Monday, April 27 12:00 AM ET

Things Got Much Worse After Reading Scroll

By Joseph Jordan

Your Place - You, upon reading that unidentified scroll you found, just made your precarious situation dramatically worse, not better like you had hoped.

Though you felt there was a chance that the mysterious scroll might teleport you away from the swarm of gnomes, that's not what happened at all, and rather, it only served to hasten your demise.

You knew things were likely to get bad when you realized a little too late that it was a scroll of destroy armor. However, you still hoped, out of the six pieces you were wearing, it might choose to vaporize your +0 burnt thoroughly rotted pair of old gloves.

When instead your +5 silver dragon scale mail armor crumbled into dust, you knew there was a good possibility things were going to get worse.

Then, when one of the gnomes zapped a wand of lightning at you, (that by the way your armor would have reflected), you knew it would hurt, but maybe, you optimistically thought, the effect would be minimal, and you would have some time to escape.

And even when the lightning destroyed your ring of teleport control, you felt assured that it would still be a long time before your uncontrolled teleportitis kicked in.

About both of these things, you were wrong.

You were also wrong when you believed that the unidentified wand you were carrying would probably not explode from the lightning, doing even more damage to your already nearly-dead character.

But then, there was a ray of hope when you randomly teleported next to the low-level jackal and thought that finally, at last, you were going to be safe.

It was only when the jackal stepped onto the hidden polymorph trap and turned into an arch-lich that you then knew, without a shadow of a doubt, there was only one thing left to consider:

Do you want your possessions identified?