To give it a good send-off before I move over to ToME 4 I've decided to run the scummiest, twinkiest, most unbelievably unfair character that I could think of: a Rohan Knight Lost Soul Symbiant, using Archery and Symbiosis to hang back and let summoned monsters do the heavy lifting while taking potshots with his bow. I'm discarding ALL ethics, sportsmanship, and general rules of good conduct (short of hacking the lib files) all in the name of a quick win. The goal here is to break the game like never before and have fun doing it.
I'm scumming around the lower floors of Mandos, and this character (after many false starts) is starting to get promising. I got lucky killing an Ice Troll that was running away from a pack of co-aligned High Elven Rangers, which popped my level into the mid-30s right off the bat. From there it was an easy walk to the Summon Never-Moving spell, and easier still to summon/dismiss/repeat until I got a Master Q as my symbiant.
Then the item-scumming started. In the grand tradition of unethical players everywhere I've been summoning creatures and making them drop their items, which has so far netted me the Ring of Flare, the Anchor, and a perception rod for ID-ing stuff, among other assorted artifacts. I plan to scum some decent kit until I find a Staff of Probability Travel, then use that to go all the way up to the first level. The free wizard-lighting will easily let me scum for broken sticks and other junk, then once I've got piles of that I'll take them and Prob. Travel all the way back down to level 98 to make stacks of artifact ammo.
Any other ways I could be scummy? The point is to indulge all those behaviors that I felt badly about doing before. I figured I may as well, since everyone seems to be moving on to 4 these days.
An oddity, though: One of my "false starts" was leveled up to about 22, with a Staff of Identify and no decent equipment, when suddenly he got breathed on by a Nexus Hound that had wandered from his pack. The Nexus effect the game chose was to move me down a level, but since I was already at level 98 of Mandos it booted me back to the surface (like getting a Princess quest on the last level of the Downs). I appeared on the surface and got the "Congratulations" message for escaping the Halls. I had to suicide him, because it pretty much wasted the whole purpose of staying down there.
