Olgreb's Toxic Radiance

Version 0.12: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Olgreb's Toxic Radiance
Level	4
School1	Poison
Source(s)	Book of Envenomations Young Poisoner's Handbook
Casting noise	2
Spell noise	0

This spell bathes the caster's surroundings in a sickly green light, inflicting poison on everything in sight (including the caster).

Olgreb's Toxic Radiance (often abbreviated as OTR) is a level 4 Poison Magic spell which poisons all visible creatures in your line of sight (including you!). The severity of the poisoning is determined by spell power. Having poison resistance is a commonsense necessity before learning this spell, though the spell will still affect you 10% of the time (having Cure Poison or extra potions of curing is recommended for those who will be using this spell often). The artifact Staff of Olgreb can be evoked to cast this spell, and drawing the Venom card from a Deck of destruction may also cast Olgreb's Toxic Radiance.

This spell is not the crowd control nuke one might expect. Poison works best when stacked with repeated applications, so using this to directly kill whole groups of monsters would take ages and lots of mana. What this spell will do is thin out a mixed or partly-injured crowd, killing off weak and injured monsters while chipping away at the stronger ones. It is capable of effectively killing off insects and spiders (almost all of which are vulnerable to poison), which makes it very useful in the Spider's Nest and in ant or bee hives.

This spell has no effect on creatures that are invisible or otherwise transparent, whether or not you yourself are able to see them; Olgreb's light will pass through them harmlessly. This includes yourself, so making yourself invisible is a good way to bypass the spell's unpleasant side effects.

History

In 0.13 this spell will cause the caster to radiate a toxic aura over the course of several turns (extendable by recasting) and inflict a small amount of impact damage (but not to you). This aura will be able to hit invisible creatures, and the poison status will bypass the player's poison resistance, increasing the synergy with Cure Poison. The Staff of Olgreb will prevent all self-poisoning from this spell.

In 0.10, the effectiveness of Olgreb's Toxic Radiance was modified to scale with spell power and to still affect poison-resistant players 10% of the time.