The druid said that Keethrax was lurking to the Southeast of Terinyo. Dashing has a terrible sense of direction though, and heads in the exact opposite direction, to the north-west.
He finds a small cave, and enters.
His rat senses are tingling. There could be some good loot in this cave. One of the scrolls he picked up warns him that "Time is working against you!" and he has the lurking suspicion he shouldn't stay in this cave for long.
"Oh Ssaass preserve me there's a cat. And some goblins and a skeleton and some big bats but THERE'S A SAVAGE CAT."
Dashing makes like a rat and runs for the downstairs to avoid being cornered by the cat. He found a cloak, but no better loot than that. He already has a great cloak, so this loot is useless.
He did kill enough beasties to level up from level 1 to level 3 though. At character creation I took the talent "Healthy" for a 20% boost to health regen. At level 3 I took the talent "Long Stride" so that movement takes 950 energy points instead of the standard 1000 energy points. Long Stride can help outrun various creatures. Talents provide various perks, if you don't know.
Going down the stairs brings Dashing to an unremarkable dungeon. He'd rather not go back into the small cave and face the cat again. The only way out is through the unremarkable dungeon. Dashing heard some orcs talking about going through this dungeon to reach a High Mountain Village on the other side. The orcs were also trying to bash his brains out so Dashing had to cut their conversation short.
On the first floor of the unremarkable dungeon Dashing found an underground river and hordes of hostile blink dogs slavering to eat him. Fortunately the downstairs was on the same side of the river as the up stairs and the blink dogs were no match for Dashing's talents with a rapier. No blink dogs dropped a corpse. Also, Dashing could swim, so the river isn't nearly as much of a problem as it could be.
On the second floor of the unremarkable dungeon Dashing found a vault full of undead skeletons and ghouls. He killed them all easily with his rapier, and found some cool loot. A pair of gloves, some wands, a wooden ring, and some bottles of water. Also another wild cat. Dashing avoided that cat.
On the third floor he encountered a yellow ooze. The ooze hit him and poisoned him, so Dashing went with the tried and true method of stabbing the thing with his rapier until it stopped moving, but got more poisoned in the process. The ooze regenerated damage, and that combined with the poison touch could make it a dangerous opponent to try and outlive. Good thing there was only one of them, otherwise things could get
Oh. Oooooooh. I think I'll just, uh, go check out what's behind some of these other doors and leave you blobs of ooze alone, m'kay.
Fortunately Dashing found the downstair behind another door and managed to flee the level with only one ooze following him. Trying to wade through those oozes while already poisoned and with no source of healing and no poison resistance would've probably killed us. Also we leveled up to 7. At level 6 I took the talent "Porter" so I can carry 10% more stuff without being burdened. Being burdened causes duelists to lose their class powers.
Good thing we won't encounter any more rooms full of hostile monsters right game--
"Oh for the love of Ssaass." Dashing went from running downstairs to avoid a room full of slime to being faced with wading through a room full of wolves.
With nowhere else to go but up, Dashing decides to take on the horde of wolves. It goes...relatively well. Many wolves perish at the dashing and elegant and dexterous hands of Dashing. But he also gets knocked down to 8 hp and still poisoned. I had to burn a prayer to Ssass for healing.
Dashing kills some more miscellaneous dungeon critters and finds a black ring dropped from a jackal. Dashing's skill at detecting items informs him that the ring is uncursed and probably safe to put on.
Oh.
OH. Okay.
Well, now it seems we're doomed. This will end well.
Next time: Dashing's Inevitable Demise at the Cruel Hands of Fate!
Well this went about as well as I might have expected. The small cave is dangerous for generating lots of monsters, and all these monsters will be twice your current level. Hence why you don't want to stay there long. At lvl1, monsters are only lvl2. At lvl2, monsters are lvl4. At lvl5, monsters will be lvl10. Etc. However, the Small Cave has a guaranteed waterproof blanket, which is very good to have. It protects your inventory from being ruined by water. This is great for situations like if I had had to swim through that river on unremarkable dungeon floor 1.
Couldn't get the blanket due to lots of monsters blocking the way, and that cat showing up. You want to avoid killing cats if at all possible in ADOM.
The unremarkable dungeon is 8 floors and tends to have lots of cool stuff, making it anything but unremarkable. At the end of it there's a village with a general store and a guaranteed potion of ultra healing and a shortcut to avoid going back through the Small Cave.
I tend to run all my characters through Small Cave to the Village, then go on with the main story. That's why I didn't go kill Keethrax. Also because Keethrax is hard.
Also, the ring of doom cursed itself and doomed us. We are doomed to have everything go wrong. we will probably die now, unless I luck out and find someway to uncurse and remove it.