YAVP: SkAM^Oka (15 rune bcrawl)

[petercordia]

I really enjoyed this run, though it was very scary at times.

Skeletons feel like the thing tengu were supposed to be; frail but with good offence, both mundane and magical. Unlike Tengu they're a bit lacking in the escape options department.

Early game was about conserving ammo and using Shackle. Shackle stops a monster from moving, so it's just like Confuse in that once a monster is tagged with Shackle it's usually trivialised. Unfortunately AM still suffer from ammo problems (especially since I chose crossbows), which limit the god options to Oka and TSO, and TSO wasn't really an option for me.
Ammo shortage meant I couldn't just Shackle everything and killed most things with an untrained Short sword. I recall I also mostly used Inner Flame to conserve ammo
I really enjoyed the AM early game.

At XL13 I was down to about 80 (single-use) bolts, and decided to go get some from vaults. I think I was lucky, and I managed to escape with 600 bolts quite quickly, after killing a Yaktaur pack and nothing else.
After that the midgame proper began. Oka gave me an arbalest, and my main workhorse spells were Cause Fear and Yara's.
Lair was very smooth and forgiving, not unpleasant.
I did begin to notice in Snake that I was very frail, and on several occasions I lost almost half my hp in a single turn. Without potions I felt like I couldn't so much in those situations except to buff up to kill the remaining enemies ASAP. As I said, it was slightly scary. But, that kept it exciting
I was surprised to learn that I couldn't train Transmutations, which must have nerfed my Yara's. I can't complain though, since it was still a very useful spell. I killed eg Asterion with Yara only. (He kept hasting himself )

In Elf I got an Ice Cave and the Desolation on the same floor, and I managed to get them both, which made me feel very good.
The Desolation of Salts gave me Discord and the arbalest "Damnation".
TBH, Damnation in its current (bcrawl) form is very annoying. It comes with *curse, and when an enemy is adjacent you you have to target a tile which is adjacent to the enemy but not to yourself. That's 3 keypresses for every shot, and I have to do this for popcorn. You could switch it out, but that's using a strategic resource (curse scrolls) when you don't need to. For a lot of the game I used a +2 penetration crossbow because it was more convenient, even if it was weaker. Any kind of cost to actually using Damnation (eg bolts, gold, *slow, ...) would be preferable to *curse as far as I'm concerned. You could still flavour it as a curse, or as a demon eating stuff.
I did enjoy blasting OoF's with Hellfire. Killing TRJ with Damnation was also a pretty cool experience.
Discord was very fun. It's a shame it doesn't work with stairdancing
My favourite trick was Discord + Inner Flame + Teleport Other / Dispersal, but I only did it a few times and I don't actually how much Inner Flame did in those situations. I could often see some XP trickle in.

Doing Pan at XL 23-27 felt dangerous, which I'd guess is the intention.
My first Pan floor was Holy Pan, and with hindsight I didn't spend the required Blink scrolls to get to the exit quickly enough. I definitely could not have cleared the floor. As it was I lost most of my hp and took a Daeva with me to the next level, where I landed in the middle of a rune vault. I could easily have died there, and I reckon I spend 5 blink scrolls (and ?fog) in quick succession.
The 2nd most dangerous Pan experience was Gloorx Vloq, who took out almost half my hp with Dispel Undead within 10 auts, the turn he came into view. I didn't fight or kill Gloorx after that...

My first Hell (Cocytus) was also scary, and at some point I spend 5 Blink scrolls whilst being chased by a pack of shard shrikes. I was out of mp, low on hp, and my first teleport displaced me precisely 1 tile. Skeletons have a really hard time recovering mp, which was my biggest weakness in extended. Luckily the 2nd teleport brought me to relative safety.

I really missed Disjunction and the Crystal Ball of Energy. I only realised when the game ended that Disjunction had been removed. Dispersal is a bit more mp-intensive, but it did the job.
Inventory management was a relief with no potions, food, or throwables

Overall this 15 rune game was quick, fun, exciting, and dangerous. (Compared with the more grindy crawl extended.) I might do it again, but not whilst I'm trying to streak

morgue: https://underhound.eu/crawl/morgue/pete ... 164424.txt

PS: I don't understand why Skald and AM aren't recommended for Skeleton. I chose the character speudo-randomly, but it worked really well, making good use of sturdy frame 3 and spell healing.