Creatures

Creatures are the other glyphs that move about the world. Each belongs to a faction, keeps to a routine, and notices what it sees and hears. Some of them fight, to the death (see Combat).

More about creatures:

• How creatures behave: their routines, how they hunt, and their pace.
• How creatures fight: their attacks, hides and bodies, and the incorporeal and elemental kinds.
• Creatures in numbers: their stats, hit points, attacks, speed, and senses, which the game never shows.
• Creatures’ gear: the arms and armour they carry, and their condition.
• Greater and lesser creatures: why two of a kind are not the same fight.
• What creatures leave: the hides, bones, flint, and essences their bodies leave when they die.

Factions

Every creature belongs to a faction, and so do you. Two factions are either hostile to each other or neutral, both ways round. A faction is neutral to itself.

Every monster is your enemy, but monsters do not fight each other. A kobold and a giant rat on the same floor leave each other alone, and so do an orc band and the dead. There are two exceptions: the fey courts are at war, and so are the demons and the devils. Wildlife leaves everyone alone, and everyone leaves it alone.

Miscasts and necromancy bring three factions of their own that break these rules. The berserk (the dead that rise beyond control, and a summoning turned on its caster) attack everyone, each other too, and leave only the gates alone. The loosed, the fiends a miscast’s gate lets through, attack everyone but each other and the gates. The gates themselves are at peace with every monster and an enemy to you and your side alone.

Animals. The factions marked as animals above leave a character with the Beast-friend talent alone, and that character leaves them alone too. This lasts until the character attacks one. From then on, creatures of that type (all giant rats, say) treat them as their faction normally would. A fiend in a beast’s shape, such as the hell hound or the nightmare, is not an animal, and Beast-friend does not calm it.

The fey courts. Each fey creature (sprites, pixies, redcaps, dryads, and the rest) belongs to one of two courts. The court is picked at random when the creature comes into the world, and it never changes.

• The Seelie court leaves you alone.
• The Unseelie court hunts you.

The two courts fight each other on sight, and both leave every other faction alone. Some kinds lean one way: nearly every redcap is Unseelie, and nearly every dryad is Seelie. The odds for each kind are in the “Faction” column of the table at the bottom of this page.

If you attack a Seelie fey, it turns on you for good. It becomes one of the wrathful fey: hostile to you, and still at war with the Unseelie.

To tell how a creature stands toward you, look at it (look mode). A hostile one is marked, as in “A giant rat (hostile, unhurt), on stone floor.” A fey shows its court the same way: an Unseelie one is marked hostile, a Seelie one neutral.

The creatures

Each creature’s look, its faction, how it stands toward you, and how it fights are in the first table below; what it carries is after it. The creatures’ numbers are on Creatures in numbers.

The dead still to come. Some of the dead below live in no dungeon yet. They wait in places deeper than any found so far:

• grave knights and headless knights in their armour, bodachs, banshees, wight lords, dread wraiths, and vampires that drink your life, the charnel heaps and wormhosts, the bones of drakes and drakes that rose with their flesh still on, and the lich, a sorcerer who would not die.
• Deeper still, the lords of their kinds: ghoul lords, draugr lords, and mummy lords, the plague-bearing nosferatu, greater shadows and white ladies, the black dogs of the churchyards and the shore lanes (black shucks and church grims), screaming skulls, and the bone colossus, a charnel house of bones stood up on its own.
• Deepest of all, the kings of the dead: barrow kings, ghoul kings, vampire lords, death knights and nightgangers, wormlords, the drowned king, the bone and rotting dragons, the archlich, and the hounds of the Wild Hunt.
• At the very bottom, the last of the dead: the mummy king and the wild huntsman of the old tales, elder and eldest vampires, the dread lord of the death knights, the deathshade (Old English dēaþscūa), the ankou of Breton tales, the ghost of a dragon, the nightwing and the nightworm, the dread wyrm, the lich-drake, the charnel titan, the deathless king, and last the demilich, of which a world holds no more than one.

The touch and bite of these last ones take two points of a stat for good unless the check holds. The eldest vampire and the demilich take three. A temple’s mending gives the points back.

The outlaws of the Ascmearc are people (@) hostile to you alone. No faction fights them, so they hide among whatever lives in the old places where they have gone to ground. Footpads carry short swords, and footpad archers short bows.

Above them are four wanted criminals. Each is one of a kind and met at most once:

• Mother Sallow, the Fennhām Poisoner: quick and quiet, and poison cannot touch her. She carries the stiletto Widowmaker.
• Black Wystan, the Gentleman of the Road: an archer with the long bow High Toby, forty arrows, and a short sword.
• Brother Osrick, the Resurrection Man: he fights with a mace, sees in the dark through the Unhalwed Bedes, and shrugs off half of any cold or poison.
• Sergeant Herrick, the Deserter: he carries a great axe (a magic one half the time) and wears the Turncoat, the mail that keeps fear from him.

Each always carries their own unique item and drops it where they die. Named monsters go by their names in what the game tells you, with no “the” (“Black Wystan shoots you.”). Each waits at the bottom of a lair of their own, where the Weyfarers’ Gilde sends you (see The wanted). The footpads run with them there.

Demons come up from below. The lesser ones (u) run from the dretch to the chasme, the greater ones (U) from the hezrou to the balor. None of them leaves a body behind. Poison does nothing to them, and fire does them less harm than it should (the balor none at all). So far only the dretch and the quasit are met in the delf; the rest wait in deeper places.

The Ascmearc has creatures of its own:

What they carry

Whether a creature opens doors and carries a light, its chance to drop a magic or rare item where it dies, besides what it carried (see Magic items), the colour of crystal its nature is, and the gear it may have. A dropped item’s item level is the creature’s level, or the floor’s if that is higher.

The Ascmearc:

See also: How creatures behave, How creatures fight, and Creature powers.