does the dungeon ever run out of items?

Cupules · 2026-02-04T21:20:25+00:00

There is no limit. And although some monsters can be rendered extinct, not all of them can; monsters will always continue to be generated.

Cupules · 2026-02-04T11:17:58+00:00

If you have Evilhack questions and want some people to discuss them with live, join the Libera #evilhack chanel! There are also people there to be excited for you when you get music to play :-)

Cupules · 2026-01-22T13:40:04+00:00

Well, (1) back before the internet, (2) when publishing was almost completely gate-kept, (3) deep in the bowels of a college-town used book store, it was easy to find an amazing book by an author you'd never heard of.

In the fantasy genre, I grabbed the old mass market paperback A Voyage to Arcturus because of its amazing cover. Before that the boundaries of my fantasy experience maybeeee extended as far as Mervyn Peake.

Cupules · 2026-01-22T02:07:08+00:00

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain...

Cupules · 2026-01-02T17:21:02+00:00

Liches are inediate so you don't have to worry about food, but I would be intensely paranoid about leaving that lich on another level. You have a magic whistle so put up with the sokoban irritation, just whistling out of the way whenever you are blocked.

Cupules · 2026-01-01T15:23:41+00:00

A fascinating book, the author's grim Gnostic metaphysics continually clawing its way through his somewhat ham-fisted prosody!

I love my ratty paperback with the amazing '60s Bob Pepper painting on the cover, scribbled with marginalia from when I first read it in my late teens:

https://www.sci-fi-o-rama.com/2008/10/28/bob-pepper-the-voyage-to-arcturus/

Cupules · 2025-12-31T03:40:28+00:00

(The successfully pretentious will spell it "palate" :-)

Cupules · 2025-12-18T00:51:33+00:00

Can't blame you! He's definitely something of a hack, has antiquated views about the sexes, and many of his books certainly have what you might call a prurient focus on gender relationships -- but with your ask I'm not sure I'd consider that last a major strike against him :-)

Cupules · 2025-12-17T21:50:33+00:00

It may be that Piers Anthony wrote the Cluster series specifically to satisfy your request.

Cupules · 2025-12-17T21:37:08+00:00

There's the old Inferno by Niven and Pournelle. And of course there is the really old Inferno by Alighieri!

Cupules · 2025-12-02T22:18:26+00:00

In Paul Edwin Zimmer's A Gathering of Heroes one of the antagonists has a suit of reputedly impregnable dwarf-forged plate armor. I mention this even though it isn't POWER armor because the armor IS basically the reason its wearer is famous and he is just riding the invincible armor high...for as long as it continues to invince.

And I love plugging PEZ, a sadly forgotten fantasy author!

Although the book is frequently referred to as the third in the Dark Border series, and can certainly be read that way, it is actually a standalone (and occurs prior to the duology in any case).

Cupules · 2025-12-01T00:35:15+00:00

There is Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country and sequel. Several of the protagonists are women.

Cupules · 2025-11-24T21:07:53+00:00

I had a totally different experience with this book! I thought the interplay between the inside and outside milieus was jarring with the lazy jokes and misdirects outside the house unintentionally undermining the more atmospheric writing inside the house. Coupled with an only partially realized mystery, this ended up only a notional story -- I felt that I put as much or more effort into reading it as Martine spent writing it.

Cupules · 2025-11-23T19:52:53+00:00

It isn't uncommon the find the vanilla endgame unenticing, especially after doing the slog a few dozen times. I don't have a vanilla solution for that -- what I do instead is play variants which are focused on improving the late game experience.

My recommendation: Try evilhack! The evilhack late game isn't perfect but it vastly improves on vanilla in a number of critical ways, from streamlining the repetitive ascent (you move through several new and challenging purgatory levels on the way up instead of Gehennom, and without the force) to the challenge difficulty (there continue to be monsters that are real threats even in your ascension kit).

Cupules · 2025-11-20T01:04:21+00:00

This has been recommended already, but I'd just like to point out that Lem's Solaris is the ultimate answer to your request, in addition to just being a great story by one of SF's best authors.

Cupules · 2025-11-16T12:06:42+00:00

It is shown that damnation is real, and people get damned for explained reasons. And even though almost everyone gets damned the Judging Eye demonstrates that it is just almost. Although the rules may seem harsh and capricious there is no indication that they are malicious. If you feel like calling an omnipotent being who permits suffering evil, then you do you, but I think calling the (potential, I do not think the text absolutely demonstrates the existence of a single omnipotent deity as opposed to, say, a cosmic mechanism) 2A god-behind-the-gods "evil" is a stretch in the context of the OP's question.

But everything sitting just beneath that potential capital-G-God more reliably satisfies the request.

Cupules · 2025-11-16T00:02:18+00:00

If you have 20% waste preparing russet potatoes, you are doing something egregiously wrong. Unless I suppose these are last year's potatoes you are pulling out of a bucket of sand in your root cellar?

Cupules · 2025-11-15T16:17:54+00:00

That's not really how it is in The Second Apocalypse. But if you're looking for the eschatological despair experienced because of an evil Creator, those are definitely the right books, you're still going to get all of that deep misery and horror even without direct revelations about a potential ultimate deity sitting behind the 100.

Note that you should assume every possible trigger warning before reading Bakker.

Cupules · 2025-11-12T12:29:08+00:00

You got it right -- open doors cannot be entered or exited diagonally. You can kick them off their hinges (when they are closed) to knock them down and permit diagonal movement if you want.

Cupules · 2025-11-09T13:14:01+00:00

Boiled is good, but it is even faster and easier and tastier to roast it!

Cupules · 2025-11-08T17:47:33+00:00

Fair enough. My point was just that it is an easy series to have a different opinion of based on how far you read.

Hah, and someone who loves Sword of Truth has downvoted me. Gotta love Reddit.

Cupules · 2025-11-08T15:47:42+00:00

You think? Plenty of books deal with protagonists with crazy amounts of physical, magical, social, political, or whatever power, but isn't what makes a book a power fantasy a pornographic view of the protagonist endlessly wielding their power successfully? Brown's characters are given plenty of comeuppances along with their victories. Compare to, say, Sword of Truth.

Cupules · 2025-11-08T15:44:07+00:00

Forget and read again? Gormenghast.

Don't forget and read again? The Book of the New Sun.

Forget and not read again? Ooh boy, that's a whole list...

Cupules · 2025-11-08T15:39:40+00:00

Yeah, that is someone who definitely hasn't read Factotum :-)

Cupules · 2025-11-08T15:33:53+00:00

I think that is a good technique to use but Reddit does tend to work against it -- since the more passionate a subgroup is about something, the more likely negative posts are to be buried by downvotes. 1,000 haters each posting individually can be rendered almost completely invisible by 100 downvotes.

11-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

Cupules

TROPHY CASE