Dangerous zones

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The Disc contains a few areas that are dangerous to the young, the unwary and the unprepared, as well as some hazards in otherwise safe areas. This page provides advice for new players on places and things to be wary of.

Auto-attack areas

These areas all contain an abundance of high-level NPCs which automatically attack on sight, without provokation. Note that all of these have prominent signs warning of the danger at their entrances. It is strongly recommended that new players do not enter these areas, as they can be a challenge even to higher level players.

  • The Shades: This is a dark and confusing maze in western Ankh-Morpork. It is filled with various tough NPCs, who automatically attack on sight. The room exits change to numbers within the Shades, making navigation and escape difficult.
  • The Medina: This is a maze in the Red Triangle district (south-eastern district) of Bes Pelargic. It is filled with very tough npcs who travel in groups and will attack unprovoked. Also, the exits with the Medina are confusing, making it difficult to escape easily. Those who are killed by npcs here will find their money taken; however, their corpse will be dragged out of the Medina.
  • The Snail: This is a spiral-shaped area in northern Bes Pelargic. It is filled with a variety of tough NPCs that automatically attack on sight, including some who wait and attack from ambush. The inner sections of the Snail are a no-portal zone.
  • Gloomy Forest: This is a dark and... gloomy... forest situated between Ohulan Cutash and the Sto Plains.
    • Out of the safe path the central forest contains auto-attacking giant spiders with poison attacks.
    • The bandit camp contains many bandits that ambush when trying to approach and can summon more allies. There are also traps that can harm or trap you around the bandit camp.
    • There are very strong and dangerous vicious spiders upstairs in Shelox's lair that auto-attack players and fruitbats with poisoned attacks.
    • The druids around the druid circle gang up on those killing too many of them.
    • New players can go around Gloomy Forest via the well-signposted and safe if extremely long 'Leggit Loop', or just be very careful to stay on the "safe path" within the forest - "look <direction>" before moving helps a lot during the day.
    • The easiest way to avoid Gloomy is perhaps to travel in the terrains south of Gloomy Forest (to the north you need to climb) though there can still be dangerous npcs like mooses or evil trolls at night.
  • The Genua Sewers: This is a maze of grilles, doors and sludge filled tunnels, and contains crocodiles which will attack on sight and use delayed pursuit. Different doors and grilles are locked at different times.
  • The Sto Lat Cabbage Warehouse: This is a maze where you do not see the exits between each rooms. It is also dark. You can however look in all the directions to see the surrounding rooms.
    • In the eastern parts of the warehouse there are very strong evil cabbages that automatically attack.
    • Picking up the spiders in the same area will make them bite you, doing unresisted damage until you drop them.
    • In the furthest reaches of that area there are skeletons that can spawn carnivorous cabbage-moths that show in your description and regularly deal damage, probably triggered by wearing a yellow stone ring.
  • The Djelibeybi crocodile pit: This is where some priests in Djelibeybi transport you to after you've killed local cats or priests. You can also reach this area through the terrains west of the Djel bridge.
    • It has tough auto-attacking crocodiles,
    • a barrier (rushes) that prevent leaving without passing a grappling skillcheck
    • and the whole pit is a no-portal/fly/passage zone.
    • If you die in the pit your ghost can be moved to the bridge by Gut Fishfryn, but you can get back down to it, for example to godmother (before being pulled up again) to get your corpse out.

The Forest Maze going east in Slippery Hollow will easily kill you if you are not well prepared, you won't see anything while Grues eat you in the darkness. Further dangers await.

The Copperhead mines above the Copperhead village contain auto-attacking npcs and other hardships.

In the SS Unsinkable missions, during the third leg of your impossible voyage one of the monsters will attack your ship and you if you are on the top deck.

  • The monster stage has been changed recently and is reportedly a lot more lethal.
  • The Kraken can insta-grab you in a tentacle, and start crushing you to death, doing large amounts of damage fast, and another player - who can also get tentacled - will have to try and "cut" you free.

Areas which may contain hostile NPCs or NPCs that can become hostile

These areas are less hostile than those above, but can contain hostile NPCs in certain times or places. New players should treat these areas with caution.

  • The various deserts: contain many aggressive desert lions. They do not pursue.
  • The water pastures near Djelibeybi and swamps: There are groups of hippos that may auto-attack. Some of the crocodiles in the area are aggressive.
  • The Ramtops: Roads may contain brigands after dark, who are mid-level NPCs that automatically attack on sight but do not pursue. They can perform specials, however, and assist each other. The higher mountain passes beyond Brass Neck contain yetis, lynxes and evil trolls, all of whom are tough, attack on sight, and in the case of the yetis and lynxes will pursue players, making escape difficult.
  • The Hub and ice land: There are hostile ice giants who pursue.
  • Uberwald:
    • Forests: Packs of werewolves in the forests around Escrow are aggressive at night. (They will also attack in the daytime if considered.) They also pursue (and have a very large bonus in the skill) anything they attack.
    • Escrow: Aggressive vampires appear in Escrow at night, and inhabit a nearby castle at all times. Vampires may still be around during the daytime and are fully capable of getting in a few hits before vanishing. Corpses of humans killed by vampires will turn into a vampire of <character>. Note that while npc corpses rise as vampires at the point at which they would normally decay fully, player corpses will rise before decaying fully. (These vampire-to-be corpses can be looted normally, though not buried, and are identifiable by a line that says they're twitching and that you shouldn't get too close.) Killing or helping to kill villagers of Escrow (even if you are not the one who gave the killing blow) will have you thrown to a pack of werewolves at a later time.
    • Dave the Most Horrid and Foul Necromancer has his lair in a swamp southwest of Escrow, he attacks if considered and he uses spells that deal a lot of damage.
  • Sto Plains:
    • Bleak Prospect: comes alive with aggressive zombies at night, which use delayed pursuit. They may be there in the daytime, too.
    • Roads: The roads across the plains can be brigand infested after dark. These NPCs will not pursue, but they defend each other and can perform specials. Aggressive evil trolls have also been seen on some roads at night.
    • Skund Forest: It is wise to treat wolf trails to the south of the village with caution. It is well populated with wolf packs that will attack after a few seconds.
    • The Grflx caves in Skund Forest has lots of grflxen that automatically attack trespassers.
    • Terrains: Wild boars in the plains and cabbage fields are sometimes (though not always) aggressive.
    • Some NPCs in the Sto Lat Sewers may auto attack after waiting in the room for a while.
    • In Sto Lat there are wandering thieves at night, usually in groups in the northwest of the city, who appear as "<adjective> character" (suspicious character, shady character, etc). They attack after a while, not immediately, but they make it unwise to idle in Sto Lat. If one kills the player, he or she will take the money on the corpse (but not in containers). These characters assist one another. These characters are sometimes hidden and groups may be half-in and half-out of hiding. Searching a room containing these thieves can result in aggression with the possibility of multiple backstabs if you failed to spot the hidden ones during your search.
    • Throughout the Sto Plains terrains, including Skund Forest, Boars and Bears may be aggressive immediately or after a short delay. In all forested areas, Wolves are aggressive.
  • Klatch:
    • The Hood in Djelibeybi contains hiding bandits that sometimes automatically attack players.
    • Ruins of Tacticum northeast of Al-Khali: 71-hour Ahmed will attack if considered, assessed, pursued or rifled and will follow after you leave the room. This area is claustrophobic, somewhat restricting escape paths if he catches you at a bad angle.

Other hazards

These are other hazards to be aware of.

Guild NPCs

Guild NPCs inside guild buildings and property may have additional uses (for example the Lecturer of Recent Runes while looking the same as any other NPC is one of the main teaching NPCs for the guild) and protections that are not obviously apparent to the inexperienced observer. These may be related to the nature of the guild concerned.

Player administrators of the guild may apply additional sanctions if you attack functional guild NPCs.

Magic scrolls

If you carry too many magic scrolls of the same spell anywhere in your inventory then one or more spell will escape. This will damage your intelligence and wisdom stats and your heath. This might make other scrolls be over the limit of what you can carry, causing more scrolls to also escape, giving you more penalties, repeating the process until no scrolls are over the limit. We call those scrolls explosions. The more scrolls are released, the more damage you take. This can cause death.

The stats penalty goes away with time or the Restore ritual.

Energy

Spells can escape when you try to remember them from scrolls or educe from a hag stones. They are also found in the UU library.

On critical failure when trying to capture a tiny speck / small point / ball / orb or sphere of energy it attacks you. Otherwise they are not aggressive.

When fighting one of them they deal direct energy damage that pass through all shields like they do not exist.

Wards

Things that you find on the corpses of priests (or indeed inside living ones) may be protected with religious wards or contain items that are. Wards can do anything from damage you (up to 1500 hp), make you more susceptible to damage, transport you elsewhere, make you fumble items, etc. This may kill you outright or place you somewhere (underwater, in a mugger filled alley, etc.) that you cannot survive.

Do not loot priests. Instead, wait for the corpse to decompose so the warded items will fall to the ground where they may be picked up safely. Priests with Withering Touch can quickly and safely decompose corpses.

If you must loot warded items from a corpse, you can reduce the consequences by looting warded items one at a time (and hope you can survive with the consequences of the ward). This is not recommended unless you have over 1500 hp (to have a better chance at surviving damage wards) and have magical/religious means of transportation (to escape from being transported to dangerous areas). Take EXTREME care with containers; looting a satchel will trigger any ward on the satchel and all warded items in the satchel simultaneously.

Wards vanish once triggered, making the item(s) safe to handle.

Water room

If you go on a room filled with water with too much burden for your swimming skills (about 60 for 15-20% burden typically), you will sink to the bottom of the water. If you stay there for some time, you will drown.

You can drop everything to have a better chance to reach the surface (to do this: "unkeep all" "remove all" "drop all" and then "up" until you reach the surface). It works nearly always, but strong currents can make it harder to move around, or find dropped things.

Otherwise, if you have a blue crystal ring you can twist it to be transported to a random player which can be in a dangerous area, or you can try to godmother out but this will take a life if you are too old, or cast portal as it should work underwater. (Passaging does not work underwater unless you can breathe.)

Wearing inflated floaties ("wear floaties" "inflate floaties") can help you stay on surface or swim up, but will make it harder to swim around and especially down or against current. Furthermore you need to inflate them out of water and they will deflate automatically over time by making lots of chats.

If you died at the bottom of the water or barely managed to swim up without your inventory, you can then either try to go back down to try to take a few items back up or try to swim of the shore while remembering your steps to get back if you want someone to help retrieve your items or if you want to go back yourself. In most cases it's possible to recover your stuff a few items at a time. Be advised that terrain rooms without a corpse will unload after a few seconds of having no being in them, destroying all items in them. Rooms around rivers should be fixed not to do that, but it is best to test this with a penny than lose all your items when rescuing someone.

Assassin Guilds

Non-members will find that wandering past warning signs can provide a fatal blow to the heart. Killing students or anyone in the guild will result in assassin npcs attacking you. Stealing on guild grounds will result in an automatic sanction.

There are deadly traps in certain parts of the various assassin guilds. The contracts room and the poison labs are known to be protected with such traps.

Ankh-Morpork

Theft

Stealing without a licence (e.g. not a thief, or a thief on leave) in Ankh-Morpork will get you visited by some heavies from the Thieves' Guild who will be very happy to beat you up, confiscate your inventory and leave you hanging from the Brass Bridge with a single hit point.

Or if you're "lucky" Captain Carrot will come to arrest you. Even if you serve time in jail the Thieves' Guild is still after you and the next time you pass in front of one of the heavies it will apply punishment.

Punishments increase each time and include: being knocked unconscious and reduced to one hp, having all money taken from you, having all items taken from you.

Items confiscated by heavies can be bought back from the Heavy Shop in the Thieves Guild

Some NPCs (Ilik, thieves/muggers in the Shades) can steal items from you; stealing the items back without a licence is NOT permitted. Kill these NPCs if you can and get your items back from their corpse.

Hedgehog

A witch singing the Hedgehog song in AM will immediately attract the attention of the Musicians' Guild, whose enforcer administers instant punishments: unconsciousness, leg-breaking, contracting. (Punishments increase cumulatively.)

Quarry lane

Killing a troll can cause other trolls to appear and turn hostile.

Dangerous groups of npcs

The Ole Ron group will fight you all at once and will pursue you, Hags are witches and can do nasty things even to not-so-newbie players and small old ladies also all attack at once and are just nasty.

Alchemist's Guild

The Alchemist's Guild has been known to explode (usually after some warning) and kill newbies who didn't leave fast enough or were standing not far enough outside of it.

Assassins

Junior assassin NPCs are often accompanied by a more skilled mentor on the streets or inside guild building of Ankh-Morpork. Attacking the student may cause the mentor to respond. (The mentor can be expected to have considerable hiding abilities and thus may be unnoticed.)

Dwarf Mansion

On the west side of Short Street, around it's middle, is a mansion. Inside the mansion there are traps, potentially dangerous npcs and a ghost that may steal your stuff.

Djelibeybi

Attacking cats and priests

Cats and priests are both sacred in this city. Attacking them is a ticket to the ancient and highly cultural pit full of crocodiles. ("Priests" appears to specifically mean "priests" and "priestesses", not "followers" or "madmen".)

Npcs reacting to combat

Also, soldiers/warriors can join in fights with other soldiers/warriors in the same room, especially if you attack young ones.

Sometimes aggressive scorpions will sting everyone fighting in the room, causing stat damage (lowering constitution, thus hit points) that can be cured with antidote tea.

Wizards (possibly soldiers?) can become aggressive if you attack a scorpion in the same room.

Assassins

Finally, Hashishim npcs (who appear as dazed, beatific, giggly, and spacey men and women) will reportedly sometimes attack in defense of other npcs.

Spies

Spy npcs in this city may assist their countrymen (particularly ambassador npcs) but have also been seen assisting players of their nationality, and may occasionally attack unprovoked (this may be related to the player's nationality) even if you aren't fighting anything. These spies always focus on the neck when attacking and may backstab and abscond.

Ramtops

The Ramtops are a mountainous region, it is possible to fall to your death by stepping off of some paths and cliff tops. These include:

Parts of Uberwald have been reported as having similar hazards. Rooms with such exits usually hint at it in their description, and you can "look <direction>" to get information about the height or the view.

Ohulan-Cutash

Asking for a "very, very special haircuts/shaves" from Teeny Sod in Ohulan-Cutash will really kill you dead. Yes, even if he's a wimp you could kill without paying attention and through all the shields in the world. No it's not a clever joke. Make sure you're willing to die before you do the Achievement: Cutthroat Twit.

Escrow

Crime

Attacking innocent villagers or other peaceful npcs in Escrow will at some future time get you instantly transported to a pack of very strong werewolves. If at night they will pursue and try to forcefully feast on your internal organs. This is normally fatal unless you manage to escape by flying away or with a blue ring or somehow manage to defeat them. During the day they attack if you consider them but you should be able to just leave.

Stealing is also said to get you thrown to the werewolves.

Castle

Many aspects of the nearby Magpyr castle aka "Dontgonearthe castle" are lethal and it is also populated with aggressive vampires.

Genua

Certain named npcs in this city are members of the local crime families, killing them will attract the attentions of a Coffee Nostra Hitman, these are highly dangerous aggressive backstabbing npcs sent to kill the offending player.

The city guards in Genua can reportedly launch lots of special attacks very fast if their health is low or if you do something using gp during the fight.

  • The specials do a lot of damage, in one instance an average of 420 hp, possibly through Major Shield.
  • Especially if there's lots of guards this can make them land lots of specials at the same time in a few heartbeats.
  • This can easily be fatal even with lots of hp.

The sermons of agitators sometimes will enrage NPCs to attack foreigners.

See also

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