Dithmenos

Version 0.14: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

"Spread the eternal night."

Dithmenos the Shadowed desires all to be darkness. Followers of Dithmenos gain a strange and otherwordly affinity to the shadows of their environment. This god despises fire, the ancient enemy of the shadows, and forbids its use by worshippers; Dithmenos favours those who would instead destroy sources of light. Followers of Dithmenos are constantly surrounded in an aura of shadow, the extent of which is reflective of their level of devotion. Dithmenos grants followers the ability to instantly step into the shadow of nearby creatures, provided the shadow is still enough to do so. Dithmenos protects followers by occasionally shrouding those struck by attacks in dark smoke. Sufficiently pious followers of Dithmenos will find their own shadow will begin to attack on its own, and eventually gain the ability to assume the form of a shadow themself. Dithmenos likes it when you kill living beings, you kill the undead, you kill demons and you kill holy beings. Dithmenos especially likes it when you kill beings that bring light to the dungeon, through fire or other means. Dithmenos dislikes it when you light up the dungeon through fire magic or other magical means.

Racial Restrictions

Demigods cannot worship Dithmenos (or any other god).

Appreciates

• Killing natural, undead, demonic, or holy creatures.
• Killing haloed monsters, or monsters with illuminating spells: Corona and Holy Light.
• Killing fiery monsters: Fire dragons, burning bushes, red draconians, hell hounds, fire drakes, lindwurms, fire crabs, any monster with melee attacks of these flavours: pure fire, fire, napalm, and any monsters with spells of the Fire Magic school.

Deprecates

• You'll lose on average one piety every 320 turns.
• Use of light: Corona and the mace of Brilliance (Piety loss)
• Use of fire: weapons or ammo of flaming/flame, staves of fire, wands of flame, wands of fire, wands of fireball, scroll of immolation, fiery spells, and lamps of fire. (Piety loss or penance)
• Abandonment. (Penance)

Given Abilities

Piety level (-): “Gloomy”

• No granted abilities.

Piety level (*): “Aphotic”

• Umbra - You are surrounded by an umbra which expands with piety. This aura cancels out haloes, increases your stealth, and decreases melee/ranged accuracy of most creatures by 1+1d4. Dithmenos makes you immune to the accuracy penalty.

Piety level (**): “Caliginous”

• Shadow Step - Blink to a space within your umbra and adjacent to an immobile target creature. The target must not be invisible, and must not be moving. All stationary monsters (such as statues and most plants) qualify, as do monsters that are sleeping, paralysed, petrified, or withdrawn. (Costs 4 MP and 4-6 piety)

Piety level (***): “Darkened”

• Bleed Smoke - The player occasionally bleeds smoke on taking sufficient damage. The cloud always triggers on a 50% maximum HP attack. The lower bound goes down linearly to 0 damage at 200 piety.

Piety level (****): “Shadowed”

• Shadow Mimic - The player's shadow sometimes mimics melee and ranged attacks (except needles) and targeted spells (so long as they're not self-targeted). This happens 10% of the time at 4*, and 50% at full piety.

Piety level (*****): “Eclipsing”

• Shadow Form - Turns you into a mass of shadows. Grants invisibility, immunity to poison, draining, torment, and hostile enchantments, and 50% damage reduction, but halves your melee damage and reduces your spell power. While in shadow form, you bleed smoke on every incoming attack, but doing so further drains your skills. The higher your Invocations skill, the longer this ability will last. (Costs 9 MP, 10-15 piety, yellow skill drain)

Piety level (******): “Eternal Night”

• No new abilities.

Punishments

Dithmenos does not appreciate abandonment, and will call down fearful punishments on disloyal followers! When angered, Dithmenos turns the shadows against victims. Monsters emerge from the darkness, both illusions woven from shadow and the very shadows themselves turning against sinners. Novices are swarmed by flitting shadows and illusionary trolls; experts by shadow fiends and illusionary dragons. Dithmenos's subtle punishments are, if anything, more dangerous: victims find the shadows ripped away from them, hunted with nowhere to hide; or find themselves smothered in shadow and sleeping, perhaps forever.

While under penance, Dithmenos will sometimes punish you with one of the following forms of divine retribution:

• 25% chance: Dithmenos summons shadows, shadow demons, or a shadow fiend. Note that these will be durably summoned. Shadow fiends are possible only if your experience level is greater than 13.
• 25% chance: Dithmenos casts Shadow Creatures near you. The strength of these summons appears to scale with your current XL, and it tends to spawn dragons and trolls. Unlike most summons created by divine retribution, these are not durably summoned, and can be escaped fairly easily through stairs or other means.
• 25% chance: You are put to sleep for 6 turns.
• 25% chance: You are afflicted with a Sentinel's Mark for about 50 turns. This can be removed with a potion of cancellation as normal.

Strategy

• While Dithmenos doesn't mind you using Lightning Bolt, he will object if you set a tree on fire with it. Air Elementalists of Dithmenos should be careful in wooded areas.
• Bleeding smoke (with or without shadow form) can create large areas filled with smoke reducing sight to 2 spaces for a short time. This can give you the edge you need to escape from or close to ranged attackers or casters. (Almost all opponents require sight to cast spells, healing being a notable exception.) The downside is that you have to get hurt for the effect to trigger, but at high piety the effect will trigger reliably on nearly any hit.
• Shadow mimic is great for Enchanters: In melee the shadow will often distract foes and deal minor damage, and while using enchantments your shadow will often give you a second cast on the target greatly increasing your odds of applying the debuff. Shadow mimic is generally a nice passive buff on your characters offenses.
• Shadow Form and a disc of storms work together very well, as the damage it inflicts to enemies is not reduced.

History

As of 0.16, Dithmenos no longer disapproves the use of Corona.

Dithmenos was added in 0.14.

Trivia

Initially, this god was called "Dithmengos" which is an anagram for "Dsomething", an early placeholder name for the new deity.