Draft:Rampart Botanical Gardens

Omega 0.90.4

The Rampart Botanical Gardens occupy the western side of Rampart, above the hedge maze and cemetery. Their pools and statues offer unpredictable rewards and hazards within walking distance of the city's shops. The eastern entrance bears a request not to deface the statues; there is no admission charge or service menu.

Pools

The gardens contain 12 enchanted pool tiles, interspersed with ordinary water. Entering an enchanted pool triggers its effect. Each pool dries up into a pit afterward, so repeated benefits require different tiles, and the ground left behind is not harmless floor.

For an unmounted character, each activation has the following distribution:

Chance	Result
1%	AQUAE MORTIS: death unless you pass a level-based escape check; surviving leaves 1 HP and gives 500 experience
24%	Raise one random current attribute
5%	Raise all six current attributes
30%	Lower one random current attribute
5%	Clear poison and disease, and remove curses from items currently in use
15%	Lose your wielded weapon; no loss if that hand is empty
10%	Add +1 to +10 enchantment to your wielded weapon; no benefit if empty-handed
5%	Gain 10 HP, even above maximum HP
4%	Receive a strength-10 poisoning attempt, subject to poison immunity
1%	Azoth: powerful healing, cleansing, triple normal mana, and a Strength surge

The ordinary attribute increases put the affected current value one above its current or maximum value, whichever is greater. Decreases put it one below the lower of those two values. These results do not raise or lower the recorded maximum attributes. The azoth result is different: current Strength becomes three times the old maximum Strength, and maximum Strength increases by one.

The chance to survive AQUAE MORTIS is level cubed out of 1,000, reaching certainty at level 10. This is the chance within that 1% encounter, not the overall chance to die from any pool. At level 0, that encounter is fatal.

A mounted character receives neither the ordinary benefits nor AQUAE MORTIS: instead there is a 50% chance of losing the horse, described as its transformation into a fig newton. The pool still dries up. Movement confirmation can refuse to take a horse into an enchanted pool in the first place.

Statues

There are ten statues in the gardens, including two clusters of three by the central pools. Bashing one in Rampart has six equally likely outcomes: it awakens nearby statues as hostile creatures; it crumbles to rubble; it resists; it crumbles and reveals treasure; it hits back; or it gives a hint. Each result has a one-in-six chance. A retaliatory blow deals 0-14 unavoidable damage.

Awakening spreads through adjacent statues. A cluster can therefore become several enemies, rather than a single opponent. Neither walking past a statue nor merely entering the gardens triggers this bashing interaction. Effects possible when bashing statues in more difficult regions do not all occur here: a city statue does not produce a staircase or reveal the whole map through this random interaction.

Strategy

These pools are a gamble, not a substitute for the healers or condo. Waiting until level 10 removes the instant-death outcome, but still leaves attribute loss, poison, weapon destruction and a possible reduction to 1 HP. Unwielding a valuable weapon prevents its destruction at the cost of forfeiting the enchantment result.

Unmounted levitation bypasses ordinary pool activation while moving; Shadowform also bypasses it. Deliberately activating the tile beneath you can defeat levitation's protection. Keep track of which tiles have dried into pits before retracing a route.

Bashing statues can yield treasure, but the clustered ones can awaken together. Prepare for several opponents and leave yourself an exit before testing the gardens' request not to deface them.