The Rise & Fall of a Mummy Summoner

This is a record of two epic Mummy Summoners. After the death of my Tengu Summoner, I decided to try Mummy Summoner out in Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Along the way, I took screenshots to document my adventure and to help others survive the early game as a Mummy Summoner.

After I found an altar of Sif Muna, I joined his religion. With Rank 1 Piety, Sif granted me the ability to channel magical energy (gain MP) at the cost of food. Because Mummies don't need food, the ability was free; my formidability in a battle subsequently increased dramatically. Taking down this play ghost was no problem.

With this power I could summon vast hoards of imps and canine familiars. Somehow this guy died, however, and I had to start over.

Menkaure's usually a son of a bitch. My guys had him surrounded, however. Notice how my army is drastically smaller without Sif Muna's channeling ability.

Eustachio draws near, command?

He's a unique summoner, so we had a little summoning battle.

He was totally outclassed by my thrall of imps.

I soon found the Temple and started worshipping Sif Muna again, although for this battle with Edmund I did not yet have the channeling ability.

It didn't take too long for me to find the lair and gain favor with Sif Muna. Now I was able to raise platoons of monsters once again.

Clearing out the Lair seems like it's gonna be cake.

Even this hive of Killer Bees didn't phase me... at first.

I go all-out with the summons and channeling and more summons. However, the Killer Bees are in another league and they slaughter anything and everything I can summon. Even though I set up my guys perfectly, the Bees walk through my army like it wasn't even there.

I make a run for it, but it won't be enough. A few rounds after the above screenshot I fall to the swarm. Let this be a lesson: Killer Bees require a stronger summon than imps and canines. Maybe my Ice Beasts would have been able to do the job, but other than that it's hard to know how I could have done better. Some games you get lucky and find another spellbook, other games, like this one, you are forced to deal with your default spells for a long time.

Play Rogue Online Now!

The original UNIX Rogue is now available for play online, free. Rogue is the game that started the cascade of number-driven ASCII worlds over the past 30 years. Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman programmed the game in C, using the then-new curses.h library. They were university students at the time, and Rogue was distributed across university and public networks over the next 30 years as free, open-source software. The creators retain copyright despite open-sourcing their creation.

A new website has appeared: rlgallery.org, the Roguelike Gallery. Currently the site hosts 2 versions of Rogue, with plans to expand. The website hosts the scores of all the players, including online leaderboards and game replays. You can watch others in real-time as they explore the Dungeons of Doom.



Simply SSH to rlgallery.org. You probably need to use a terminal emulator, and I recommend PuTTY, a free Telnet/SSH client. The username is "rodney" and the password is "yendor".

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Telnet and SHH are text-based internet protocols. They are Pre-Web technology, but are still very fun and easy to use.

I encourage all readers to give Rogue a try and set some high scores on rlgallery.org!