Spells

Attack Spells
Cold, Fire, Acid, Shock, and Light, plus a couple that do physical damage. There are four spells here that qualify as the game's "tactical nukes", delivering large damage over a large area. Each has its own limitations:


 * Blizzard requires a Living Frost, whose location places the center of the spell (3-square radius). It does 8-18 points each of cold and physical damage, plus a Slow effect (6-12 rounds).
 * Chain Lightning needs a crowd of monsters, and ideally a confined space, for maximum effectiveness. The damage is erratic, but 1-60 points of shock damage per hit can add up quickly in a storm of bolts.
 * Sunfire does 28-71 points of light (not fire), and melts a three-square radius (exempting the caster) unto lava. While this is the safest to cast of the four "nukes", you will be Tired and unable to repeat the feat for quite a while, usually over 200 rounds. This spell is the only way to create lava where none was before.
 * Corrosive Explosion needs a stack of items at the target center -- arrows are especially useful, but anything will do. Given enough items, it can do awesome amounts of acid damage (6-36 points per blast), with up to a 10-square radius!

Healing Spells
Besides recovery from damage and poison, this category includes two of the three non-necromantic means for obtaining pets. The somewhat dubious Summon Familiar takes little mana, but a huge amount of experience. The resulting pet starts out weak (though Transfer Knowledge can help), and its death will inflict System Shock on you. The advanced Resurrect is far more useful -- it takes lots of mana but much less experience, you can get a variety of pets, and they are much more expendable. (The third way is a blessed Wand of Create Monster, plus patience and luck.)

Utility Spells
This category includes a huge number of useful spells to provide information, food, escape, and defense. There are even a few useful attacks available:


 * Dig and Down Pour, besides their other uses, do heavy damage against Earth and Fire Elementals respectively.
 * Create Pit and Rolling Boulder work best in combination. Any Earth Elemental will be happy to demonstrate....
 * Combining Petrify and Force Bolt will take out almost any fleshly creature.
 * Animated Trees are useful shock troops.
 * Force Wall can get a crowd off your back quickly.

Death Spells
This category includes a mix of deadly attacks (including the sort-of-nuke Dark Ritual), and temporary or permanent pets, plus the only "necromantic healing" spell.