Draft:Scroll
Scrolls are single-use magical or informative items, shown as a yellow ?. Omega has 24 kinds, including blank paper, hint sheets and Jane's guide to treasure. Their strengths include choosing equipment, improving items and reaching places that ordinary movement cannot. Reading is slower than drinking a potion, and blindness or fear can prevent it altogether.
List of scrolls
All scrolls weigh 5. Values below are base values in Au, not guaranteed buying or selling prices. Item level affects random generation; it is not a character-level requirement. The brief effect column describes ordinary, non-cursed use unless stated otherwise; follow the item link for blessing strength, enchantment, failure and cancellation rules.
| Scroll | Base value | Item level | Main use or limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blank scroll | 5 | 0 | No magical effect |
| Hint sheet | 10 | 0 | One random hint |
| Identification | 20 | 0 | Identify one item; blessed, identify the whole inventory |
| Light | 30 | 0 | Light a qualifying dark room |
| Spells | 250 | 1 | Attempt to learn a random spell or reduce a known spell's mana cost |
| Teleportation | 75 | 1 | Same-level escape; blessed, choose a destination |
| Clairvoyance | 25 | 1 | Reveal terrain around a chosen point |
| Alertness | 50 | 1 | Improve searching and reactions to certain surprise attacks |
| Self-knowledge | 10 | 1 | Report character conditions and progress |
| Blessing | 400 | 2 | Raise an item's blessing, with dangerous curse-strength boundaries |
| Enchantment | 200 | 2 | Improve an item; already enchanted targets can explode |
| Displacement | 50 | 2 | Chance to evade monster melee hits |
| Jane's guide to treasure | 50 | 2 | Learn the identities of one random item category |
| Charging | 100 | 2 | Refill a stick, up to 99 charges |
| Law | 100 | 2 | Move alignment toward Law |
| True sight | 50 | 2 | See invisible creatures and overcome certain visual deceptions |
| Summoning | 300 | 2 | Summon a hostile random monster, even when blessed |
| The warp | 100 | 3 | Travel within the current dungeon, excluding its final level |
| Dispelling | 250 | 3 | Remove qualifying curses, monster abilities or magical terrain effects |
| Deflection | 250 | 3 | Deflect magical bolts; does not stop ball attacks |
| Cosmic flux | 300 | 5 | Rebuild the current dungeon level; hazardous different effect in town |
| Heroism | 200 | 5 | Temporary melee improvements |
| Acquirement | 5000 | 7 | Create an item; blessed, choose its exact kind |
| Wishing | 10000 | 10 | Choose from specific wish words; some choices are lethal |
Obtaining scrolls
Scrolls occur in random treasure and monster loot. The pawn shop also generates stock at source level 5, making it a practical place to buy known scrolls. Its stock is finite, and neither the price nor availability is represented by the base-value column alone. High-level scrolls can appear in shallow loot, but are much less likely there; the complete table below gives the distribution within the scroll category.
Acquirement can produce any of the 24 kinds without the ordinary source-level filter. Bless it first to choose the exact scroll. The result normally starts uncursed, even though the acquirement scroll was blessed.
Ambrosias can turn certain corpses into blessed scrolls during daytime. A fnord yields summoning, a blipper teleportation, a phantasticon true sight, and either a murk fungus or a shadow spirit light. The price is twice the corpse's base value, with a minimum of 10 Au; the individual scroll pages give the relevant costs. These are transformation recipes, not promises that those creatures carry the scroll. Necromancers, separately, start with a scroll of spells.
Reading and identification
Use Peruse (r) with the scroll in accessible possessions. An item still in the pack must first be brought into an accessible slot. A normal reading takes 20 time ticks. Blindness and fear block reading before an item is consumed, so prepare a healing or fear-removing potion when either condition threatens an escape plan.
The selected scroll is normally consumed after its effect, including a failed or useless effect. Cancelling the initial choice of scroll consumes nothing; cancelling a later target is a different operation and generally still spends the scroll. In particular, cancelling an identification target still consumes its scroll despite suppressing that action's monster response. Read acquirement and wishing from separate, single copies: their blanking behavior resets the selected stack and can discard all remaining copies.
At the start of a game, each kind receives a different inscription from a pool of 30. The inscription identifies the kind consistently within that game, but is reshuffled for another game. It does not by itself reveal blessing or enchantment. An identified cursed scroll can also use a different name: for example, a scroll of destruction is cursed acquirement. Scroll of vulnerability is ambiguous, since both displacement and deflection use that cursed name.
Recognizing an effect and the game recording identification are distinct. Many useful non-cursed scrolls teach their type when read, but blank scrolls, hint sheets, law and dispelling do not automatically do so. A failed effect is not a reliable identification test. Jane's guide teaches the identities of one of six random categories; a scroll of identification reveals the selected copy's detailed state as well. Buying an identified item at the pawn shop also teaches its type. These methods avoid the risk and expense of reading an unknown scroll that turns out to be summoning, a curse, or a rare resource.
Choosing and preparing scrolls
For a new character, reliable escape and knowledge usually solve more immediate problems than maximizing enchantment. Teleportation escapes within a level; the warp changes dungeon levels but cannot reach the bottom floor; clairvoyance lets the player inspect a chosen region before approaching. None is interchangeable with unrestricted travel. Carry an escape scroll accessibly and keep a potion alternative for fear or blindness.
Blessing has especially clear value on acquirement, identification and teleportation: it changes what the player can choose or how much is affected. It does not make every scroll stronger. Summoning remains hostile, and positive blessing does not improve true sight's duration. Enchantment depends on the scroll's own enchantment value, and charging has its own charge formula and cap. Consult the particular item before paying to improve it.
Blessing also is not a universally safe way to remove curses. A sufficiently strong blessing can destroy a deeply cursed target instead of making it safe. Dispelling offers a different removal rule for items in use. Valuable equipment deserves an explicit comparison of these two methods before either scroll is spent.
Duration and repeated use
Some protection scrolls last for several ten-minute status updates, rather than a fixed number of actions. In ordinary indoor time these occur at ten-minute boundaries, so an effect used just before a boundary immediately loses one unit. Displacement and deflection replace their old duration instead of adding to it and can even overwrite a much longer equipment effect. See each article for its range. Most positive timed effects stop naturally counting down at 1000 units; this threshold is a property of the duration system, not a guarantee that repeatedly reading any scroll builds permanent protection.
Other interactions and older advice
Throwing an ordinary scroll does not read it at a monster. Its zero-damage throw can give it to a creature capable of carrying objects, or leave it on the ground. Blank paper has no normal writing command that turns it into a chosen magical scroll.
Older Omega guides describe exploits involving putting non-rings into ring slots to reuse their effects. The inventory rules in 0.90.4 reject those placements; carrying a scroll in a legal hand slot does not substitute for reading it. Older routes remain useful research leads, but their mechanics should not be assumed to work in this version.
Random inscriptions
The displayed names have the prefix scroll-. Six of these 30 inscriptions are unused by the 24 kinds in any one game; none has a fixed magical meaning.
| Inscription | Inscription | Inscription |
|---|---|---|
| GRISTOGRUE | Kho Reck Tighp | E Z |
| Kevitz | Arcanum Prime | NYARLATHOTEP |
| Gilthoniel | Zarathustra | Ancient Lore |
| Eyes Only | Ambogar Empheltz | Isengard |
| Deosil Widdershins | Magister Paracelsus | Qlipphotic Summons |
| Aratron Samael | De Wormiis Mysterius | Necronomicon |
| Pnakotic Manuscript | Codex of Xalimar | The Mabinogion |
| Ginseng Shiatsu | Tome of Tromax | Book of the Dead |
| The Flame Tongue | Karst Khogar | The Yellow Sign |
| The Kevillist Manifesto | Goshtar Script | Pendragon Encryption |
Generation probabilities
This table applies to the ordinary random-object generator, conditional on the final item being a scroll. Each cell is the probability of one particular kind at the indicated item level, not the combined probability of the column. The main catalogue supplies the level of every kind. Multiply by the number in the column heading to obtain that whole group's share. Values are rounded to three decimal places.
| Source level | Level 0 (4 kinds) | Level 1 (5) | Level 2 (8) | Level 3 (3) | Level 5 (2) | Level 7 (1) | Level 10 (1) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 14.790% | 7.506% | 0.221% | 0.221% | 0.221% | 0.221% | 0.221% |
| 1 | 9.862% | 6.607% | 3.353% | 0.099% | 0.099% | 0.099% | 0.099% |
| 2 | 6.485% | 6.485% | 4.345% | 2.205% | 0.065% | 0.065% | 0.065% |
| 3 | 5.249% | 5.249% | 5.249% | 3.517% | 0.052% | 0.052% | 0.052% |
| 4 | 4.831% | 4.831% | 4.831% | 4.831% | 1.643% | 0.048% | 0.048% |
| 5 | 4.682% | 4.682% | 4.682% | 4.682% | 3.137% | 0.047% | 0.047% |
| 6 | 4.474% | 4.474% | 4.474% | 4.474% | 4.474% | 1.521% | 0.045% |
| 7 | 4.409% | 4.409% | 4.409% | 4.409% | 4.409% | 2.954% | 0.044% |
| 8 | 4.346% | 4.346% | 4.346% | 4.346% | 4.346% | 4.346% | 0.043% |
| 9 | 4.284% | 4.284% | 4.284% | 4.284% | 4.284% | 4.284% | 1.457% |
| 10 | 4.225% | 4.225% | 4.225% | 4.225% | 4.225% | 4.225% | 2.831% |
| 11 or higher | 4.167% | 4.167% | 4.167% | 4.167% | 4.167% | 4.167% | 4.167% |
Derivation and limits
For each attempt, the generator chooses the scroll category with probability 10/135, then chooses one of its 24 kinds uniformly. It accepts a candidate if its item level l is less than the source level d plus a uniform random integer from 0 to 2; otherwise it has a further 1% acceptance chance. Rejected candidates restart object generation, including category selection. The resulting acceptance weight is:
| Item level relative to source | Acceptance weight a(l,d) |
|---|---|
| l < d | 1 |
| l = d | 0.67 |
| l = d + 1 | 0.34 |
| l ≥ d + 2 | 0.01 |
The conditional probability of kind i is a(level(i), d) / sum(a(level(j), d), over all 24 scroll kinds j). Thus the pawn shop's level-5 source gives wishing about 0.047% of its generated scrolls, not 0.047% of every stock item. The 10/135 category weight is also not the final proportion of scrolls among all generated objects: rejection rates in every other category affect that proportion. Fixed monster possessions, corpse transformations and acquirement choices do not use this table. Source level is supplied by the generation event and need not equal the player's level or the displayed dungeon depth.