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[torsbein2]

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Vampire

Ah, I don't think it said that the last time I looked... Thank you for showing me! Now we'll try that out instead We'll still kill the second vampire though. For fun...

[Eric Blank]

Still loving this show. You've made me facepalm mroe than once, though, so here's some advice that should help you survive;

You should get Ass a crutch. Actually, you should get backpacks and armor for all your companions, and start hoarding crutches. Search in those (many, many) tombs you spotted north of the town you're currently in. Don't delve too deep obviously for fear of the inevitable mummy and its curse, but you can at least grab a lot of gear. If you do accidentally disturb the mummy, run and sneak back out and pray your friends are as smart as you are or at least didn't see the mummy or skeletons before you closed the door and started running. You'd want to have some serious skill before dealing with mummies because the curse directly reduces your skill rolls, so a skilled axeman would be acting as if they had adequate skill.
Dumping Ass' shield wasn't necessarily the best option, clearly, because she's not too good at dodging and is now missing a foot. Completely defenseless. It would be better for her to go around bashing people with a shield and deflecting blows than to crawl around and slash at their ankles while they bludgeon her to death.

Aim for the foot in combat to get your opponent on the ground. This slows them down significantly, reducing their danger to you, and thus puts the odds heavily in your favor for the remainder of the fight. Disarming them should be the next step, but it's important to get them on the ground first because even unarmed they have a good chance of insta-killing you with a punch or kick to the face, and once they're prone they get something close to a 50-70% speed reduction. Also remove and drop your own backpack before a fight to increase your own speed as much as possible. Just don't forget to pick it back up when you're done! You can technically look for it later, but that requires effort...

[torsbein2]

here's some advice that should help you survive;

Oh wow. that's a lot of helpful stuff. Heeeh, thank you! I usually aim for their arms first to disarm them, because I didn't know how much it helped to get them prone. I have many traumatizing experiences with tombs, so I'm a little scared of going there for supplies. Do you really find a lot of good stuff there? Besides crutches :p Oh and about crutches, how do they work / how do I use them? I think the last time I played DF before 0.34 they didn't really work. I'm glad you enjoy the show!

[mcguinty]

You just have the crutch in one hand's grasp like a weapon or shield.

Anything that doesn't have a $ around it is free to take. They don't give you any rewards so it seems like they assume you're going to take their armor and stuff for the journey. I would like to think having such a savage planet would make townsfolk more generous toward adventurers. Kind of like in Dwarf Fortress mode how the Dwarven armor smiths produce armor for the warriors with the only compensation being not getting torn apart by the things other than ore that the miners dig up.

Oh, your videos have helped me a lot by the way. I never knew dfhack had a bodyswap function till I watched your video. Adventure mode is a lot more fun because I don't think of my companions as disposable anymore. I never used to read their descriptions either.

[Eric Blank]

Yeah, tombs, town keeps and the dungeons under the keeps are usually chalked full of gear. Not guaranteed of high quality, but there's enough of it with enough variety you'll never need to go to the markets again unless you actually want to BUY food. While dungeons usually have an enormous supply of goods, they're also guaranteed to have an enormous supply of outlaws who tend to shred even experienced adventurers from sheer numbers, so raiding the first few hostile-AI-less rooms of a tomb is usually safer, and you've got a lot of individual tombs within a couple days travel of you.

[torsbein2]

Thank you both! This is all very helpful to me. I didn't know the game told you which items you aren't allowed to take. Now I won't be so afraid of accidentally stealing things : P The bodyswap thing I was told by someone else on youtube. I'm glad it's helped you find friendship among the many meat-shields of the world!

I guess we should really go check out some of those tombs. I have started to notice how useful armor can be. Like how a person with a good helmet becomes almost invincible when they're unconscious because NPCs only seem to aim for their head. The two other times I've visited tombs I was immediately killed upon entering. But I'm not as worried about it when I have so many friends to die in my place. The only thing Ass is concerned with is dying with her sword in her hand. So I don't know if I have the heart to trade it for a shield...

[Eric Blank]

Do note that even helmets don't give 100% coverage against attacks, so anyone becoming invincible due to a steel helmet has actually experienced a sudden stroke of luck. Also, If you're willing to 'cheat' just a bit, get Ass a backpack, put it on, then pick up her sword, then shield, and then a crutch, then use the 'r'emove command to take the shield and crutch out of the backpack. Now she's holding all three in one hand. Sword goes first or she may well start beating people with the shield/crutch anyway.
It's considered a dishonorable and cheap trick, but your next best bet for keeping her alive and in fighting shape would be getting her bitten to become a werecreature, except that when she transforms next month she'd go rogue on you.

[torsbein2]

Haha, and she'll be able to use them all? We're fine with cheating a little :p We're not trying to convince anyone we're good at playing Dwarf Fortress. How do you even find a werebeast? I assume they're human most of the time? Oh, I guess you probably get quests to kill them. Does being a werebeast make you stronger even while you're not transformed?

[Eric Blank]

It doesn't make you stronger whilst in normal form, but the werebeast form is usually a lot tougher. You will regenerate missing body parts upon transforming to and from that form like I said, but all at the cost of a high risk of becoming an enemy of society by being caught transformed and attacked. Contracting it is also extremely dangerous because you must be bitten by a werebeast in their werebeast form, so you're liable to be murdered or very seriously maimed before you can escape and slink away. I did this with my character and didn't even successfully contract the curse. Come next full moon nothing happened and I still didn't have any arms with which to hold my axe.

You're also already a vampire, (drop that backpack full of corpses and I'm sure you'd notice just how much higher your speed is than when you started!) and vampire and werebeast curses exclude each other. So no werelizardism for you...

Oh, and the vampirism doubles and then permanently locks your attributes at the level they were when you became one, so it's all up to improving skills for you now...

[torsbein2]

That's a beautiful story. I'm sorry your arms didn't grow back though. Too bad it's so difficult and dangerous... I'd like for my friends to be werebeasts.

About being a vampire... We've recorded the next episode, and drunk more new vampire blood. But we still can't feed on unconscious people, and our skills haven't doubled. So we're still confused Maybe there's something keeping us from becoming a vampire... We've drunk so much vampire blood.

[Eric Blank]

Hmm... Perhaps contracting syndromes in adventure mode is bugged currently... I know Gizogin managed to turna ll of his own dwarves into vampires throguh tainted well water, and the raws for the vampires declare it as ingestable through blood. Cursed bugs. Not even an unintended feature, just a broken one.

[torsbein2]

Oh no D: How will we ever become a vampire... Our new plan is to get bitten. And we've stockpiled lots of blood. Hopefully drinking it will work sometime.

[torsbein2]

Episode 09 is up! <-Click there.
Seto drinks the blood of another helpless vampire, and then desecrates a tomb for fun.

[Eric Blank]

Oh dear Armok don't take another step into that tomb!

That thing is TINY! Every tomb I've ever seen has been a massive pyramid to rival the typical dwarven fortress, but here you have a tomb about as impressive as a barn, and there's visibly nothing on the first floor besides a mummy and the dozen or so corpses to slaughter you. I'm sorry, I didn't realize they could be that small or devoid of goodies. Continue on to one of the other tombs in the complex, and visit a larger one if you find it. I was terrified there that I was about to watch you die horribly just for my ignorance in the variety of tombs, and advice founded on said ignorance.

Here's an image of a tomb roughly the same size, horizontally, as the ones I've seen.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That's about 4 stories from the entrance/ground floor. And ye, that area of ~ in the middle is an outdoor courtyard covered in snow.

This one is also completely different from what I've seen before, though. I've only ever seen large pyramid-shaped structures, but what I've found here is a large rectangular building with an open-air courtyard. The pyramids also had much more densely-packed rooms than this one, but I'd guess almost the same floorspace either way.
The more you know...

[torsbein2]

Hahaha! I'm glad it scared you But not to worry, the problem solves itself in the next episode. Though in a somewhat unsatisfying way... The cheating runs deep in this let's play... But at least we're open about it. And this time it's more just that we were lucky. We do find a bigger tomb eventually, and have some fun there too