Poltergeist

Version 0.33: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Poltergeists are undead spirits who delight in causing trouble for the living. Completely incorporeal, they interact with the physical world by possessing small objects and making them fly through the air. They can use this to fight with weapons as well as the living do, as well as gain the protective benefits of many different hats, boots, gloves, and cloaks at once, though body armour is too large for them to manipulate in this fashion. At higher levels of experience, they can even control these possessed objects at a distance from time to time, harassing their foes with a barrage of unruly armour. Their superlative aptitude for both stealth and hexes make them powerful enchanters, and they are adequate at most other forms of magic, though they struggle with conjurations. They are adept with short blades, if a little below average with heavier weapons, and their lack of a physical body makes them terrible at unarmed combat. The same power they used to possess objects makes them natural experts at throwing. Finally, their nature as spirits of bad luck also grants them temporary AC whenever they inflict maladies upon their enemies.

Poltergeists are an insubstantial undead species with interchangeable auxiliary armour.

Innate Abilities

• Poltergeists are undead creatures, and have the following innate traits:
  • Cold Resistance 1: Poltergeists are resistant to cold.
  • Life Protection 3: Poltergeists are resistant to negative energy.
  • Poison Immunity: Poltergeists are immune to poison.
  • Torment Immunity: Poltergeists cannot be tormented.
  • Poltergeists cannot gain mutations, use talismans, or be polymorphed. When mutated, they temporarily lose max HP instead.
  • Poltergeists are unbreathing, cannot be put to sleep, cannot go berserk, and do not have blood.
  • Poltergeists are vulnerable to Dispel Undead, holy damage, and holy wrath-branded weapons. They may not worship the good gods (The Shining One, Zin, or Elyvilon). The holy wrath brand will not function on weapons they wield.
  • Poltergeists cannot use the spells Borgnjor's Revivification, Death's Door, or Sublimation of Blood.
• Poltergeists are insubstantial, granting immunity to throwing nets, webs, constriction, petrification, and sticky flame.
• Floating: Poltergeists' insubstantial bodies float through the air, flying permanently.
• Formless 1: Poltergeists may equip any combination of six items of auxiliary armour (hats, helmets, gloves, boots, cloaks, and scarves). They cannot wear body armour, and cannot train the Armour skill.
• Trickster: When inflicting debuffs on an enemy in LOS (not counting poison or constriction, but including debuffs from allies), Poltergeists gain 3 + XL / 6 AC for the first debuffed enemy, then +1 AC for every enemy thereafter. If the bonus is already at +15 AC or more, the chance to get AC is halved. In addition, there is a cap at 6 + XL * 4/5. This bonus decays over time, at a rate of -1 AC per 3.0 decaAut.

Poltergeists have a base Strength of 4, Intelligence of 10 and Dexterity of 9 (before Background modifiers) and have normal base magic points.

Preferred Backgrounds

• Zealots: Chaos Knight
• Warrior-mages: Enchanter, Hexslinger
• Mages: Necromancer, Ice Elementalist. Earth Elementalist, Alchemist

Poltergeists are forbidden from becoming Shapeshifters.

Level Bonuses

• +1 dexterity or intelligence every 5th level.
• 10% less hit points than average.
• +4 willpower per level.
• At XL 13, they gain the Cacophony ability. For each piece of armour equipped, an allied haunted armour is summoned. These allies will not stray more than 2 tiles from the player, and their attacks may daze, drain or confuse their targets. For the duration you create a loud noise. The ability has an experience-based cooldown longer than most other comparable effects, and is very noisy for its full duration. (Coded as the Formless 2 mutation.)
  • This ability may be used even if worshipping Okawaru.

Starting Skills and Equipment

Poltergeists start with all the skills and equipment listed for their background, with the following exception:

• Body armour is replaced with a +1 cloak.

Difficulty of Play

While Poltergeists have a large amount of built-in resistances and immunities, their low HP and inability to wear body armour makes their base defenses bad, especially early on, when aux armour items have not been found. Thus, they'll tend to lean heavily into inflicting debuffs to benefit from the Trickster passive.

The unlucky XL 13 grants poltergeists a strong (if infrequently-available) ability in Cacophony, which immediately surrounds them in allies that can inflict debuffs. This can help substantially with covering an escape to a staircase or to overwhelm individual foes, but should be used with a fair bit of caution on unknown floors or floors with known vaults due to being extremely loud for the entire duration.

Skill aptitudes

The higher the value, the better the aptitude.

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

Strategy

Ways of inflicting debuffs include:

• Spells: Hexes are the most obvious to use due to the +4 aptitude, though they still have good +1 apts for Necromancy and Alchemy that can both debuff and either provide allies or deal direct damage. While Hexes will eventually fall off lategame due to higher will and infinite will enemies, the +4 aptitude makes it cheap to invest (and easy to switch). In addition, it can bridge into Summonings, as both Summon Mana Viper and Sphinx Sisters are part Hexes.
• Weapons of draining and chaos are much better on Poltergeists than other species, as both brands can both inflict status debuffs. Chaos can set up stabs, but could give an enemy a positive-for-the-defender effect.
• Evocable / throwing items, like wands of acid/wands of light, a phial of floods, or darts (other than poison darts), can inflict debuffs and are relatively common.
• God choice can help out significantly when early item luck runs dry.
  • Gods with passive debuffs: Includes Hepliaklqana's hexer ancestor, Uskayaw Line Pass and Solo Time, and Ru's aura. Xom always presents some degree of risk, but can regularly defeat or hinder enemies for free and can provide strong chaos weapons.
  • Cheap active ability debuffs: Kikubaaqudgha provides Sign of Ruin and helps find Necromancy spells. Makhleb's Destruction (3 of 4 types have a 50% chance to debuff) and certain demon summons have debuffs. Nemelex has a variety of cards to inflict statuses, with the deck of destruction having many. Fedhas' Ballistomycetes can inflict confusion without checking willpower or HD, and oklobs corrode.
  • Indirect: Sif Muna can help find relevant spells. Dithmenos' shadow mimic can copy your debuff spells.
  • Gozag's gold distraction aura does not count as a debuff, and is thus worse off for Poltergeists than most other species.

History

• 0.33 added Poltergeists as a replacement for Vampires.