Zot

There have been a lot of ideas concerning Zot, and I'm surprised there's no page yet.. so, this isn't at all comprehensive, and should be updated with the best picks from earlier discussion. At some point. — evktalo 2010-12-20 22:05

This is an oldie but goodie. Zot should change according to which runes you have collected. Level types and monster distribution could be affected. It shouldn't be possible to go gather more runes once you open up the portal to Zot. Zot should be more challenging if you've collected many runes.

A terrible idea. An one-entry place that you absolutely have to complete goes against the whole idea of Crawl – that you don't require spoilers and may retreat at any time, to heal, grab more supplies, get stronger, etc. Let's leave the inability to play unspoiled to NetHack. — kilobyte 2010-12-21 22:53

One possibility: Zot should consist of 2+n levels. The arrival level, one level for each rune you collected, and the final level with the orb.

Having the length of zot based on the number of runes you have would probably be excessive: 15 runes would mean doing 17 levels of zot, under that proposal! Even if the number was smaller, it would get rather boring. — evilmike 2010-12-21 15:42

Of course, the levels should be interesting and challenging enough to not be boring. Each level should be accordingly themed for each rune, so the levels would be different from each other. (And of course they should still be Zotty). — evktalo 2010-12-21 15:54

• If you've taken a rune from a non-random Pan or Hell lord without killing it, that lord could show up in Zot. – minmay 2010-12-21 03:14
• Orb run is more difficult (more frequent + more dangerous monsters spawn) the more runes you have. Could also affect the spells pan lords have on the way up (more runes = higher chance of nastier spells).
• The orb vault could be chosen based on the number of runes you had (with some randomness). 15 runes would guarantee an extremely hard vault. — evilmike 2010-12-21 15:42

Zot already has a strong theme and a lot of monsters you can't see anywhere else. I'm afraid adding branch themed levels would water that down. On the other hand, I think some of this ideas are great for the orb run. To add variety to Zot while keeping its theme, I would suggest to add vaults, unique monsters and a new level generator which outputs weirder layouts. — galehar 2010-12-21 22:44

Instead of adding (or setting) entire levels dedicated to each rune you have, have one level (or part of it) be a mini-Sprint level, with a series of rooms for each branch from which you took a rune. You could even scale this up to fulfill some of the other suggestions, so that when you have 15 runes, you have to go through 15 themed rooms before you reach the Orb vault, but only 3 if you have only 3 runes. — zannick 2011-01-01 23:38