YMMV / Dungeon Crawl

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • The three Gods Of Good get a bit of this, due primarily to the Everything Trying to Kill You nature of the game. A game played as a follower of one of the good gods will see the player committing wholesale slaughter just as they would as a follower of a neutral or even evil god. Elyvilon is probably the worst, since pacifying monsters with "Heal Other" makes them neutral not just to you but to other monsters, and they will attack other monsters that are in their way. Manipulating enemies into attacking each other is often the most efficient way to "fight" as a follower of Elyvilon, so a typical follower of the pacifist healer god goes around brainwashing everyone they see and tricking people into murdering their friends.
  • Some of the Evil Gods also get this, due to some of them not really seeming that much worse than many of the neutral or even good gods. Mahkleb and Kikubaquudgha promote death and destruction, but then again so do neutral deities like Vehumet and Qazlal. For that matter, Beogh might be a Fantastic Racist but other deities like Trog the Mage Killer or the demon-hating good gods could be accused of the same thing and at the very least Beogh is very good to its chosen people, the orcs.
• Breather Level:
  • The Lair, depending on your build. While it contains some powerful threats of its own, a character that hasn't been too fond of Dungeon Bypass typically has no problem clearing the branch as soon as they find it. The Lair's sub-branches are far from easy, though.
  • The dungeon levels between The Lair and The Vaults typically don't progress in difficulty as fast as the character gains power, making them fairly easy to clear. Further emphasized as many players clear The Lair and Orcish Mines before going that deep.
  • The Ecumenical Temple, an early area which contains nothing but a bunch of altars, so your character can choose a god. No enemies will ever spawn here (though some enemies can follow you in) which is why many players use the temple for resting and for keeping their stash. (Similarly some players keep a stash in The Lair, since none of the creatures that spawn there can use items.)
  • Worst of all was The Hive, a Breather Level deemed so bad that it was removed entirely from later versions of the game. It consisted entirely of killer bees and killer bee larvae, which are deadly early in the game but can be dealt with trivially if you put it off for later (at least until you found some way of reliably resisting poison), and contained an unbalancingly-high quantity of not just free permafood that all characters could eat but also the best food item in the game (which doubles as a potion of restore abilities).
• Demonic Spiders: Many, but mostly situational.
  • Orc priests. They are the extremely painful introduction to smiting. Smiting is instant, undodgeable, unblockable, and usually shaves off 10-15 health with every cast. They can show up as early as the second level of the dungeon, where having 30 HP is a huge luxury. Even worse, they tend to travel with packs of orcs and orc wizards, which means that you might have to fight through a pack of reasonably tough enemies just to get to them. And they can smite you while you're doing that!
  • The Lair has a handful of notorious early game killers:
    • Cane toads are the bane of many squishy early-game casters. When they spot you, they rush into melee range and hammer you with surprisingly powerful poison-branded attacks. They resist poison, and are fast enough to make escaping difficult without burning consumables.
    • The dreaded hydras, the bane of squishy casters, stealth-based characters, and just about anyone with a longsword. Hydras start with four to eight heads, and get an extra melee attack for every head. Furthermore, hitting them with an edged weapon (axes, long blades, certain polearms, and troll claws) causes them to grow an additional head and recover a chunk of HP. They're also resistant to poison, regenerate HP rapidly, and have enough willpower to make Hexes unreliable. Thankfully, they're fairly squishy despite that, with no AC, abysmal EV, and no elemental resistances.
    • Wolves come in huge packs, are as fast as spriggans, and can swarm you from offscreen faster than you can escape.
    • Death yaks are the biggest threat in the Lair. They come in packs, and while they aren't fast, they're tanky, can shrug off most Hexes and low-level spells, and even melee brutes will get overwhelmed by taking on a pack when they first appear.
  • Unseen horrors. They're fast enough to move in, hit you, and back away all in a single turn, and when they hit they can hit hard. Oh yeah, and they're invisible. Their invisibility is particularly nasty for lightly armored characters who tend to focus on evasion, as the evasion stat is ignored by invisible foes. And their random movement makes them the only invisible enemy in the game where you can't usually guess what tile they're standing on even right after they hit you.
  • Any sort of higher demon, but there are a few specifics:
    • Executioners are tier 1 demons with double the speed of most characters, which they like to boost even further with the Haste spell. Once that's done they'll zip into melee range and start hitting you three times for every turn they take, which ends up being 6-9 hits for every action you take. While beefy, heavily-armored melee brutes can usually soak up their blows, casters and other squishy characters will get sliced to ribbons quickly.
    • Brimstone Fiends, Ice Fiends, and Tzitzimimeh (called Shadow Fiends in older versions) are all tier 1 demons most reviled for knowing (and loving to abuse) the spell Torment, which cuts your current HP in half with every use and is unresistable for most characters. While all monsters who know Torment are bad, Fiends up the ante by adding other nasty attack spells plus summoning hordes of minions. Tzitzimimeh are perhaps the worst since they have the spell Dispel Undead, which deals massive damage to undead characters, who incidentally are the only ones able to reliably resist Torment.
    • The tier 3 demon Neqoxec also qualifies. Though somewhat weak, neqoxecs know (and love to spam) the spell Malmutate, which is very likely to give the player negative mutations. As of 0.27 there are few ways to resist mutations. Thankfully potions of mutations remove mutations before giving you new ones. No guarantees that the new mutations won't be worse than what you had before, though.
  • Many Enemy Summoner foes are considered demonic spiders as well, including deep elf summoners, mummy priests, and orc sorcerers, all of which rarely do battle without first calling in a dozen or so various demons. Vampires used fit in this category as well thanks to their tendency to flood the room with rats and bats until version 0.12.
  • Before they got nerfed, electric eels were this. They would appear in large schools in every body of water, fire painful bolts of lightning at you from across the room, and then dive underwater as soon as you got close. Fortunately they got a nerf at some point (the Crawl Wiki doesn't have the version number); they still fire bolts of lightning, but those bolts are much less damaging, the eels themselves are much less common, and they no longer dive underwater.
  • Early on, you might meet oozes, which are barely-sentient blobs of dirt that nearly anyone can beat to death. Their big brothers, the jellies, however, are a whole nother beast. Jellies can hit fairly hard, but what makes them dangerous is their acid. Hitting them in melee will splash you with acid, dealing heavy damage and corroding you. Corrosion is a thankfully-temporary status ailment that sharply decreases your AC and weapon enchantment.
  • Caustic Shrikes. All the worst parts of stronger jellies, stapled to bees, with disproportionately high HP to match. And they come in packs. They cause a disproportionately high amount of deaths at high levels just because of the sheer damage output from them, especially if you're caught out in the open.
• Difficulty Spike: Quite often. A lot of times this happens between dungeon branches (for example, you'll be able to clear the Orcish Mines long before you can even think about taking on the Elven Halls, despite the latter being accessed from the former). Sometimes this can even happen mid-branch; usually the last level of any branch is much more difficult than the levels preceding it.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Orc Jesus" for Priests of Beogh. (Alternately called “Orcus Christ” by some of the more irreverent players.)
  • Some of the names in the game are notoriously difficult to spell properly, effectively forcing nicknames into existence. (Seriously, it takes a while to learn how to spell "Kikubaaqudgha", let alone figure out how to say it. As a result, most call them "Kiku".)
  • Okawaru's role as a generic melee god is referenced by an occasionally used nickname: "Default".
  • Lugonu was named "Lucy" during its earliest development stages, and is still sometimes nicknamed that.
  • Somewhat cryptically for new players, fans often use abbreviated forms of the races and classes. MiBe is a minotaur berserker, MfIE is a merfolk ice elementalist, and so on.
    • Fans will also use abbreviations for other aspects of the game, such as some of the wordier spells (LRD is Lee's Rapid Deconstruction, etc). IOOD stands for Iskenderun's Orb of Destruction, which is particularly problematic as the spell's name was eventually shortened to just Orb of Destruction.
    • Monster names get in on this as well. For example, orbs of fire became OOFs, which is especially appropriate given their tendency to cause Yet Another Stupid Death.
• Fridge Brilliance: If you kill the Royal Jelly, Jiyva the Slime God dies, supposedly due to the Royal Jelly being its only intelligent follower... except that's not true. Jiyva has one more intelligent follower: Dissolution, the High Priest of Jiyva. So why doesn't Dissolution keep Jiyva alive too? Because Dissolution hates Jiyva. Dissolution was formerly the high priest of an ancient civilization that was destroyed by Jiyva, and he was forced to convert or die. He wants Jiyva to die for this, and as such will abandon the god if its other intelligent follower is defeated.
• Game-Breaker: The various level 9 spells. While these might seem impractical, if you can find a way to eliminate the hunger cost (staff of energy, Necromutation) and offset the hefty MP cost (Vehumet, channeling, Sublimation of Blood), you can sling them around like they're going out of style:
  • Fire Storm hits like a freight train, punching through even complete fire immunity, has a humongous area of effect, and leaves behind fire vortices to distract enemies.
  • Absolute Zero did instakill whatever monster is closest to you. No resisting, no dodging, no blocking, they are dead. This level 9 Ice magic spell was removed in 0.27 for being too strong, and its effect was moved to a level 8 Air magic spell, which has a delay between the cast and the instakill.
  • Shatter hits everything in your line of sight for immense, non-elemental damage (although it doesn't work against flying or insubstantial monsters) and can destroy walls as well.
  • Tornado doesn't have quite as much raw power as the previous spells do, but it cannot be resisted and its long duration makes it very MP-efficient. You can also continue to attack while the Tornado is blasting the area, and anything caught within it is thrown about the room.
  • Dragon's Call summons dragons. Lots of them.
  • Necromutation is a game-changer of a spell. Successfully casting it temporarily turns you into a lich. You gain immunity to negative energy, torment, rot, poison, and mutations, resistance to cold, a spell enhancer for Necromancy spells, and you lose your hunger clock. As long as you can remember to compensate for your undead vulnerabilites (vulnerable to holy damage and Dispel Undead, can't wield holy weapons or quaff potions), turning into a lich can allow you to ignore a huge number of nasty end-game monsters.
  • Before its removal, Singularity basically created a black hole that sucked everything nearby into it, dealing very high damage in the process. You could add insult to injury by casting other spells at things while they were getting sucked in.
  • In older versions, Nemelex Xobeh also qualified if you knew what you were doing. The legendary versions of their decks, along with high piety, a decent evocation skill, and liberal use of their gifted abilities essentially turned any PC (even purely melee focused characters) into an epic level mage capable of summoning dozens of creatures in combat with a zero chance of being hostile for a paltry 2 mana or blasting several of the strongest spells in the game better than an equal level wizard could. Plus, you got powers present nowhere else in the game, such as the ability to create food out of nothing. On top of all this, old Nemelex had a grand total of one real rule (using combat oriented cards when there's no one hostile around), meaning the only real way to get excommunicated was to stand around for tens of thousands of turns with out sacrificing anything to them or using cards in combat, something a player is never going to do.
  • Qazlal Stormbringer also applies. At high piety, they surround you with a swirling elemental storm that hits anything that walks into it for huge damage. It also grants you a boost to your SH stat and permanent Repel Missiles (one of the most useful buffs in the game). At high Invocations, their abilities also provide a powerful substitute for elemental magic. Upheaval basically becomes a cheaper, random element Fire Storm, and can be spammed to destroy most anything within your line of sight. Disaster Area, while not as spammable as Upheaval, is even more devastating, dropping well over a dozen random Upheavals throughout your line of sight. The only downside is that the storm generates a tremendous amount of noise, although since you don't have to worry so much about the effects of heavy armor, feel free to kit yourself out in the heaviest stuff you can find.
• Genius Bonus: There is a reference to The Metamorphosis in the description for the giant cockroach monster.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • True of Crawl's bats. They barely even hurt you, but can hit multiple times in a turn, and have so much evasion they're hard to kill. Most annoying is that they're so fast they can move toward you, hit you, and move out of reach in one turn, meaning that you can't melee them unless you make some odd moves. Potentially deadly in the early game if you're unlucky, mildly irritating afterwards. Humorously, the game will sometimes generate vaults full of various unique types of bats, which is referred to in the source code as a "goddamned_bats" vault.
  • Ugly things and slime creatures later on in the Dungeon. Both always appear in packs, absorb a good chunk of damage before dying and flee when wounded. Ugly things also are slightly faster than most PCs and have randomly branded attacks (including acid — see Jellies under Demonic Spiders for how that works — and one that stops you from healing for a while) and resistances which randomly shift while in a group. Slime creatures, meanwhile, have an incredibly annoying habit of fleeing and coming back within seconds, having completely regenerated in the process, and will merge into much more powerful brutes if you try to fight them one at a time in a corridor.
  • Crimson Imps (or just "Imps" in earlier versions) have three really annoying abilities: high evasion which makes them difficult to hit, the tendency to blink (short range teleport) a lot, and lightning-fast regeneration. Add to that they resist damage just like other demons while appearing at a point in the game before the player is likely to have strong enough weapons to overcome said resistance. Fortunately they deal very little damage, meaning they're generally a minor annoyance to distract you from more dangerous enemies. Unfortunately, they can pick up and use weapons on the ground just like you can. If they pick up something dangerous enough (like a good enchanted sword or a wand, or the bow left behind by a centaur) they can become Demonic Spiders with ease.
  • Another common killer of early characters is the not-so-humble adder, which can appear on the second level of the dungeon. They're much faster than you, are fairly evasive, have more health than most monsters during the first few levels, but worst of all is their poisonous bite. Poison can be seriously hazardous for an early player, who won't have much HP at that point, and also likely won't have identified the potion of curing yet either, or any escape items. If you get poisoned more than once by the same adder, you'll likely be forced to start trying out random potions to survive (and that's dangerous in itself, since you might down a potion of degeneration or ambrosia).
• Memetic Badass: From the "Foolproof Plan for Winning Crawl" flowchart:
  "Did you find something to kill? -> Is it Sigmund? -> You poor bastard."
• Nightmare Fuel: If you have a good imagination, there could be plenty in Dungeon Crawl.
  • Using Animate skeleton on a fresh corpse shows a lovely message describing it ("Before your eyes, flesh is ripped from the corpse!").
  • Back when Bleeding status effect existed, you could make an enemy bleed with your sharp claws and they proceeded to run around the dungeon painting it red.
  • Half in-universe example, ghosts can say some pretty darn creepy things ("They lied to you. The dungeon just goes down forever and ever....") that really hammer home how spiteful these phantoms are.
  • Some of the sacrifices made to Ru, the god of sacrifice in exchange for power, can fall into this category. They range from giving up some of your magic skills to chopping off one of your hands to sacrificing the capacity for love, which permanently enforces Everything Trying to Kill You, even for things that would normally be friendly, like summoned allies.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Shadow traps, introduced in 0.16. Stepping on a shadow trap casts a hostile Shadow Creatures against you, and temporarily shuts down the trap. Shadow traps, unlike most other traps, can never be permanently disabled, and their cooldown time after being triggered is ridiculously short. They often show up early in the game, in which case it's very difficult to find them at all. Even worse, if an enemy steps on a shadow trap, the summoned creatures still go after you. It was so bad that one of the first changes to the 0.17 trunk game was the removal of shadow traps.
• Scrappy Weapon: Scythes. In spite of how lethal Sigmund is with his, they have dreadful damage for a two-handed weapon, terribly slow attack speed, and are completely outclassed by nearly every other weapon in the Polearm class.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • You only need 3 runes to unlock the Realm of Zot, but many players go for more in bonus levels (a total of 15 can generate in any single game). When this wasn't enough, the developers started adding clearly uncompetitive joke builds. Enjoy your Felid Wanderer of Xom.
  • In keeping with the challenge of collecting excess runes, prior to version 0.9 it was possible to obtain an infinite number of "Demonic Runes" from the endless demonic realms of Pandemonium. The record was over 250 runes. This was eventually changed so demonic runes would stop generating after you got one.
  • Some players may also go for Speedruns (lowest number of turns, fastest real time), or ascend with the lowest level humanly possible.
  • Another popular challenge is the "only move forward" game. You are not allowed to move back over any space you've already covered (unless you hit a dead end), and you must take the first down stair you see even if you don't think you're ready.
  • The yearly tournaments award players points for successfully completing these. You get lots of points if you do The Tomb after you grab the Orb of Zot (which means you're facing both the native hordes of mummies as well as the archdemons that keep popping in trying to get the orb back).
  • There's also the "Makhbat" challenge, which revolves around playing a vampire of Makhleb who remains in bat form (where virtually your only means of attack is using the combat invocations Makhleb gives you).
  • The Necro challenge, where only pure Necromancy spells that do not create allies can be used. No Regeneration or Bolt of Draining, no Animate Dead or Simulacrum, no melee or ranged weapons, no throwing weapons, no evocables, no spells from other schools... The only spells left to you are Pain, Agony, Vampiric Draining, Dispel Undead, Sublimation of Blood, Borgnjor's Revivification, and Death's Door.
• That One Boss: Crawl has enough for all stages of gameplay. Lucky characters may even live to encounter them all!
  • Sigmund was Crawl's original That One Boss. He's a human wizard-warrior who gained a notorious reputation for killing off early-level characters. As a mage, he isn't well-armored or particularly resilient, but... he can turn invisible, which thwarts ranged attacks. He can cast Confuse, which thwarts melee. He can throw flames, which is doubly troublesome if he's already turned invisible or confused you. And he wields a scythe, which is a fairly damaging weapon at this point in the game. Most players will want to avoid or escape him if they meet him, unless they have something that will help in taking him down, like a powerful attack wand or a potion of berserk rage. Even then, you might still need to take him by surprise.
  • Grinder is another early game That One Boss. She's a shadow imp who can paralyze the player and cast a nasty pain attack. Grinder typically appears just a bit later than Sigmund, and a popular joke among fans is that the two have a rivalry going on to see who can claim the lives of more newbies.
  • Maurice is a thief that'll haste himself, turn invisible, then sneak up to you and yoink your stuff. Losing your stuff is bad enough (though you will get it back if you can kill him) but depending on what he manages to get from you he can become extremely powerful. If he grabs a potion of healing he can be back to full health in a second. If he grabs a powerful enough wand then bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
  • Then there's Gastronok, a giant slug who became a mage after eating a wizard. Unlike most mage characters, Gastronok is surprisingly tough, having more HP than even equal-level melee threats like orc knights. Not only can he sic swarms of rats on you, he also has the Airstrike spell: Airstrike deals a ton of damage hits with 100% accuracy, and is smite-targeted, meaning it can hit you even if Gastronok doesn't have a clear line of fire to you. His one disadvantage is an inherently slow movement speed thanks to being a giant slug, but he can even overcome that by casting slow spells on the player and haste on himself.
  • Nessos the centaur. Even normal centaurs are fairly bad because of their speed and ranged attack, but Nessos is even worse thanks to his unique ability. Ordinarily if an arrow has an enchantment it overrides that of the bow that fires it. Nessos ignores this rule, gaining the ability to fire flaming toxic arrows. Couple that with his liberal use of the Blink spell (which makes luring him into melee all but impossible) and he's easily one of the most dangerous mid-game uniques.
  • Mennas the Religious Bruiser is a mid-game boss notorious for shredding through squishy spellcasters and unprepared hybrid characters. He's equipped with the Silence spell, which shuts down spellcasting, scroll reading, and all invokable abilities. He's also as fast as a centaur, heavily armored, surprisingly evasive, and always carries a powerful weapon of holy wrath. In short, Mennas is very, very hard to take down.
  • Mara is another late-game threat, appearing around the same time as Mennas. Not only does he have a dangerous spell list and the tendency to spawn with a decent weapon, he can conjure up illusions of himself (which are just as nasty), blink and teleport around, and create an illusion of the player, which is just as dangerous as the player is. Are you powerful enough to casually sling Fire Storms around? Your illusory self will be too!
  • The Royal Jelly, boss of the Slime Pits and guardian of the Slimy Rune Of Zot. It's got an impressive amount of HP and hits like a Mack truck, plus it has the same ability to corrode your equipment as a regular jelly (though if you're in the Slime Pits you should already have a way of protecting against that). Worst of all, it has a unique defense mechanism whereby it spawns additional high-tier slime monsters like Death Oozes and Azure Jellies every time it gets hit, allowing it to easily swarm any enemy player. Also, it's faster than a freaking CENTAUR! To be fair, it should be expected for this monster to be so powerful considering its existence is literally the only thing keeping the Slime God Jiyva alive.
  • Tiamat. She spawns in the Realm of Zot, accompanied by a pack of draconians, which are already nasty enemies. Even if you manage to kill off or lure away her draconian retinue, you still have to deal with Tiamat. She has a mountain of HP and HD, hits like a freight train and tends to come with a good weapon, and worst of all, her scale colors shift - which changes up her elemental resistances and breath weapon.
  • Ignacio, who is a mercifully rare unique Executioner found only in Pandemonium, and even then only half the time. Read the Executioner entry under Demonic Spiders above. Most Executioners have a fairly low HP range, from 46-84 HP. Ignacio has anywhere between 166-336 HP. He gets even more attacks per turn than a normal Executioner, and he carries a well-enchanted executioner's axe of pain. To top it all off, he can also hammer you at range with Agony, softening you up before he gets into melee range.
• That One Level: While all of Crawl could qualify for some people, there are specific examples:
  • The last levels of several branches. Elf:3 (Hint: Kill the high level casters first). Vaults:5 (also known as Crawl: Zerg Rush Edition). Even the Swamp can be this.
  • Hell, which also qualifies as Bonus Level of Hell, as befits its name. To even enter you need to kill the archdemon Geryon, who almost qualifies as a That One Boss thanks to his Enemy Summoner nature. Once he's down you have your pick of four equally lethal regions: the iron city of Dis, the fiery Gehenna, the undead-filled Tartarus, and the icy Cocytus. Each region is filled with hordes of demons, including large numbers of tier 1 and tier 2 demons, and is guarded by a powerful unique archdemon down at the very bottom. Each hell also has the special effect to hinder you, like you can't read scrolls, or your willpower is halved. And everytime you go down a staircase in any Hell branch, "Mystical Force" does some random bad things to you, like drain your stats, or give you a temporal bad mutation. Unless you are a believer of Zin, you can't resist those random effects.
  • The Tomb is considered to be the most hazardous of the game's many side areas. It's an undead-themed branch with an Egyptian flavor to it, meaning lots of traps and lots of mummies, most of which will spend their time either smiting you, spamming Torment, or summoning demons. What makes it so deadly is the mummy death curse; whenever you kill a powerful mummy in this branch, you get hit with some sort of magical backlash. They can torment you, shave off chunks of your health with Pain spells, drain your stats, and so on. In short, mummies can hurt you no matter what you do, and since there's lots of them, this adds up very quickly. Also, stairs in the Tomb are 1-directional, so you can't escape easily from the stair you entered from. If you try to brute-force the Tomb, you will die.
  • The endgame, after collecting the Orb of Zot and you're ascending back toward the surface. You'd expect an easy return since you've already cleared all the floors, right? Wrong! First, while holding the Orb of Zot your stealth is decreased drastically, which can be very damaging for certain characters. Add to that, teleportation takes a lot longer to take effect, and the duration of magical contamination is greatly extended. What's more, the game will constantly spawn new enemies to attack you, drawn from the Hell and Pandemonium lists. This includes Pandemonium Lords, which are the strongest non-unique enemies in the game and ordinarily only appear at a rate of one or less per floor in the demon plane of Pandemonium, but during the ascent you can fight multiples per floor, or even 2 or more at once.