The first time I created a character in hack, I knew I wanted to beat
the game with every role. That desire was tempered by the sheer
impossibility of the game. Eight years later, right around the time I
first gained access to USENET, a friend would demonstrate that it was
indeed possible to complete nethack, the variant I had come to favor. A
few years after that, I would read a post by someone whose Valkyrie was
named after a character from a movie which was particularly significant
to me. I was inspired at that point to see how I might map the nethack
roles to different screen characters, and initiated what has been a 30+
year project to ascend every role.
I made the project more difficult for myself by slowly adding conducts
I would retain with every subsequent attempt, and by ascending the roles
in an order roughly describable as “easiest to hardest”. With this
wizard, I have completed all but one. Some roles were more difficult to
map to screen characters, particularly since I wanted to retain the same
level of connection with the characters’ source material that I had with
the subject of the post I had been inspired by. Wizard was one of the
few where I did not have to go searching for the right fit. The answer
had been there for most of my life.
My parents took a Sci-Fi Film class in college in the late 70s. I was
probably five years old at the time. I went with them to see a variety
of titles such as “The Cat From Outer Space” and “A Boy and His Dog”.
But the movie that made the biggest impression on me was the 1974 John
Boorman film, “Zardoz”.
Let me preface the rest of this post with an acknowledgment — what this
film means to me has varied widely from the first time I saw it at the
age of 5 (“this movie is too scary”), at 19 (“this movie is too
trippy”), and what I expect may be the last time, at 49 (“this movie is
too rapey”). I’m not going to dwell on the rapey parts here but I am
going to acknowledge that 1) they exist, 2) it wasn’t cool in the ‘70s
and it’s not cool now, and 3) any number of my readers probably don’t
want to think about it. So feel free to skip past the
film-review/autobiographical portion of this post and straight to the
ascension portion (look for the first blank line below) as needed.
“Zardoz” was traumatizing for any number of reasons. Beyond the
frightening uses of imagery and sound, the sequence at the end basically
spelled out for me that I was going to eventually move away from home
and my parents were going to get old and die. I had nightmares for
months.
When I was 19, a my friends and I watched “Zardoz” whilst under the
influence. During this viewing, I was finally old enough and had the
appropriate context to understand the film (as well as the proper mental
state in order to appreciate it). I was intrigued by the way its plot
line seemed to be presented recursively, nonsensical information being
doled out until the middle of the film, the jumble of data then
gradually unfolding into a (more or less) cohesive story.
It quickly became one of those significant shared experiences among my
friends. When three of us attended the Bay Area Science Fiction
Convention that year, one used the fan name “Zed”, another used
“Consuella”, and they both encouraged me to use “Friend”. I was honored
by the sentiment, though I certainly can’t identify with the character
in the film of the same name. But in their honor I adopted “friend” as
my internet handle. This ascension is thus dedicated to “Zed”, and to
the memory of “Consuella”, who is unfortunately no longer with us.
It was at this convention that I learned that if I got into technology
I might be able to afford to attend science fiction conventions
regularly, and ultimately found tech work in the mid 1990s. I started
in games, but switched to unix systems administration after learning
what the newly unveiled “Windows 95” was doing to the quality of
computer gameplay, and how Microsoft was wielding monopoly power to
force this operating system down the throats of PC gamers. I swore off
Microsoft products and found solace in nethack, as it featured
consistent frame rates on every platform :>
I leveraged my unix skills to get hired at an Internet Service
Provider. Agitated by edicts from management only to solve
“monetizable” problems, I decided to start my own web hosting service.
Taking the wrong lesson from “Zardoz”, I was entranced by the idea of
preserving the bulk of human knowledge against an impending apocalypse.
Comparing the DARPANET history of the internet against my own certainty
that I would die in a nuclear holocaust before I was 40 (don’t plan for
the end of the world, kids) I named my site vortex4.net in honor of this
film that had such an extraordinary impact on my life. Unfortunately
I’m not very entrepreneurial, and I eventually learned that working full
time while being the only tech support for a 24x7 service was a losing
strategy.
Twenty-five years later I have some regrets. Hanging my identity on
this movie for so long has conveyed impressions of me that I would in
retrospect prefer not to have conveyed. I’ve effectively named myself
for a misogynist resident of an elitist enclave who champions
suppression of the unwashed masses through mass murder and “selective
breeding”.
I had convinced myself that I had found beauty in an otherwise flawed
piece of art, but while the film may have its moments, it’s not very
good. It’s a bad sign when listening to the director’s commentary, you
are encouraged to “just fast forward this part”.
That said, the fact of this film being so firmly embedded in my life
demanded representation. Despite what, after all of these years, I now
think of “Zardoz”, Arthur Frane has always been the inevitable choice
for my Wizard.

To maintain a relatively even balance of races and alignments across my
ascensions, arthur would be a neutral gnome. His starting pet would be
Friend, and later pets would be Zed, George Saden, and Merlin. His
horses would be Zardoz or Stone Head on the rare occasions a saddle was
discovered.
Though there is a meal scene in “Zardoz” featuring apples, oranges,
watermelon, strawberries, pineapple, grapefruit, and bananas, none of
them were particularly central to the film. Alternate foodstuffs were
potatoes (“Yes, or no? Potatoes?”), and wheat (“Did you NEED wheat?”),
but during my traditional Halloween viewing (this time with director’s
commentary) before the November Tournament, I listened to Boorman note
that the movie started a “green bread” fad, and that for a time all of
the hotels he stayed at served green bread (I don’t know why the bread
is green. Presumably in 2293 bread will be green). So I went with
“green bread” as the fruittype, resulting in potions of “green bread juice”.
Nurses would be named for Sean Connery’s “allies” in the film:
Consuella, May, Avalow, and Death. Succubi would be named for the
Apathetics: Loamer, Gray, Grayler, and Bones.

I had not played a Wizard since hack, when I was eight years old. My
friend and I would startscum to try out wands on our pets, hoping for
the fabled wand of wishing. Playing a wizard in nethack required
adaptation. I am not a stranger to soft characters, but the wizard is
really soft, and since force bolt is both limited by spell points and
overly destructive, it took me a while to get the hang of the early
game, particularly since I’ve had been striving for a vegan conduct for
a couple of ascensions now, and the prayer-as-food approach makes it
impractical to keep the character level intentionally low.
My best early attempts were ignoring the fact I could cast spells and
slowly building a melee fighter until good armor was available. The
hardest part was realizing that the starting equipment should be used
immediately rather than saved for alchemy later. My first serious
attempt was during Junethack, and I didn’t even manage to finish Sokoban.
My best run before ascending ended in the Astral Plane. I had been
trying to finish a game in the November hardfought tournament before the
deadline, and started the ascension run without taking the time to
properly recover from a bag of holding mishap. It was a bitter loss,
but I had already lost the attempted vegan conduct by forgetting that
royal jelly is technically an animal product (I would make a terrible
vegan in reality). I would not make the same mistake again.

After a couple more months of frustrating early game failures, I
finally got traction again with a full moon start in late February,
running 3.7 on hardfought.

The build:

Weapons
a - a blessed +1 quarterstaff (weapon in hands)
----- Armor
|:.%| b - an uncursed +0 cloak of magic resistance
(being worn)
|.f@| Scrolls
-$%.+ i - a blessed scroll of identify
----- j - an uncursed scroll of identify
k - an uncursed scroll of stinking cloud
Spellbooks
l - a blessed spellbook of force bolt
m - an uncursed spellbook of healing
Potions
g - a blessed potion of enlightenment
h - an uncursed potion of invisibility
f - a potion of holy water
Rings
e - an uncursed +1 ring of adornment
d - an uncursed ring of see invisible
Wands
c - a wand of speed monster (0:6)
Tools
n - a magic marker (0:22)