Xom

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

This page is about the god. For the removed card, see Xom card.

"A new plaything!"

Xom is a wild and unpredictable god of chaos, who seeks not worshippers but playthings with which to toy. Many choose to follow Xom in the hope of receiving fabulous rewards and mighty powers, but Xom is nothing if not capricious. There is nothing a follower can do to influence Xom's mood. To worship Xom is to live riskily. In a good mood Xom may shower you with gifts, while at other times this capricious god could decide to “spice things up a little” and send you to your doom. If you prove yourself the stronger, so much the better; if not, well, there'll be other playthings...

Chaos Knights begin play worshiping Xom.

Racial restrictions

Demigods cannot worship Xom (or any other god).

Piety

Unlike other gods, there is no way to affect your piety; it is instead randomly changed.

For Xom, Piety's only use is to determine the niceness and strength of its actions. Xom's niceness depends on your Piety: the chance to perform a "good" action is approximately equal to Piety/2 % (this probability is increased during dangerous situations, like combat, up to 95%). The strength of Xom's actions will depend on how far you are from 100 Piety (in either direction).

Piety starts at 100 and changes by 1 point roughly every 20 turns (about 49% chance to move towards 100 and 51% chance to move away). When Xom acts, there is a 20% chance that your piety will be set to a random amount. Piety can be observed in the ^ screen by watching your favour status, as well as observing the piety meter.

Depending on your piety, it displays the following messages:

• 0 - 20: A very special plaything of Xom.
• 21 - 50: A special plaything of Xom.
• 51 - 80: A plaything of Xom.
• 81 - 120: A toy of Xom.
• 121 - 150: A favourite toy of Xom.
• 151 - 180: A beloved toy of Xom.
• 181 - 200: Xom's teddy bear.

Amusement

Another important aspect of Xom is that it really, really hates being bored. When Xom is bored, Xom will act more often, and its actions will almost always be bad. This is reflected by an "amusement" value, which ranges between 0 and 255.

When you start worshiping Xom, its amusement is set to between 2 and 80. Every 20 turns, there's a 50% chance that Xom's amusement will be decreased by one, until it reaches 0. When that happens, you'll get a message "Xom is BORED", and the bad stuff will start. You'll get a warning when the amusement gets down to 1 (at least 20 turns before it reaches 0): "Xom is getting BORED". If your interest reaches zero, your title will always be "A BORING thing", regardless of your piety level.

To avoid boring Xom, you should always try to keep the god interested in you. Unfortunately, Xom is mostly amused by things you can't control (like being teleported away in the Abyss when the exit or a rune was in sight) or if you waste useful resources. When Xom finds something funny, the amusement may rise if the action's amusement value (which is randomized) would be higher than the current one, setting amusement to the new value. You can guess how high the amusement was set by the message provided:

• Xom is interested: 12 - 25
• Xom is mildly amused: 26 - 50
• Xom is amused: 51 - 75
• Xom is highly amused!: 76 - 100
• Xom thinks this is hilarious!: 101 - 200
• Xom roars with laughter!: 201 - 255

Interest

You can help make Xom more interested in you by doing or being affected by the following things:

• Extreme (255): Using an unknown potion in dangerous combat (and you are more than XL 1) (200), randomly teleporting into a dangerous situation, being banished to the Abyss, being hit by a vulnerable element (200), or being killed by falling down stairs (200).
• High (128): Mutating (depends on the mutation) or undead rotting. Reading a random "bad effect" scroll in dangerous combat (Scroll of immolation, Scroll of poison if the player does not have poison resistance, Scroll of torment if the player does not have negative energy or torment resistance) (100). Being killed by disintegration (100). Being significantly hurt by a monster of a far higher or far lower XL than yourself (amusement value varies).
• Medium (64): Drinking potions of degeneration or berserk rage, having your intellect devoured (50), using an unknown useless or good scroll with a dangerous monster nearby (50) or when hostile monsters accidentally hit each other.
• Low (16): Successful use of a box of beasts (14), enchanting things, gaining levels, anyone in sight fumbling in shallow water (14), or being drained (15).
• Minor: Spell miscasts (the level), becoming confused (duration), or sustaining serious injury (varies).

Xom is also interested by dangerous and high tension situations and is more likely to intervene or act when these occur, which will also reset the boredom timer. Some examples include fighting many monsters at once, battling a high HD monster when your XL is low, and being under many debuffs, such as being slowed or paralyzed.

Acts

Every 20.0 decaAut, Xom will turn its attention towards you, and depending on the situation (from 7% of the time if there are no monsters in view to 33% in the middle of a big fight) may decide to perform either a "good" action or a "bad" action.

Xom's actions will often be in context (e.g. not turning you berserk if there's no one around), although nothing is guaranteed. Good actions are more likely if your Piety is high (see below).

Below is an incomplete list of actions that Xom may perform.

"Good" Actions

Only combat actions

• Potion effect: Affect you with a random potion effect:
  • curing, heal wounds, magic, haste, might, brilliance, or invisibility (12.35%)
  • attraction or berserk rage or ambrosia (6.17%)
  • experience (1.23%)

Only potions that will have an effect are picked (for example, no Magic if the player character is at max MP).

• Cast spells: Make you cast a random un-aimed spell for free, with spell levels correlating to present tension.
  • This list comprises of: Summon Small Mammal, Gloom, Fugue of the Fallen, Olgreb's Toxic Radiance, Battlesphere, Awaken Armour, Martyr's Knell, Leda's Liquefaction, Forge Blazeheart Golem, Animate Dead, Alistair's Intoxication, Summon Mana Viper, Alistair's Walking Alembic, Summon Cactus Giant, Dispersal, Death Channel, Summon Hydra, Sphinx Sisters, Diamond Sawblades, Malign Gateway, Discord, Disjunction, Summon Horrible Things, Summon Dragon, Fulsome Fusillade, Chain of Chaos.
• Kind door ring: Raises a massive cage of disconnected transparent doors between 4 and 7 tiles away from you, while blinking away all other hostile monsters to the outside of these doors. This can only replace rock walls, trees, fountains, and other doors, and won't happen at all if there's too many other types of terrain nearby.
• Enchant monsters (Good): Paralyzes, vitrifies, slows nearby monsters, or makes them start petrifying.
• Prevent you from being banished.

Summons

• Summon several allies: see Xom summons below.
• Summon one ally with several hundred turns duration and an innate Regeneration buff. This requires less than 25% of the level to be known first.
• Hyperbuff ally: Give your weakest current ally a large list of buffs, or summon a weak ally to give all of these buffs to if none are already present. Choosing between the two depends on your current allies versus your XL. ("Witness the rise of a true champion!")
  • The buff list includes: Might, Haste, Invisibility, Brilliance, Deflect Missiles, Resistance, Regeneration, Strong-Willed, Toxic Radiance, Doubled Vigour, Mirrored Damage, and Swiftness.
  • Possible summons include iguanas, cerulean imps, black bears, hell rats, wyverns, hell hounds, elephants, and toenail golems.
• Flora ring: Summons a thick garden of either demonic plants or toadstools immediately around you. This won't be used if monsters with Smiting range attacks are present.

Statuses

• Mass charm: Temporarily charms half of all monsters in sight, always charming at least one and failing to charm another, while otherwise aiming for the lower half of the HD of monsters present.
• Animate weapon: Cast an irresistable Tukima's Dance on a random monster's weapon, making it your ally. ("[Enemy]'s [weapon] dances into the air!")
• Confuse monsters: Confuse hostile monsters around you. This will not occur if the monster is nonliving, plant, has the Clarity intrinsic, or is already confused.
• Good polymorph: Polymorph a random monster around you into a weaker monster (-3 HD).
• Snakes to sticks Permanently transform a hostile snake or naga into a "stick" (any one of the weapons: club, spear, trident, halberd, glaive, quarterstaff, shortbow, longbow, giant club, or giant spiked club). The stick will never be branded, and is not guaranteed to be useful to the player character. The stick's rarity, type and enchantment are influenced by the HD of the snake.
• Wave of despair: Drops a large amount of harmless skeleton items, inflicts Vulnerability on both you and everything else in sight, then drains and fears all hostile enemies.

Destructive effects

• Divine lightning: Throws a bolt of divine lightning, which explodes in a 5x5 radius around you but not actually hitting you, and then sprays additional lightning bolts around one's sight, with 33% of them being aimed towards foes and the rest aimed at random spots in sight. Lightning bolt count scales with tension levels, and all lightning power scales to XL plus having more than 3 runes. ("The area is suffused with divine lightning!").
• Destruction: Hurl fireballs at your foes, which also applies Sticky Flame. This skips adjacent monsters. If Xom is in a bad mood, there is a chance to hurl fireballs at allied monsters. There is a 1/3 chance for the fireballs to be fake and apply a backlight Corona instead.
• Force Lance fleet: Push away nearby monsters (without dealing damage), then summons friendly living spells around you that all cast Force Lance. The power and number of Force Lances are randomized but scale to XL.
• Light up webs: Light all webs in sight on fire, removing all clouds currently on top of webs, freeing anybody currently caught in a web, and leaving behind flame clouds. This can only happen with visible webs.

Also non-combat actions

• Gift: Gift you an item. Weapons have an extra chance to become chaos branded, and Xom will rarely directly lean on scroll of acquirement choices.
• Good teleport: Instantly teleport several times, likely up to a relatively safe place. This can only occur if less than 80% of the level has been explored.
• Good mutation: Give you a random good mutation, or many random good mutations. This will reduce your current HP (but no lower than 50% of your max HP), but they can also restore your health to 50% of your max HP if you are below that amount. These go through mutation resistance, and do not care about one's
• Detect all: Detects simultaneously monsters, items, and the current floor's terrain, with spottiness and distance dependent on XOm's mood. Note that the location of detected monsters is fuzzed, and will only display the genus of each monster. This can only occur if less than 80% of the level has been explored.
• Change of scenery: Alters terrain around you. Fountains may begin to gush blood, trees may become demonic or petrified, teleport traps or closed doors or altars to Xom may appear, caches of fruit and meat may fall from the sky....
• Cloud trail: You start spewing a trail of clouds behind you with every movement. Cloud types include, in decreasing likelihood, seething chaos, harmless magical condensation, miasma, calcifying dust, mutagenic fog, excruciating misery, opaque salt, and blastmotes.
  • Calcifying dust and salt can block line of sight, while the rest can't. Worshipping the good gods will prevent producing chaos, miasma, or misery, while Zin in particular will also prevent mutagenic fog.
• Bazaar banishment: You are sent to a special bazaar containing many double-edged consumables and equipment, spells that are either double-edged or in Xom's casting list, various talismans, and chaos-branded weapons. Uniquely, this can provide a Chaotic modifier ontop of unrands, which lets them hit with an additional chaos brand on top of their other properties. This is unlikely to happen multiple times a run, and depends on having sufficient amounts of gold increasing each time.
  • Visually, this uses the banishment animation, and the resulting bazaar can use Abyss tiles. Reading the message log upon being banished is important.

"Bad" Actions

Only combat actions

• Chaos gift: Add a Chaos brand and several slaying increases to a random nearby creature's weapons and ammunition.
  • This will not occur if the item is blessed, a wielded by a holy monster, is a gift from another god, is branded, a boulder, a throwing net, a magical staff, or an unrand. Upon upgrading, the text "[enemy]'s [weapon] erupts in a glittering mayhem of colors" will alert the player to the chaos upgraded weapon.
• Bad Polymorph: Polymorphs a random hostile monster into a stronger monster (+2 HD). This can't occur for firewood plants, avoids flying monster for the few few xls, and has a chance to apply the wretched status at lower XLs.
• Confuse players: confuses you, and potentially other hostile monsters depending on Xom's mood. If you can't drink a potion of curing to remove this, you'll also get might for the confusion's duration.
  • Like the good action, hostile monsters won't be confused if they're nonliving, plant, have Clarity intrinsics, or are already confused.
• Time control: Slows, hastes, or paralyzes everybody in sight (including you). This can still be applied even if you have Stasis from being a Formicid.
• Clones: Summons two hostile illusions of yourself, and one friendly one, for a very brief duration.
• Brain drain: Drains your mp, and produces some number of antimagic monsters scaling to XL: brain worms, mana vipers, and at very high XL, quicksilver elementals. These may be neutral or hostile depending on Xom's overall mood.
• Forced Word of Recall: Makes a random hostile monster start chanting a Word of Recall, even if it can't otherwise cast magic, and otherwise be unable to do any other actions. This takes 60 to 90 aut, unlike normal casts of the spell, and requires there to still be other hostile monsters out of sight on the floor, as well as the monster to not be silenced.
• Mean door ring: Raises a massive cage of disconnected transparent doors between 4 and 7 tiles away from you, while blinking towards you an XL-limited number of hostile enemies and blinking away everything else. Like the beneficial version, this can only replace rock walls, trees, water, and lava, and won't happen at all if there's too many other types of wall nearby.
• Fiddle with doors: Closed doors will burst open, and open doors will slam shut. This can open runed doors!
• Enchant monsters (bad): Applies Haste, Might, Regeneration, or Resistance to multiple monsters in sight.
• Chaos clouds: Places a large amount of seething chaos clouds on top of you.
• Torment: Invoke a Symbol of Torment.
  • Xom will never do this if you're immune to torment.
• Blink monsters: Xom blinks all hostile monsters in sight, likely ruining your positioning.
• Rearrange the pieces: Xom swaps around the positions of you and other monsters, confusing monsters 50% of the time, and very likely extremely ruining your positioning.

Also non-combat actions

• Miscast: makes a silly message from miscasting a spell "through" the player. Nothing will occur, but this will be indicated through chat messages "Xom almost notices you." "Xom's attention almost turns to you for a moment." "Xom's power almost touches on you for a moment." or "You almost hear Xom's maniacal laughter."
• Bad teleport: Instantly teleport several times, likely up to a relatively dangerous place. The instant nature of this means one can't wake anything up mid-transport until the end.
• Summon hostiles: see Xom summons below.
• Random mutations: Give you random mutations or removes them. This will reduce your current HP (but no lower than 50% of your max HP), but they can also restore your health to 50% of your max HP if you are below that amount. These go through mutation resistance, and are not subjected to the same hard cap of 15 other non-divine mutation sources have.
• Move stairs: If stairs (or escape hatches) are in view, they are moved toward you or away from you. For several turns, when you move on a stair or climb up or down a stair, there's a chance that it will slide away from you. This is far more common in the Abyss.
• Noise: Make loud noises at your location, ranging from shouting to shattering the volume (12 to 31). This cannot be affected by Silence.
• Fake Shatter: Does a fake Shatter effect, which produces a similar level of incredible noise but which does no damage, has a very low chance to destroy most non-rock walls, and frequently replaces destroyed rock walls with piles of debris. This can still be done while you're silenced.
• Draining: Inflict you with draining. This is reduced if you are already drained.
• Banishment: Banish you to the Abyss. This is internally considered the most severe action Xom can take. The level of the abyss you are banished to depends on the XL of the character. This will not occur if the player character is below the minimum experience level, and can only be a "fake" banishment. However, if Xom is "bored" or if the player character is under penance, then banishment is always allowed and never reverted. If Xom is not bored and the player is not under penance, then there is a chance that Xom will immediately revert banishment to the Abyss.
• Doom: Inflict some Doom upon you. This will never inflict a full Bane unless Xom is either bored or wrathful.

Xom's actions and gifts will often seem to be in the spirit of what Xom (with its particularly capricious sense of humor) finds funny. Xom might gift a gold dragon scales for your Octopode, just to tease you.

In any case, Xom's actions will never directly kill you unless Xom is bored or you are under penance (a mutation or effect that would reduce a stat to 0 is cancelled, HP damage that would have killed you is cancelled, etc.). However, anything Xom summons is more than capable of killing you.

Xom summons

Most Xom monsters are either demons (though with a limited selection of high-tier demons), summoners, debuff-inflictors, or chaotic. One can receive a long-term single ally with regeneration, multiple friendly monsters, or multiple hostile monsters. In the non-singular case, there is always a 1/4 chance that only one of these Xom-favoured summons will be chosen, and the rest will be appropriate monsters of the floor akin to scrolls of summoning and Shadow Creatures. Experience level provides a baseline loose "depth" number, which is then fuzzed further according to one's XL and the number of monsters summoned (lower for more and higher for less). As long as Xom's not bored or wrathful, the baseline variance is -4 to +3 for hostile summons, and -3 to +8 for allied summons.

Monster	Minimum Depth	Max Depth	Monster	Min Depth	Max Depth	Monster	Min Depth	Max Depth
b Butterfly	-4	26	r Quokka	-4	-1	5 Crimson imp	-3	6
5 Iron imp	-3	6	5 Shadow imp	2	8	5 Ufetubus	3	8
5 White imp	3	8	Drude	3	8	M Mummy	4	8
W Phantom	4	8	B Bombardier beetle	5	10	z Weeping skull	5	12
k Swamp drake	5	12	4 Orange demon	7	14	p Shapeshifter	7	15
4 Ice devil	8	14	4 Red devil	8	14	g Boggart	8	15
4 Chaos spawn	8	20	4 Hellwing	9	14	9 Toenail golem	9	14
V Vampire	8	14	3 Ynoxinul	9	14	r Hell rat	9	14
K Kobold demonologist	10	14	x Small abomination	10	15	u Ugly thing	10	16
3 Soul eater	10	17	4 Rust devil	10	18	3 Smoke demon	11	17
Y Dream sheep	11	17	x Worldbinder	11	20	3 Neqoxec	11	22
b Obsidian bat	12	16	6 Demonspawn	12	18	3 Sun demon	13	19
3 Sixfirhy	10	17	G Great orb of eyes	13	20	z Laughing skull	13	21
X Large abomination	14	22	p Glowing shapeshifter	14	22	h Hell hog	15	22
8 Obsidian statue	15	23	x Bunyip	16	22	B Radroach	16	23
u Very ugly thing	16	25	H Sphinx marauder	16	24	G Glowing orange brain	17	24
2 Shadow demon	17	33	2 Sin beast	17	33	2 Cacodemon	17	33
2 Zykzyl	17	33	H Guardian sphinx	18	25	2 Reaper	16	23
( Dancing weapon	18	24	8 Orange crystal statue	19	26	t Apocalypse crab	20	33
X Tentacled monstrosity	21	33	P Starflower	22	33	Y Hellephant	23	33
y Moth of wrath	24	24	R Nekomata	25	33

Butterflies, laughing skulls, and dream sheep come in twos or three, while hell rats, boggarts, ugly things, tarantella, hell hogs, and very ugly things come in twos. Reapers will always come with chaos scythes, whether allied or hostile.

Revival

Rarely, upon death, Xom may intervene and save your life. This is affected by the tension of the situation, if Xom considers the death "worth saving", and the current mood (piety). This will never happen if your character's max HP is 1, or your XL is 1. Deaths that cannot be considered "worth saving" from are deaths from: leaving the dungeon, winning the game, quitting, or self-aimed death. . Upon being revived, your character will receive anywhere from 1 HP to 1 + Max HP/4 HP. Xom is guaranteed to not be bored within the next 10 auts (gift timeout is set to a minimum of 10) .

Death Comments

Xom has a chance to comment upon the character's death if it is particularly "funny" or "boring". These will only occur if the death is final, and Xom does not revive the character. A funny death is one where the death is unusual (not killed by a monster, killed by a god or otherwise invisible actor, beam, cloud, freezing, burning, self-aimed, or trap), having died with HP greater than -9, or having had high tension (more than 19) before the death. Xom will laugh in the post-death screen ("Xom roars with laughter!", "Xom laughs nastily!" etcetera). A boring death is one where the dead character has down to -2 HP and the situation was of low tension (maximum of 10). Xom will remark that you were boring ("Xom yawns loudly!", "Huh, did I miss anything?" etcetera). These comments have no effect on gameplay.

Gifts

Xom will occasionally give you gifts as one of its actions. These are delivered purely at random, not based on any Gift Timeout. Xom's gifts can be normal, useful items, but are usually chosen for maximum annoyance. Items range from excellent randarts to large piles of gold to utter trash (robe {god gift}). Randarts will sometimes have titles with Xom's name in them (e.g. leather armour of Xom's Amusement).

Penance

Unfaithful ex-followers will find themselves suffering through Xom's bad moods for so long as Xom can be bothered to remember about them. Still, Xom's caprice remains; the unfaithful are rewarded just as the faithful are punished.

If you leave Xom, your penance counter will be set to 50, which is quite high.

While under penance, Xom will occasionally punish you by performing a "bad" action from the list above. As a true god of chaos, however, there is a 10% chance that Xom will do a "good" action instead. Note that Xom's wrath makes "bad" actions harsher and scarier, and harmless effects like flavour messages won't be chosen- when combined with Xom's limited number of actions outside of combat, this means one will get over a dozen bad mutations, and frequently have to deal with large numbers of hostile Xom summons.

Trivia

• When using a QWERTY keyboard layout, the name "Xom" is simply "Zin," but with all letters mistyped one key to the right.
• In one of the books of Zin (through the Recite ability), there is a chance for the "sinners" to be referred to as "bastard children of Xom".
• Xom's "last name" on its god page is usually "of Chaos" (at a 70.175 percent chance of occurring), but can more rarely be any one of 27 other options. This is unique for all gods in Crawl, as all other gods can only have one last name.
  • Most rarely are the last names "The Xom-Meister, Xom-a-lom-a-ding-dong", "The Xom-Meister, Xom-o-Rama", "The Xom-Meister, Xom-Xom-bo-Bom, Banana-Fana-fo-Fom", "Xom of Unknown Intent", "Xom the Fickle", "Xom of Unknown Intention", "Xom of Swiftly Tilting Intent", "Xom of Fickle Intent", "Xom of Ineffable Intent", "Xom of Gnomic Intent", each at a 0.50% chance of occurring.

History

• In 0.33, Xom will get a new effect that inflicts Doom.
• In 0.33, Xom got a new effect that hyperbuffs a player's ally.
• Prior to 0.32, many of Xom's effects didn't scale with XL; most notably, this included Xom's summons, which had had many fewer options. Many effects were adjusted to be more unambigiously good or bad, contain other also, several new effects were added in 0.32:
  • The following effects were added in 0.32: time control, brain drain, flora rings, both varieties of door ring, chanting word of recall,
• Prior to 0.26, Xom was not stimulated on worship from a faded altar (+200 amusement).
• Prior to 0.25, Xom could cause miscast effects.
• Prior to 0.24, Xom could not summon butterflies when you were tormented.
• Prior to 0.21, eating mutagenic chunks could grant Xom's interest.
• Prior to 0.18, Xom branded weapon gifts with chaos less often and didn't chaos brand ranged weapons. Drinking potions of poison could also award Xom's interest.
• Prior to 0.17, drinking potions of decay could award Xom's interest.
• In 0.16, Xom gained a 'mood' meter on the Crawl interface, in the same place other gods have piety meters.
• Prior to 0.14, Xom's confusion could surpass 20 turns; this has been capped to 20. Xom's abilities also did not respect clarity and sustain abilities at all, although Xom may still bypass these abilities if the mood meter is particularly low.