ToME Guide

[Gauss]

Is there any sort of guide?
I'm new to ToME and i want to read a little about gameplay differences with
Vanilla. Any guide up there for noobs?

Thank you in advance

[fph]

Are you speaking about Tome 2.x.x, or Tome 4? Those are two dramatically different games...

[Gauss]

Im speaking of Tome 2.x.x

[Derakon]

The number of changes is pretty massive. If you want to know specifics about how certain elements work, the Killer Bunnies spoilers (scroll down to "Spoilers") are pretty helpful.

[Pete Mack]

Lord Dimwit's guide is probably what you want.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080317101614/wiki.t-o-m-e.net/Spoilers/Lord_Dimwit%27s_Advanced_Strategy_Guide

Eddie Grove's Tales of the Bold is another, although that is not for ToME specifically. As easy familiarization, I recommend archer, then farm the warg quest for elf skeletons. (DON'T kill all the wargs! Just go back in when you need more ego/artifact ammo.) Once you get to skill 10, you get create ammo, which means you can kill any low-level monster. Then with piercing shot and extra shot with an xbow you can kill everything up to DL 40. (Really. With a little luck and scumming the wargs quest, you can even kill eol with really basic gear.) Don't waste skill on ordinary bows, and especially not on slings.

The one thing Lord Dimwit gets wrong is the start of the game. The river to the south of town is a huge resource for a CL 1 player. If you can kill a naga or lizard man at DL1 you jump directly to CL 7 for a huge increase in skill points. If you die, you lose nothing. So buy !Hero, a longbow, and some arrows, and scum the stream until you see a naga some distance away. Then kill it from a distance. Boom! If your first kill is a novice rogue, you might get CL 3 if you are lucky, then CL 5 from the whole quest. What he gets right: in the early game, dump everything into specialized fighting (assuming you are a warrior or archer type) and magic devices. Magic and prayer won't help for quite some time. Stealth and casting such can come later.

Most importantly: have a plan. If you just start randomly spreading around skill points, you won't get very far.

Here is a discussion I had with Cliff Stamp on archery:

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!searchin/rec.games.roguelike.angband/Cliff$20stamp$20TOME$20archer$20quests

The TOME maintainer jumped in and said that scumming Lothlorien for ammo is cheating, but he did not address the underlying problem: when you are deep in the dungeon, there is almost no low-level stuff, so important items like !rFire and !speed (absolutely necessary for warrior types, as Eddie Grove pointed out) and junk (for archers to make ammo) are ridiculously rare. The result is people end up having to scum early levels to get this stuff. It is a serious design issue I chose to ameliorate by scumming the wargs quest instead.

[Derakon]

Personally my inclination with ToME 2 is to play a spellcaster. There are some ridiculously good spells in ToME, especially in the Divination and Conveyance schools. Divination gives you an area-of-effect Identify spell, which is crucial for the amount of loot that gets generated in the late game, and Conveyance gives you targeted teleportation and a spell that lets you "jump" through walls to an open space at the other side (or the level boundary if there isn't one), which is a very fast and safe way to cover large distances.

The main problem with spellcasters in ToME is your offensive options, which tend to be a bit limited. Manathrust is powerful but single-target, other spells deal damage slowly, with awkward elements, or in strange areas-of-effect. You can usually fix that by investing in Thaumaturgy, which gives you randomly-generated attack spells. Of course, sometimes those spells aren't very useful. But you're likely to get a lot of unresistable attack spells, spells that hit everything in LOS, and spells that can hit a single target multiple times. Inertia and force are particularly useful: the former can slow anything (except for the very few enemies that breathe inertia) down to around -50 speed with repeated applications, and the latter knocks targets back and (IIRC) stuns them.

[fph]

In addition to Lord Dimwit's guide, the whole Tome wiki is a great resource (now available only on the Internet Archive, unfortunately).

[Gauss]

Thank you for the guides.
Found Lord Dimwit's guide pretty useful.

[Yottle]

You can also check out the ToME 2 forum. it isn't very active but there are hundreds of topics discussed. http://forums.te4.org/viewforum.php?f=28

[AnonymousHero]

I can't remember if LordDimwit's guide covers the "fast path", but here's a TL;DR.

• Choose 99 quests as character creation. (You will suffer for this later, but hopefully -- by then -- you'll have the tools to deal with it.)
• Go to (C)haracter sheet. Change to "Running" and "Berserker" (fighter types) or "Coward" (spellcaster)
• Buy a Lantern.
• Do the bandit quest immediately at L1. Most characters can do it even if it may be a bit annoying with the 'teleporting' thieves. If not, then walk to the wilderness the slow way, kill rats, etc. until you get a bit higher level. Might want to buy food & light first. Or just accept that you'll need a lucky hit or two in the quest and just restart if you don't.
• You'll exit at level 4 or 5.
• Sell the loot, buy a shovel and a few ?PhaseDoor and maybe a ?Teleport/?WoR or two (depending on your luck, the L10 Bandit's drop can actually vary quite wildly, but it's usually just a mildly enchanted dagger.).
• Go to the Barrow-Downs
• If you get a princess quest, try to complete it. Use the ?PhaseDoor to escape if you get in (escapable) trouble. If you die, meh. Just start again.
• Choose the reward with the best sell-value.
• Ignore any Lost Sword quests, skipping to the next level as soon as you see down stairs. Perhaps consider killing a few of the quest monsters to gain XP (they're usually quite OoD) -- you'll usually be forced to anyway.
• (You should have gained a few levels during all of this.)
• Once you have 2-3 items that you reckon would be 10k+ each, go to town using your ?WoR. Sell them and buy ?Teleportation (20+) and a lot of food + light.
• (You should be about L10-15 at this point. If not, do a little more of the Barrow-Downs.)
• Start traveling to Gondolin using the overhead map. Avoid any water squares, etc. If you get ambushed, use ?Teleportation (repeatedly, if necessary) to get to the edge of the map and try to escape that way. If you can't -- well, you've only spent 10-15 minutes, so just restart.
• In Gondolin, use the "level teleport service" to go to "Orc Cave 21" (depending on 'friendliness' status this can cost anywhere from 10k-30k gold IIRC). Go through that level slowly making sure to grab the Thalke-something armor, the Maedhros sword and the artifact gloves.
• Get a few !Speed
• Go to Maze 37(?), again via the teleportation service in Gondolin. Kill the Minotaur and take his helm.

... win.

EDIT:

Disclaimer: I only play the Theme module for any length of time, not the 'standard' ToME module. The wilderness is harsher in that mod IIRC, so the above should actually work better in 'vanilla'.

This is the basic route for all my characters, though I have a somewhat limited set of classes that I play:
[LIST][*] Warrior+Anti-magic (or Unbeliever)[*] Ascetic (Theme mod). There's a potential variation here with Zombie+Easterling+Anti-magic+Barehand from Lost Sword which may theoretically be better because of NO_STUN. (I should really get around to adding NO_STUN on equipment...)[*] Possessor: The 'standard' progression for me here is: Player body until you kill the Minotaur in the Maze. You'll want to pump Corpse-preservation/Possesion to reasonable levels to hopefully get a corpse. If you do -- possess his body. If he doesn't drop a corpse, you'll have to try to compensate by getting enough !Speed and !Healing/whatever. Then go get Eöl's corpse. (The thing to remember here is that even if you're eventually going Barehand combat you can wield weapons with as little as 0.1 in Weaponmastery and Maedhros' sword has huge bonuses. They + speed should be enough to kill Eöl and Eöl has some basic summons to help if you're going bare-hand.). If you're going with weapons, you'll probably top out with Watcher in the Water or DarkGod or Marylene (joke_monsters). If you're going Bare-hand you'll eventually want a GWoP or Ancalagon's corpse -- when in doubt go for any greater dragon that can summon more dragons! (There's actually a potential further choice here: If you've 'saved' Lost Sword quests and go back to do them you can actually go for Anti-magic, but this get really tricky wrt. equipment slots and Anti-magic skill.)

• Barehand: ) or Theme+get DarkGod or Ingeborg's corpse)
• Sorcerer who worships Melkor. If you want a sturdier character, Warper is basically the best Mage-type character. (However, it's hard to beat Udun in terms of magical power -- though there's this incredibly annoying tendency for the really big spells being unavailable on "special-enough" levels... I presume to avoid making them completely trivial.) If you're feeling really cheesy you can try to go for Symbiosis @35/0.5 through the Lost Sword quests and get a Master Quylthulg which can be (ab)used to endlessly summon ancient dragons and shares damage 50:50 with you...

... anyway. There's a lot of mechanics in this game.

EDIT#2:

Oh, yes, and stealing. If you have a character that can get any sort of decent DEX (18+) and you have a few minutes to spare, you'll want to maximize DEX at character creation. As the very first thing you do in game, go to the Black Market to check for 'interesting' rings or amulets (Flying, Extra Attacks, Speed, whatever) and try to steal it. Actually, one of the best items to steal is anything that's low-weight that boosts your DEX so you can steal even more. If you fail, just restart the game immediately. If you succeed... well, you now have a huge advantage starting out...

(Personally I think this is so scummy that I have considered just removing stealing entirely... or perhaps 'balance' it with an always-75%-chance-of-failure. It's ridiculously abusable once you get to really high DEX. You can actually macro the sequence to steal 1 (amount) of the top item in the shop and just auto-destroy non-artifact speed rings and end up with +10 speed/attacks, etc. rings if you just continually steal from Speed Ring shops or even Rare Jewelry shops.)

[Derakon]

The Lost Sword quests are worth doing eventually, because they can give you access to out-of-class skills at up to a .5x multiplier (requires getting the same skill reward from three different quests). In particular, Mindcrafting can be a godsend for a lot of characters because it offers nearly unparalleled utility at very cheap SP costs. I can see skipping the quests if your goal is to get power in the short term though, since hunting down all those monsters scattered across the level can take a lot of time. I forget if ToME lets you enable the "always generate small levels" option during the middle of a game; if it does, you can use that to concentrate the monsters and make the hunt less tedious. Assuming of course that you can handle them!

The Orc Cave special level is definitely a good source of power for young characters. Too bad the artifacts are so well-hidden; IIRC they're blocked behind blank granite walls. So bring a means of digging and some Object Detection scrolls.

[Gauss]

Actually i skipped the lost sword quests.
Starting new character soon so i will try them for the skills.

Thank you all for the info

[AnonymousHero]

The Lost Sword quests are worth doing eventually, because they can give you access to out-of-class skills at up to a .5x multiplier (requires getting the same skill reward from three different quests). In particular, Mindcrafting can be a godsend for a lot of characters because it offers nearly unparalleled utility at very cheap SP costs. I can see skipping the quests if your goal is to get power in the short term though, since hunting down all those monsters scattered across the level can take a lot of time. I forget if ToME lets you enable the "always generate small levels" option during the middle of a game; if it does, you can use that to concentrate the monsters and make the hunt less tedious. Assuming of course that you can handle them!

I've added a bit of info to my post, suffice it to say that skipping(!) Lost Sword quests are really the ultimate metagame (cf. Anti-magic). By postponing them it's possible to possess Ingeborg (joke monster, Theme-only) with 3 weapon slots, all the standard slots and 12K(?) HP... and then go full-on Anti-magic. Of course it's a strange combination of extremely dangerous and extremely tedious, so it's not for everybody, but I've done it once or twice. (Once you get the corpse the game is usually over, so the challenge is mostly about the challenge of getting the corpse without using magic above level 1 via devices ). Also, I haven't tried it, but I believe it was actually possible to do Alchemy (before I removed it) even when you were under the influence of Anti-magic -- you just had to get the castable Alchemy spell before Anti-magic 'canceled it out' by making it impossible to progress to 50 points.

The Orc Cave special level is definitely a good source of power for young characters. Too bad the artifacts are so well-hidden; IIRC they're blocked behind blank granite walls. So bring a means of digging and some Object Detection scrolls.

Good advice, but I think a means of digging + ?Mapping should be sufficient, and you'll usually have that before going to Orc21 -- at least if you follow my suggested speed-route

[Yottle]

If you are running a sorceror or any kind of character that can kill a dragonfly (preferably from a distance) at level 1 then the first thing to do is to go to the mountains east of town and try to do it. It will provide 15 levels or so instantly. At that point you can take out griffins and maybe even young dragons (blue are the safest). At level 20 mature dragons should be possible. They will get you to about level 30 if you want.

Alchemists can do even better by killing a young dragon to start.

Possessors can wait for Beorn or one of the eagles to kill a dragon and possess that body.

I think the easiest character for a beginner is a Zombie RohanKnight Swordmaster worshipping Melkor (make sure to pray when you start). Maximize Strength and Dexterity and use a dagger so that you have multiple blows.

The easiest character for me to win with is a Lost Soul Death Mold Sorceror worshipping Melkor with Unusual Rooms on. If I survive for five minutes I have a sure winner. It only takes about 24 hours playing time total.

The Orc Cave artifacts are not behind granite walls. There are hidden doors. The down staircase is behind a granite wall, but you can just go out the way you came in.

[Therem Harth]

Unusual Rooms can be all of fun, horrifying, and boring by turns. Part of the problem is which kinds of vaults are actually good in ToME 2, a lot of the more reliable ones for treasure are boringly designed. (And vice versa, the huge scary looking ones often have mediocre treasure.)

Also in old versions you could raid the Sandworm Lair with Unusual Rooms on for pretty easy artifacts, due to limitations on what monsters could spawn in that dungeon. Not sure if AH has fixed that in 2.4.0.

As far as acquiring powerful items, IIRC the main rule for drops is that drop level is the average of dungeon level and monster level. So fighting powerful monsters out of their native depth is not that useful item-wise, whereas killing lots of "weak" monsters deep in the dungeon can get you more loot (just as a matter of statistics).