Hearse Karma

You all know that I play Nethack. Recently I have been playing Unnethack as well. The reasons for this are that Nethack has not been updating for a while, and Unnethack has added some interesting features.

One thing that I like about both games is that when your character dies it is dead for good. An interesting add on to that is that the game sometimes saves the level of the dungeon where a character died so that future characters can find it and interact in some way with the other adventures in the dungeon (looting their corpses). These save files are called 'bones files'.

On multi-user systems the bones files that you meet will often belong to other players, but on modern windows boxes you almost never have two players playing on the same installation of Nethack. This means that all of the bones files you meet are boringly going to be your own files.

Enter Hearse.

Hearse is a program that takes your bones files and replaces them with bones files from other people's computers.

It uses the internet to move electronic dead people around.

Anyway, the real point of this is that sometimes users of hearse can be really rude and upload level inappropriate bones files. For instance:

Vlad was a Vampire Wizard who was Level 1. He started the game with a wand of polymorph and a pet cat. A plot hatched in his mind: Zap the cat and get a more deadly ally. One zap of the wand later he was staring at a fully grown dragon.

The dragon was friendly (although awfully slow). It also ate voraciously, and before too long Vlad was nearing starvation (he had to suck blood, but the dragon tore everything apart too fast for Vlad to get a bite in). He decided to scout ahead and get some kills of his own so that he didn't starve.

Hunting was poor and before too long he fainted of malnutrition. He was killed by a dwarf while unconscious. After his death a bones file was generated. I was at Level 4 of the dungeon. Dragons are way too dangerous for a reasonable level 4 bones file, but I decided that that would be fun to upload to hearse anyway.

The bones file that I got back was at the Oracle level (a little deeper than level 4, but still pretty reasonable early game material).

I played a game and my new character - Rincewind - got to the Oracle and loaded the bones file. I walk down a tunnel and spot a fairly difficult demon at the end of it. I decide to take it on, but two round in to the fight a teleporting Arch-Lich shows up.

For those who don't know, an Arch-Lich is something that no character (no matter what level) can take on without a little bit of worry. They have a finger of death attack as well as cursing abilities and a wicked summon monster spell that can swamp you with foes.

Basically I was hanging around at the Prancing Pony and Sauron walked in the room and started slapping me.

Needless to say I couldn't defeat him. I had to point my wand of digging at the floor and escape (perhaps when I am a higher level I will try to kill him) - if I don't die first.

So... is that karma? I uploaded a level inappropriate bones file and got one back.