Elements and Resistances

As well as purely physical attacks, there are four special types of elemental attack that some monsters may use against you:

Fire

  • The most common and dangerous element — the fires of Angband are legendary.

  • It can destroy arrows, bows, axes, polearms, hafted weapons, boots, gloves, cloaks, soft armour, chests, torches and staffs.

Cold

  • Treated similarly to fire, but less common and less dangerous.

  • It can destroy potions and flasks of oil.

Poison

  • Many spiders and werewolves are famed for their deadly poison.

  • Instead of damaging you directly, poison damage is added to your poison counter. If you don’t take steps to prevent this, you will eventually suffer all of this damage. Each round, the poison counter is reduced by 20% and you suffer this damage.

Darkness

  • Morgoth is the Lord of Darkness, and some of his servants use darkness itself against you.

  • Darkness resistance works differently to the other elements. There is no ‘darkness resistance’ available, except a strong source of light. If the light level on your square is above 2, you get a level of darkness resistance counted for each level of excess.

Elemental damage

Elemental attacks are either pure (like dragon breath and poison gas), or mixed with physical damage (like a balrog’s flaming sword). Mixed elemental damage was explained in the combat section: if you don’t have the relevant resistance, you take an extra die of damage. If you are especially vulnerable, you take two extra dice of damage. There is no advantage in having multiple sources of resistance to mixed elemental damage.

Dragons and some other foes have potent elemental breaths. Their breath spreads out in a cone, damaging everything within, but the damage decreases by 2d4 for each square. Armour is usually no defence against such an attack. The only sources of protection that count are special protection from special abilities, or magical rings and amulets. If it is fire or cold damage, you can also count the protection from your shield. Any damage that gets through this meagre protection is then halved if you have resistance, or divided by three if you have double resistance etc. If you are vulnerable to the element, the damage is doubled.