Spriggan

Version 0.19: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

This page is about the player species. For the monster, see Spriggan (monster).

Spriggans are small magical creatures distantly related to Elves. They love to frolic and cast mischievous spells. They are poor fighters and have little physical resilience, though they are incredibly skilled at dodging attacks. They are terrible at destructive magic - conjurations, summonings, necromancy and elemental spells. On the other hand, they are excellent at other forms of magic, and are very good at moving silently and quickly. So great is their speed that a Spriggan can overtake a Centaur. Due to their tiny size, they need very little food. However, they are herbivorous and cannot eat meat. Their size also makes them unable to wear most armour. They cannot wield large weapons, and even most smaller weapons require both hands to be wielded by a Spriggan.

Innate abilities

• Acute Vision: Spriggans can see invisible.
• Slow Metabolism 2: Spriggans need almost no food.
• Herbivore 3: Spriggans gain more satiation from plant-based food, but they cannot eat meat, including chunks from corpses.
• Fast 3: Spriggans cover ground extremely quickly during movement.
• Spriggans are little and are unable to use bardiches, battleaxes, dire flails, executioner's axes, glaives, great maces, great swords, halberds, longbows, scythes, triple swords, giant clubs, giant spiked clubs, and javelins. One-handed weapons like magical staves, broad axes, tridents, demon tridents, and double swords are two-handed weapons to them.
  • In addition, spriggans are unable to wear the following types of armour: large shields, gloves, boots, helmets, and any type of body armour apart from robes, hides, troll leather armour, and dragon armour.

Spriggans have a base Strength of 4, Intelligence of 9 and Dexterity of 11 (before Background modifiers). They have +1 to base magic points.

Preferred Backgrounds

• Warriors: Assassin
• Zealots: Abyssal Knight
• Warrior-mages: Warper, Enchanter
• Mages: Conjurer, Earth Elementalist, Venom Mage
• Adventurers: Artificer

Level Bonuses

• +1 intelligence or dexterity (equal chance) every 5th level.
• 30% less HP than average.
• +7 magic resistance per level.

Starting Skills and Equipment

Spriggans start with the skills and equipment listed for their background, with the following exceptions.

• Incompatible body armour is replaced with an animal skin or robe.

Difficulty of Play

Spriggans are an easy race to play, primarily due to their very fast movement speed. They are also the only race with a "tiny" body, giving them high Evasion and stealth bonuses, complemented by their excellent aptitudes for those skills. Spriggans also have tremendous, albeit uneven, aptitudes in magic skills.

Though their dietary restrictions are more stringent than any other species, Spriggans seldom have real problems with food. At most, when playing a Spriggan, one should train Spellcasting a bit higher and a bit earlier than usual, to offset any spell hunger issues. Spriggans have an excellent aptitude for Spellcasting, so this is of little concern.

Spriggans have very low HP; keep this in mind even when you have huge EV and feel that nothing can touch you. A few bad rolls — or a few evasion-ignoring attacks — can cut through your HP suddenly. Fortunately, Spriggans' speed makes it easy to remain in control and fight or flee from battles on your own terms.

Skill aptitudes

The higher the value, the better the aptitude.

Skill	Aptitude	Skill	Aptitude	Skill	Aptitude
Attack		Miscellaneous		Magic
Fighting	-2	Armour	-3	Spellcasting	2
		Dodging	3
Maces & Flails	-3	Shields	-3	Conjurations	-3
Axes	-2	Stealth	5	Hexes	2
Polearms	-3			Summonings	-2
Staves	-3	Invocations	0	Necromancy	-1
Unarmed Combat	-2	Evocations	3	Translocations	4
Throwing	0	Shapeshifting	2	Alchemy	1
				Fire Magic	-2
Short Blades	1			Ice Magic	-2
Long Blades	-2			Air Magic	-1
Ranged Weapons	0	Experience	-1	Earth Magic	-1

Strategy

Spriggans' innate abilities make them well-suited to a few particular classes:

• Enchanters: Spriggans' aptitudes heavily favour stabbing, as they are quite talented in Stealth, Short Blades, and Hexes. Moreover, their high speed works very well for a stabber: unlike normal speed races, a few bad rolls of the dice will not leave a Spriggan with an angry ogre sticking to them like glue.
• Venom Mages and Assassins: Both of these builds rely (early on, at least) upon inflicting high levels of poison on monsters from a distance. Spriggans' speed allows them to maintain that distance, letting them deal with many threats without ever letting them into melee range.
• Necromancers: Since they have no other use for corpses, Spriggans can raise large armies of the dead without worrying about starving themselves.
• Conjurer and Summoner types in general: Being able to maintain distance while blasting is a great thing. Unfortunately, Spriggans' aptitudes for such magic are inconveniently terrible. The best combos for such characters are the aforementioned SpVM, and also SpAE: their aptitude for Air is not terrible, and there are several useful defensive Air/Charms spells.

It is also worth mentioning that Spriggans can make very good use of powerful rods they find: doing so grants access to powerful conjurations and/or summonings (again, more useful to them given their speed), but instead have them governed by one of their best skills, as opposed to some of their worst. Unfortunately, one can never rely on finding a good rod, and for that reason, Artificers are not a particularly good class with which to start a Spriggan.

As for god choice, Spriggans work reasonably well with most gods. A few stand out as somewhat more useful. In no particular order:

• Kikubaaqudgha: Goes well with a necromancer build. The torment ability is a bit more useful for Spriggans than most races, since their speed provides a powerful escape option.
• Trog: A somewhat paradoxical choice, but actually pretty strong. Spriggans' intrinsic speed makes post-berserk slowing somewhat less dangerous, Trog's Hand helps out with their low HP, and Brothers in Arms is a powerful panic button in general. Watch the hunger cost on berserking, but there is generally a large amount of vegetarian food in most games.
• Ashenzari: Complements a stabbing build very nicely. The detection and scrying can be good for avoiding danger, particularly around corners.
• Okawaru: His armour gifts can occasionally be useful for Spriggans, since they are guaranteed to be wearable for them.

Most other gods will work well, however. Elyvilon stands out as being slightly more difficult, since her abilities come with steep hunger costs that Spriggans will find a little harder to replace. Cheibriados is considerably more difficult, since he removes one of Spriggans' primary advantages, namely their speed.

History

• Prior to 0.19, spriggans could not wield shields
• Prior to 0.16, spriggans began play with a potion of porridge in place of a bread ration.