Cigotuvi's embrace

Version 0.26: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

This page refers to the artefact. For the obsolete spell, see Cigotuvi's Embrace (spell).

Armour borne of rotten flesh and bone and gristle, held intact by the will of a long-dead sorcerer. The dreadful energies within it call to the bodies of the recently dead, sucking them in, protecting the wearer with a cocoon of carrion. This protection only lasts a short time, however - the ward against decay holds true within, but not without.

the +4 Cigotuvi's embrace

+4 leather armour

Miasma immunity
Drains wearer when removed
rN+
Absorbs corpses to temporarily increase AC
Evil

AC Mechanics

Any corpses or skeletons in your line of sight (even those that generate as part of vaults) will be destroyed to increase the enchantment of Cigotuvi's embrace. This increase is subject to diminishing returns (it takes more and more corpses to increase the enchantment further), and the enchantment will gradually decrease over time. Also, the higher your bonus armour, the faster it decays.

Corpses of monsters your god forbids you from desecrating will not be absorbed by the armour. This is mostly relevant for followers of Beogh, who will retain access to orc corpses; as Cigotuvi's embrace is an evil artifact, the good gods will require penance from any follower that dares wear it.

The enchantment goes to +10 with one corpse harvested, which takes about 90 turns to fully slough off. Four corpses give you +18 and take ~180 turns to fully go away, sixteen corpses give +34 and take ~320 turns to fully rot away, etc.

Unlike Gozag's Golden touch passive ability, Cigotuvi's embrace converts each and every corpse into the same amount of extra AC, regardless of the monster's hit dice and size.

Desirability

With enough corpses, Cigotuvi's embrace can provide extremely high amounts of raw physical protection despite its light weight -- the trick is continually generating said corpses. An amulet of regeneration may come in handy; the longer you have to spend recovering after a fight, the less bonus AC you'll have for the next one.

Cigotuvi's embrace is of limited use in areas with a dearth of monsters that drop corpses such as Hell or the Tomb. While the resistances to negative energy and miasma it provides may potentially come in handy in such areas, other sources of such resistances combined with more universally-useful body armour may be a better choice.

While Cigotuvi's embrace absorbs any and all corpses you come across, monsters that can drop armour when killed will still leave it behind, so you'll never lose out on any sets of troll leather armour or dragon scales. Additionally, certain methods of killing enemies won't leave corpses behind (wand of disintegration, Inner Flame, Orb of Destruction), leaving you without any additional AC.

Necromancers or followers of Yredelemnul may find the lack of corpses an issue, though Death Channel and Enslave Soul will still function. Infestation will still get you death scarabs, but any infested corpses are destroyed before they can be added to Cigotuvi's embrace.

Followers of Gozag have no use for Cigotuvi's embrace, as slain monsters will turn into gold instead of corpses.

History

• In 0.26, the rot immunity on Cigotuvi's embrace was replaced with immunity to miasma.
• The unrand version of Cigotuvi's embrace was added in 0.25 as a reference to the old spell.