early on; sadly I didn't do too well in the late game either, and managed to lose two perfectly good Wizards during the ascension run. (One was killed on Astral by me having seriously underestimated Pestilence, and the other died of poor equipment in the Sanctum due to a comedy WoC+BoH accident earlier on.)
However, third time lucky! My third Wizard to get as far as the Quest and Castle turned out to go all the way. (Despite some pretty poor play in several places, as you'll see if you read on.)
Like my previous two good Wizards, the key turning point was finding some good armour early on. There was a pair of speed boots just lying around DL1, which was probably the single most important thing. Then DL2 contained an enormous armour shop, which kitted me out with enough other stuff to get me AC 3.
(Getting your pet to follow you anywhere while wearing speed boots is a real hassle. I had to keep herding Greebo into corridors ahead of me and carefully not letting him get behind me again.)
Also on DL2 was the Mines entrance; the first couple of Mines levels turned out to be lit, so I debated going all the way to Minetown to shop; but the next level was dark, so I retreated and went to do Sokoban first in the basically traditional manner. Still, my brief Mines visit netted me a heap of daggers with which to start honing my bladework.
DL3 contained an altar; cross-aligned, but good enough to BUC-id things at least, which was handy – particularly since a potion of water I'd found elsewhere on the level turned out to be holy. Also on this level a floating eye left a corpse, which was nice of it; my starting inventory had included a blindfold, so I was now equipped to go back and do the rest of the Mines without too much fear of the dark. But I didn't, for the moment; I pressed on down to Sokoban.
On DL4 Greebo stole a helmet from a shop for me, which turned out to be +2 brilliance. Very nice.
First really dangerous moment of the game was on DL7, where a soldier ant laughed at my AC of 1 and nibbled me to within an inch of my life. I resorted to dropping a scroll of scare monster, but even that didn't help, because a giant ant came along instead and didn't seem scared by the scroll. So I retreated – and stepped into a bear trap! I thought I was a goner for sure then, but thankfully a quick prayer and three force bolts turned out to finish off all the opposition so I could get out of the bear trap at my leisure. Phew.
On DL8 I met a cross-aligned unicorn. Another common reason for my Wizards to die early is because I try just a little too hard to kill unicorns when I'm not really hard enough, on the grounds that the horn is just so damn useful and I can't quite bring myself to pass up a chance at it. This game was no exception, except that I didn't die: after a lot of frantic manoeuvring and swearing every time it teleported away, my speed boots eventually let me catch it at range and in a line of fire, and zap it fatally with a force bolt.
And then to Sokoban, which turned out to be the BoH version, which was fine by me. After all that angst about the white unicorn on DL8, I ended up killing three grey unicorns in Sokoban (of course it was easier because they couldn't teleport), the last of which gave me poison resistance for eating it. Yum yum.
Back up to the Mines, and tried them again. The Minetown shops were all feeble and the altar was cross-aligned, but I picked up my candles from Izchak at least and pressed on down.
The real find came on the level below Minetown: a bones pile containing Magicbane, a Hawaiian shirt, and a magic lamp. (This wasn't my first bones pile of the game; there'd been one on DL6 too, but it didn't have anything very interesting in it.) It also yielded enough other junk to make me Burdened, so I wandered back up to the main dungeon to stash some of it; while I was there I decided the time had come to make some more holy water and start on equipment improvement. So I blessed my BoH, and using my starting magic marker I did some enchantment of my HoB, starting cloak, and shirt. That brought me to AC -8, which I thought ought to be good enough to make soldier ants less of a worry.
Having done that, I returned to the Mines for the third time, this time making it all the way down to the bottom and collecting the luckstone. (It was the Catacombs version of Mine's End, but of course a character who starts with a CoMR can laugh at the level teleport booby traps.)
In the Mines I found a spellbook of create monster. So when I came out, I went straight back to my DL3 altar, converted it, and started creating monsters to sacrifice. Unfortunately I hadn't anticipated (and should have) that Pw regeneration would be a large limiting factor in this pursuit; after running out for the first time I gave up and decided to come back and do my sacrificing after I'd got the Eye.
So instead I did some bulk ID by blessing the various identify scrolls I'd picked up. That was very profitable. I found out that one of my random unIDed rings was free action and another was searching; I found out what SoEW was, with which I promptly enchanted both Magicbane and a big stack of daggers to +6; I found out what SoCharging was, so I was able to recharge my marker, continue writing SoEA, and max out the enchantment on those pieces of my armour I wanted to keep, bringing my AC to -18.
(I'm aware that enchanting Magicbane past +2 is controversial, but my personal feeling is that the increased damage output is preferable to a greater chance of Magicbane's special effects. I never had cause to regret this during the game.)
With AC -18 and a +6 artifact weapon, I now felt pretty confident about pressing on down the main dungeon; so I did. Found the Quest portal but was still only XL11; found an enormous barracks on DL15 which yielded me an enormous pile of C- and K-rations for food emergencies.
I established a stash in one of the chests in the barracks, to which I'd keep returning for the rest of the game. This was an error, with hindsight; I was a Wizard, so I was going to get the Eye, so I should have established my main stash in Sokoban where I could Eye-port to it instantly if need be. Failure to realise that at this point led to a lot of unnecessary trudging down stairs later in the game.
Pressing on downwards, I found a large general store. The shopkeeper wasn't pleased to see me because by this point I'd acquired intrinsic invisibility; rather than faff about with mummy wrappings I decided I was now more than hard enough to take on shopkeepers, and just killed him.
I continued downwards, periodically returning to my stash to dump junk. On one of those stashing trips I made another serious error: I accidentally stashed my luckstone! I didn't notice this for quite some time, so I continued on down to Medusa (the titan version, although the titan posed no problem: I nailed him with magic missiles before he got anywhere near me). I lacked levitation by this stage, however, so my next step was to go back up to the big armour shop on DL2 and hope I could identify levitation boots in there. Since I'd already had the idea of killing shopkeepers by this point, I turned this relatively simple goal into a killing spree which took out all the shopkeepers in the dungeon except Izchak. That netted me a lot of gold, which I gave to the Minetown priest and thereby reached AC -20; what it didn't net me was levitation boots.
I tried messing about with scrolls of earth to make a path across Medusa, but realised it wasn't going to work on the titan version. So I resorted to the other desperation measure: digging down to the next level, coming back up the stairs, and hoping Perseus had left levitation boots. He did, thankfully; so that was my immediate levitation need taken care of. (If he hadn't, I suppose I'd have had to do the Castle, and wish up something in the last resort.)
Did the Castle next, in any case. Went round the back to the storerooms first. Opening both dragon pens at the same time turned out to be a tactical error; a Valkyrie might laugh at being whomped from both sides at once by fully grown dragons, but I didn't. Hasty retreating, projectile weapon work, and one emergency jump down a trap door to heal up were required; but I prevailed, and after checking the storerooms I opened the throne room door and applied the pointy end of Magicbane to pretty much everything that came through.
I found the wand of wishing (which turned out to have been at 0:1), and promptly wished for SDSM since I hadn't seen any reflection for the whole game. I mentally flipped a coin and wished for it at +3 rather than +2, because I was feeling lucky; I got it at +0, which surprised me – I still hadn't realised my luckstone was in my DL15 stash instead of on my person. Still, even at +0 SDSM is a big improvement on +1 leather armour, and I still had plenty of SoEA-writing capability. I'd also found GoDex in the Castle armour store, so that completed my ascension armour set; I wished up a magic marker and some charging scrolls, and brought myself to a healthy-looking AC -36. (I only got one charging scroll, too; damn that missing luckstone.)
In the process of killing everything that moved in the Castle I'd passed the XL 14 barrier, so after some curse-testing, stash-reorganisation and generalised item-juggling my next objective was the Quest. (I've heard expert players recommend doing the Quest before the Castle for many classes, but I've never worked out how you're supposed to arrange it unless you have a lot of luck with PoGL or wraith corpses; I've almost invariably found I had to do the Castle first just to rack up enough XP to be eligible.)
The Quest was a doddle, but I knew that (having got two previous Wizards through it already). My battle plan for tackling the Dark One was to ignore all his attacks completely and poke him with Magicbane until he bought it, which was a perfectly adequate plan; more difficult was arranging for him not to run away in the process, because without controlled teleport I couldn't easily occupy the up stairs before starting to pound on him. I had to walk all the way back to the up stairs with the Dark One periodically materialising and being ineffectual at me, then stand just far enough away from the stairs that he had to move off them to attack me, and when he did so hastily occupy them myself. Having done that, he was a pushover, and the Eye and Bell were mine.
Now I had the Eye, it was time to do some of that chain-sacrificing via the create monster spell on which I'd given up earlier due to Pw exhaustion. I gradually refined my altar-scumming technique as I went along, eventually ending up with a little niche in the wall next to the altar and boulders everywhere except on it, so that when I cast create monster the monster always appeared on the altar and I didn't have to lug the corpse anywhere. Initially my scumming was very productive, yielding me a bundle of spellbooks, golden glows taking my max HP from 90-odd to 150-odd, and bringing my protection to a stonking 11 points.
Unfortunately, at this point I made my single biggest error of the entire game: while attempting to sacrifice the latest corpse and re-zero my prayer timeout, I hit M-p instead of M-o and my fingers had carried on to hit ‘y’ before my brain registered the different confirmation prompt. Result: I prayed when it wasn't safe, and Anhur blew away all 11 points of my divine protection. He'd already crowned me by this point, so getting any of that protection back was much more difficult than it had been to get it in the first place. I eventually only clawed back three points from Anhur, and when I got bored of that I went down to the Valley and got two more by donating to the priest there. (Brilliantly, I did them in that order, losing the chance of extra points from the first donation.)
I altar-scummed for about 7000 turns in total. I'm aware that it's perfectly possible to ascend a Wizard without that level of faff, but since my primary purpose in playing a Wizard was to have fun with spellcasting I felt it was important to have lots of spells for maximum fun :-) The two spells I didn't get which I'd have liked were identify and magic mapping (the former for general usefulness, the latter for Gehennom). I decided that after all that tedious scumming a tedious run through Gehennom was the last thing I needed, so I indulged myself by burning marker charges on writing the spellbook of magic mapping unseen (having retrieved my luckstone by this point, and maxed my luck during the sac-fest).
So, Gehennom next; with magic mapping it was very quick and easy to find all the stairs including Vlad's. The demon princes were mostly no trouble: Asmodeus and Baalzebub were as trivial as expected, Juiblex was more trivial than expected because I managed to magic-missile him to death from a distance before he even bothered to move off his starting square let alone attack me. Orcus put up a bit of a fight, by contrast: I broke a potion of paralysis over his head in the hope of getting his WoDeath before he used any of it (I already had the Finger at 0% fail by this point, but zero-mana-cost zaps are useful too), but he recovered very quickly and managed to half-empty his wand. Then I had a momentary horror when he summoned a second demon prince, but it turned out to be Dispater rather than (as I'd feared) Demogorgon, and Dispater was a wuss.
Vlad himself was also trivial, of course, though I can't say the same for the bottom floor of his tower: a pair of incubi managed to completely undress me. I seriously considered Eye-porting the hell out of there to put my clothes on again, but as it turned out the rest of the opposition was weak enough by then that I was able to kill everything in range and get dressed in peace.
Then I made my way to the bottom of Gehennom and found the vibrating square with no serious difficulty; so now it was time for last-minute pre-Rodney preparation. Alchemy of all the potions I'd found in Gehennom brought me to a decent 268 max HP; I practised jumping so as to attain Skilled in escape spells (the primary purpose of which was that then I could descend at will after using the spell of levitation); I prepared a planes kit and left it on DL1 to pick up just before leaving the dungeon; and then I did the second most tedious chore in the entire game (after the altar-scumming), which was to go to Sokoban and sit very still while waiting for all the spells I cared about to time out, so I could refresh them all at once before beginning my ascension run and hence not have to cart infinite spellbooks about with me. (I eventually ended up taking my book of magic missile along just in case, though I turned out not to need to reread it.)
And then the ascension run itself. On the bottom floor of Rodney's tower a lich started summoning nasties; I killed the lich before he summoned any more, whereupon one of the others read a cursed SoCM and filled most of the entry room with gribblies. That gave me a nervous moment or two, but my armour was equal to the task. Got through the zoo with no trouble, Fingered Rodney, grabbed the book, and cursed-teleported down to the vibrating square. Quick in-and-out of the Sanctum by the approved methods (do the invocation, go down the stairs, come straight back up and cursed-teleport down again in the hope of coming out on the far side of the graveyard, then after getting the Amulet escape by cursed PoGL).
The mysterious force was a total pain, oddly since I was chaotic. In fact I think it was more of a pain than it was during my previous ascension of a neutral Valkyrie. Not only that, but every time the mysterious force dumped me on the wrong side of a level, it seemed that on the way back I'd run into a magic trap or something with a cursed SoCM and get surrounded by monsters again. Bah. Still, made it out of Gehennom in the end, and sprinted uneventfully (apart from the occasional re-Fingering of Rodney) up to DL1.
At DL1 I realised I'd committed another act of gormlessness: having carefully prepared four scrolls of gold detection for portal-spotting on the Planes, I'd left them in my DL15 stash chest rather than bringing them up to DL1 when I prepared my planes kit. D'oh! Fortunately I realised this before going up the stairs; so back down to DL15, quick rummage in my stash, and back up again looking rather embarrassed. Though not embarrassed enough to stop me instakilling Rodney an extra time in the process.
The elemental planes were easy. Earth was a doddle as usual; I dealt with the elementals on Air by the simple method of zapping one of my surprisingly large collection of WoDeath every time I got engulfed; Fire was no trouble and the portal was quite close; and Water was outright kind to me. My usual approach on Water is to run over to the right-hand side of the level before reading my SoGD, because otherwise by the time I get to where I saw the portal it tends to have drifted an annoyingly long way from there. I tried that this time, but managed to accidentally step into the portal half way across before even beginning to think about detecting it!
And then to Astral. I had rehearsed this in my mind many times beforehand, since getting killed by Pestilence on my last visit; my plan was to do Famine first (trivially zappable), then Death (manageable), then Pestilence (very scary indeed), no matter what. As it turned out, ‘no matter what’ didn't survive contact with the real world: Pestilence's door was in the middle and was between me and Famine, and I decided going past that door more times than necessary wasn't the world's best idea. So I went right for Death first; the altar was lawful, and I took rather an excessive number of melée attacks from Death on the way in and out, causing me to use one of my spare PoFHs and precautionarily put on Vlad's AoLS (which I'd hitherto spurned in favour of the extrinsic telepathy from wearing the Eye). Then went left for Famine, who as it turned out had the correct altar! I should have stuck to Plan A after all. An Archon at the temple door momentarily worried me, but I dodged round him and got to the altar, and then of course never had to get back past him afterwards.
Phew! And also what a faff. Perhaps I won't play any more for a while.
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Sgtatham the Sorceress St:18 Dx:21 Co:16 In:23 Wi:19 Ch:13 Chaotic
Astral Plane $:0 HP:128(178) Pw:113(245) AC:-36 Xp:19/2768488 T:54035
Max HP is down to 178 from a previous maximum of 268; thanks Death. Also, that AC would have been a stonking -42 if I hadn't slipped up on the pray key. Arrgh!
Your inventory
Amulets
e - the blessed Eye of the Aethiopica
t - an uncursed amulet of life saving (being worn)
Weapons
a - the blessed rustproof +6 Magicbane (weapon in hand)
I - 7 blessed rustproof +6 daggers
Armor
r - a blessed fireproof +5 pair of speed boots (being worn)
x - a blessed +4 silver dragon scale mail (being worn)
z - a blessed +5 pair of gauntlets of dexterity (being worn)
M - a blessed +4 Hawaiian shirt (being worn)
O - a blessed +5 cloak of magic resistance (being worn)
Y - a blessed rustproof +5 helm of brilliance (being worn)
Comestibles
c - an uncursed lizard corpse
Rings
D - an uncursed ring of free action (on right hand)
T - an uncursed ring of searching (on left hand)
Wands
B - a wand of death (0:3)
L - a wand of teleportation (0:1)
S - a wand of digging (0:6)
W - a wand of teleportation (0:0)
Tools
b - a blessed bag of holding
g - an uncursed sack named planes kit
n - an uncursed blindfold
N - an uncursed magic lamp (lit)
P - an uncursed stethoscope
Q - a +0 unicorn horn
Gems
h - a blessed luckstone
Edited highlights only follow. The rest of the data is in the dump file if anyone's really interested.
Contents of the bag of holding:
an uncursed scroll of gold detection
Didn't need it on Water.
2 potions of unholy water
Found one of these at some point, made a few more, and carried them around in case I ever found a use for them. Never did.
an uncursed ring of free action
an uncursed ring of free action
Since I had two spares, lugged them along in case something bizarre happened.
a wand of wishing (1:1)
I kept this back in case I needed an emergency wish, but managed without.
an uncursed flint stone named Wilma
Goes with the one named Fred from my previous ascension :-)
Vanquished creatures
Asmodeus
Baalzebub
Dispater
Orcus
Juiblex
The Wizard of Yendor (5 times)
Death (twice)
Famine
[...]
5 master liches
9 liches
3 demiliches
I got a single genocide from the Castle throne, which I used on arch-liches. I decided to risk leaving the rest of the L race intact; in fact the worst trouble liches ever gave me in this game was the occasional mild summoning storm. Though it'd have been worse without Magicbane to soak up curses.
4 mind flayers
I eventually blessed-genocided these, but met a few before that happened. I never saw any grease, and on several occasions was unable to avoid melée combat, but fortunately none of them managed a successful brain-suck.
Genocided species:
hobbits
dwarves
bugbears
dwarf lords
dwarf kings
mind flayers
master mind flayers
arch-liches
8 species genocided.
Wrote a blessed SoGeno for mind flayers after I lost my patience with them; genocided arch-liches off the Castle throne.
Voluntary challenges
You genocided 8 types of monsters
You never polymorphed an object
You never changed form
You used 3 wishes
You did not wish for any artifacts
Three wishes were SDSM, magic marker, scrolls of charging.
I never engraved Elbereth, either.
Goodbye sgtatham the Demigoddess...
You went to your reward with 3244548 points,
Magicbane (worth 3500 zorkmids and 8750 points)
The Eye of the Aethiopica (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
1 amulet of ESP (worth 150 zorkmids),
1 amulet of life saving (worth 150 zorkmids),
1 amulet of magical breathing (worth 150 zorkmids),
and 0 pieces of gold, after 54035 moves.
Killer: ascended
You were level 19 with a maximum of 178 hit points when you ascended.