Trolling in Caves of Qud

I mean that literally. Caves of Qud has trolls, and I did some stuff to them.

If you stick with Caves of Qud long enough, you’ll be sent to a dungeon called Bethesda Susa. Before you can get into the dungeon proper, you need to deal with three literal trolls who have claimed the site’s regenerative pools as their spa.

The first troll is Jotun, Who Parts Limbs. The first time I met him, he did exactly that, putting an end to my run.

My next hero was more prepared. He came packing a forcefield bracelet, so Jotun didn’t have much choice but to stand there and soak up bullets. This forcefield strategy worked pretty well for trolls #2 and #3, too. Caves of Qud is a game where the boss encounters aren’t designed to play fair, so the player shouldn’t either. If you’re willing to think laterally and engage the game’s mechanics, there’s lots of ways to safely deal with these troll-shaped problems.

My next hero had a different outcome in mind: he wanted to make friends. Trolls know secrets no one else does, and I was determined to learn them.

Love Hurts

There are two ways to make friends in Caves of Qud. The first way, which is boring and stupid, is to be nice to creatures your would-be friend likes. Then, once their murderous impulses are tamped down and they’re willing to hear you out, invite them to share drink. This might work for the local haberdasher, but it’s not likely to work for trolls who are more interested in hucking axes at you.

The second way is to use psychic powers to brainwash them into being your friend and/or slave. This is obviously much more productive, and trolls have notoriously thin brains. If your Qudling hero doesn’t have psychic powers, the game provides a convenient workaround: the love injector.

To make friends with Jotun — and keep my limbs un-parted — I just had to close enough to get a syringe into him.

I equipped my love injector and positioned myself to get the first strike against Jotun. But trolls are known for their thick hides, and the syringe didn’t stick. The daggers in my other three hands sure did, though. Jotun was on fire and gushing blood. I tried again, and this time the love injector struck home. Jotun fell in love with me…

…and then my three follow-up attacks with fiery daggers landed. Whoops. The game alerted me that my ally had burned to death, and that I was the one who did it.

Well, okay, lesson learned. I just had to refine my strategy for the second troll. I fished the first key out of the gross pile of troll ashes and pressed on.

I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff

The second troll is Fjorn-Kosef, Who Knits the Icy Lattice. He likes to stand back and belch frozen spider webs, then spawn miniature troll foals to mob you while you’re stuck. This time, I equipped a love injector into each of my four hands, maximizing my odds of jabbing the troll without accidentally setting him on fire.

This turned out to be a partial success. Having just one troll on my payroll wasn’t enough to get that juicy troll gossip I so craved. It also didn’t disable F-K’s ability to constantly poop troll foals out of his disgusting pustules. As long as F-K was heartsick for my sexy four-armed hook-legged bod, the map remained packed with foals constantly bouncing off the walls.

This time I definitely received an in-game alert about the love injector definitely working. Whatever else was about to happen, at least I didn’t have to fight my way through the icy lattice. I asked my new bestie to give me the second key, and we pressed on.

Darkness Took Me

With Jotun’s unfortunate demise, I needed one more troll to satisfy my craving for malicious gossip. That meant injecting some love into Haggabah, Who Plies the Umbral Path. Complicating matters is that Haggabah is the only creature in Caves of Qud who is invisible. As long as he’s standing in light, you can’t see him. And convalessence — the bluish-white pools the trolls love to lounge around in — is luminescent. So Qudling heroes are already at a disadvantage here.

One clever strategy is to lure Haggabah to the dark corners of his room, away from the glowing pools. This was my plan: race to the corner with my love injectors at the ready, rely on my night vision mutation to see the troll clearly, then jab him before my loyal army of F-K-lings could tear him apart.

But I couldn’t see Haggabah. I was definitely standing in a dark corner, and the combat log was dutifully reporting him beating on me with his adumbral hands. Troll foals flipped out everywhere in pools of spattered blood. I did the only sane thing I could think of: I picked an “empty” square next to me and jabbed all four of my syringes at it, hoping an invisible troll was standing there.

Then, it got very quiet. The foals calmed down. The adumbral beatings stopped. I no longer saw the sloppy footsteps of an angry invisible troll juking around the room. I scoured my battle log for messages that Haggabah had been killed, or turned to my cause. I tried chatting with empty squares, checking to see if he was still invisible. I ran laps around the pool, searching in vain for the third key laying on some invisible corpse.

Then I gave up. I pickaxe’d my way through the door, forgot about my hopes of learning troll secrets, and pressed on through the depths of Bethesda Susa.

Then Things Got Weird

The rest of the dungeon was glorious slaughter. I barely had to engage with it. F-K and the foal army rampaged through all the rooms, gleefully stomping on snail eggs, drawing sparks from plastronoids, and farting icy lattice all over the walls.

But every so often, out of the corner of my eye, I would catch a glimpse of something that didn’t make sense. A troll sprite, somewhere I didn’t think one could be. A message in the combat log about allies being attacked. Troll foals lingering and multiplying even after F-K was fried by an exploding humor. Was the ghost of Haggabah following me? Was he showing his love after all, from beyond the umbral path? As my adventures took me eastward across rivers and jungles, was I destined to be followed by a cloud of endlessly-spawning troll foals?

It was clear that my love injectors had hit their mark — Haggabah was very invisible, and very much ride-or-die. But no matter what I did, I could never interact with him. Even if I caught him standing in a dark corner, visible because of my night vision mutation, he always vanished just as I approached. Ours was a love forever doomed to the aching middle distance… too near to ever receive closure, but too far to reach out and touch.

And then, he was dismembered by a frenzied madpole. Haggabah had plied his last umbral path. I fished the key he carried from out of the river where he fell, and one by one his final batch of foals met their own inevitable ends. The mystery of my shy umbral companion settled in as nothing more than a haunting memory.

Next time I had business in Bethesda Susa, I took a moment to unlock the door in his room, and to pour out two drams of convalessence in his honor.

It Was the Mushroom’s Fault

Around this time I found a piece of equipment I wanted to wear on my back: a pair of helping hands. Four arms was fun, but I figured, hell, why not six? Much earlier in my run — long before my first jaunt into Bethesda Susa — I had contracted a fungal infection all over my back. The shroom didn’t hurt at all, and in fact was providing me with a point of armor, so I just let it molder there. I had forgotten all about it by the time I was injecting love into trolls. But if I wanted to install the helping hands, the infection had to go.

The fungus’s descriptive text doesn’t state outright, but it’s right there in the name: glowcrust. I never noticed because of my night vision, but my itchy back had taken on an eerie luminescence. Any time Haggabah came in for a hug, he’d be rendered invisible by my own light.

And so, because of my insatiable addiction to glowing mushrooms, ours was a love which could never bloom.

Such is romance, in the caves of Qud.