(DCSS = Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup)
Found a suspicious vault locked by crystal doors (can only be opened by the player), read a scroll of revelation to see what’s inside.
Holy shit. A storm dragon, a hell knight, a deep elf annihilator?! Even on a fully cleared floor this party will kill you outright.
Mean game.


The closest to in-fighting in DCSS is a wand of charming that makes an enemy fight for you for some time. Unfortunately, it’s single-targeted and can fail against its target’s willpower.
If I would need to open this mess and deal with it, I’d do the following:
Clear the entire floor first, making sure to not disturb anything inside with noise (they won’t open the blue doors but that’ll still mess up my plan, see below);
Open the blue doors then make a few steps away from the vault (enemies are still not aware of me);
Drink a potion of lignification that will turn me into a tree (we’ll need it for a later step);
Probably drink some other potions like resistance (to not be one-shotted by the dragon), invisibility and especially haste;
Shout to attract attention of the enemies;
Read a scroll of immolation - it applies a special status effect to all enemies, making them take additional fire damage when they lose health and explode when they die, heavily damaging anyone who stands close;
Read a scroll of torment halving everyone’s health in half (which is considered an attack, so it’ll trigger the immolation’s fire damage) - it usually applies to the player too but the tree form grants immunity to it;
Read torment again if it wasn’t enough;
Read a scroll of teleportation and then walk around the floor, killing off whoever is still alive.
With this plan, my chances to win would probably be higher than the risk of death.
For monster infighting, there’s also orbs of mayhem. But yeah, somewhat of a risky option. You can’t really control which monsters are affected and they can still decide to attack you, and the affected monsters get buffed. 😅
With all the new orbs I completely forgot about the orb of mayhem to the point that I was shocked to see it in one of my recent games.
Yara’s Violent Unraveling reasons B)
To be honest, the main reason I linked to that wiki page is that I had opened it to try to find out whether orbs of mayhem are still in the game. 🙃
Would not have surprised me, if they tweaked the design a bit with 0.34 and then gave them a different name, but at the same time, well, I did just describe that they have upsides and downsides, which is how the devs like to design things…
Amusingly, mayhem is a unique orb brand because all the other brands scale heavily with evocation skill nowadays yet mayhem still has a fixed effect. But it’s the one the most likely to backfire so that makes sense.