Challenge Guide

Gotta catch em all.

Introduction

Welcome to my guide to insanity. Of course, the usual stuff applies. Neither do I know the best way for each challenge, nor are my english skills superb. Lots of knowledge I have acquired from other forums, especially this thread http://www.moddb.com/games/rogues-tale/forum/thread/challenge-clarifications-and-guides-major-spoilers

As you can imagine, a big part of the challenge is to figure it out yourself. There will be plenty of spoilers.

I will look forward to your comments in the comment section. It would be great to see different and better ansatzes to some of these challenges.

The Challenges I

• Bottled Rage You are supposed to kill an enemy with a health potion. This can best be done with a STR character. Remember, health potions heal your target as well, so you really need to spend some time in the gym to make it count. Look for a dilute health potion (or two) and an easy enemy, like a rat. Hit him first and check your progress with "v" and clicking on the enemy. Once the health bar is low enough, just throw the potion and get the title.
  
  
• One Stray Shot This one is also pretty easy and more or less just happens as you play along. Get a ranger with a double D6 damage enchanted recurve or repeater. Next enchant everything you have with agility and maybe even get a blessed ring of accuracy. Use Aimed Shot to make the extra agility count more. You don't even have to select specific targets, as there is always the chance that you pierce the armor and you don't have to kill the beast in one shot anyways.
  
  The Curve Ball This one needs a little bit more preparation. You are supposed to kill a full health enemy with a single throw of a weapon that can only be thrown. This leaves effectively only the throwing knive or the throwing star. Find a blessed one (or use a scroll of blessing) and then double enchant it with D6 damage. Gather plenty of STR (~18) and use deadly throw on a rat or spider. Maybe a ring of accuracy can be helpful, because if you miss and your double enchanted weapon breaks at a wall, you might feel slightly frustrated.
  
  Itch Be Slapped Kill a monster with fists only. Actually not as hard as it seems. You want to beef up on strength and it can be very helpful to have the Pandamonium achievement, but it is not necessary. Be aware though, you need both hands empty and cannot use a shield. Have a protection from confusion and extra health and of course health potions, because the fight might take a while. Fisticuff a bear or another monster of choice into submission (maybe stay clear of infernals, as there is always a chance that they instakill you, unless you have protection). Even better, use a scroll of invisibility so they have a hard time hitting you (and they cannot use their special ability). User Byuunion pointed out, that the tentacles from the special quest count as well. They have little life and some other cultists may join the fight.
  
  The Ghostbuster At some point in the king fight, the soon-to-be-dead king will summon an army of named undead. These are the same that are in the graves you have to visit for the physical resistance heritage. Kill them then and there. You want to have some protection from curse and possibly turn undead as a spell or scroll.
  On a sidenote, I was puzzled by the names of the ghosts, as clearly some represent action hero actors. One of the players (I forgot who) pointed out, that they were the cast of the Expendables.
  
  Against the Odds This one is also not so bad once you understand what a cursed item does. They basically increase your critical failure rate. So simply find three cursed but otherwise good items (like cursed amulet of free action/ ring of fortitude) and get three increased chance to crit on three of your items. Now you can fight as a normal fighter and should be fine. No need to depend on a pet or so.
  
  Dark Passenger Simple get to level 20 without lighting torches. You shouldn't light torches anyways, except maybe for some special boss fights.
  
  The Loose Knot Can be done at the same time as Epic Splat. Stand under a prison gate and use telekinesis on a lever to kill yourself. You probably want to do this with a wizard, since the chance of jumping away rises with increasing strength and agility. Also have Plane Shift ready to teleport out of prison if for some reason you cannot reach the lever again with telekinesis.
  
  True Devotion The easiest and the hardest at the same time. Just finish all the others and it will come by itself.
  
  Control Freak This one is actually quite hard, since you have to control a human, beast, undead, monster and demon at the same time. As a beast, your dog is perfect. But he might die on the way. If that happens, just keep some food ready to get one of the common pets.
  The obvious choice for the monster is the cave bear. However it is in my opinion not the best choice, because they die easily and also can get confused and attack their owner. Instead, grind (shop search) for a blessed ring of familiar which can summon a drake when you want it. So don't wear it, just keep it. Also a blessed scroll of summon gets you an infernal, but only for limited time. The human friend is also not that easy to come by. There is the wand of wishing, where you can wish for true love and get a female companion. That is however rare. You could also use a blessed scroll of animation to bring back a dead human in its original form (or some of the legend bosses, which actually make quite powerful companions. This insight is due to the great Keigan).
  The least grindy way is by having 9 STR and 8 CHA (or maybe 9) and talk to all the bodyguards of a merchant. There is typically one of the opposite sex that after some number 1 answers gets a green answer bar. Clicking this converts that crossbow shooter with some probability to you, but it doesn't always work.
  The undead can be summoned with an amulet of necromany or a scroll of animation. The demon can be summoned (most effectively by scroll) (it is useful to have the banishment spell or enslave spell ready, just in case summoning doesnt enslave the demon and he would kill any other pet).
  So get first a human, then a beast(or have your dog). Kill an enemy. Animate him and then use the ring of Familiar. Last you summon the demon and you should be fine. Or maybe first summon the demon and then the Drake, I cannot say what is more likely to produce positive results.

The Challenges II

• The Meticulous One This one is pretty hard. All of the enemies you are supposed to kill are quite hard. However, there are some basic rules that you can keep in mind. Always have at least one scroll of invisibility and one scroll of polymorph handy. These are usually enough to deal with the single enemies. As always, have protection from confusion since many specials have increased chance to crit. Lastly have health potions and a ring of frost protection. I don't know all the enemies strengths that well, since some are easy to counter with a certain class, but much harder with another class. If you want to go after this achievment, rest at the inn often and then complete dungeons. Make sure to replenish your ressources inbetween fights. But they typically drop pretty valuable loot. I believe shield fighters are the most reliable for this challenge.
  Prince Altren Very hard since he is not alone and has a strong repeater and extra agility. Even worse, he has other crossbow archers with him. Invis yourself and kill him possibly with a wand. An infernal will come out of him and might kill some of the other crossbowmen for you.
  Satyr' Rae Quite similar but easier since he is alone. Sometimes you just need to lure him into a hallway and club him.
  The Icequeen With a shield build quite easy to kill. She is also the reason why I always have a frost ward, preferably blessed, with me. The drakes can be quite nasty.
  Master Gifin-Gif Also hard. He comes in groups and uses stealth. Here, Keen Eyes is a huge benefit. Also, use scroll of invisibility so the master cannot use blade flurry and one shot you, even with dodge and block. The enemies also use poison, but it was mostly silencing I believe. In the updated version, him and his henchmen use weapons with chance to instakill. It might be worthwile to have a protection for that, maybe as an additional ring or so.
  Dawid the Paladin Maybe the easiest of them. Can be killed of from a distance. If converted with bl. scroll of animation, he becomes a great support.
  The Beartamer Also not that hard. Try to defend yourself in a hall way and just kill his stupid bears, or let your dog do it. The Beartamer himself uses a chopper, but is otherwise not so special.
  The Archmage Never caused problems. Either sneak up on him or have some good magic defense. He seems invincible at first, but that is because you usually has an amulet of abjuration .
  The Swordmaster He hits really hard, so try to attack from a distance. He actually often wears amulet of ghostform and can hence be easily killled by magic.
  Ryan the Trickster This one is a really frustrating and dangerous enemy. First of all, he has a cursed amulet of pestilence which summons more rats than you can fight. Hence haste effects can become necessary. Also he can curse you to death. He also doesn't hesitate to use polymorph on you up to three times (I even survived that once and killed him afterwards). Also he shoots poison and disease. On the other hand, he can be defeated easily, especially if you spot him first. Use polymporph and then any ranged attack. Most effective is the wand of excavation. He will be in a pit and due to the rats surrounding him he cannot come out and just dies. It might be possible to carry plenty of cheese with you and convert some neighboring rats to draw his attention, but I never tried since I don't like to have cheese in the inventory. So yeah, either have all the immunities (polymorph/curse + haste) or use some tricks on your own.
  
  
• Feel The Power Just get 7 power enchantments onto your equipment. Takes some money, but that is what you want to do with most classes anyways. The blessed ring of brutality/accuracy/clarity and control have an additional power modifier.
  
  
• Peaceful Hippie That is a quite hard one. You can fight, but not kill. Probably best is to have some spells to buff your pet and yourself and go for a shield build. This way you take the blows while your dog fights. Keep searching for traps and light torches and pick locks until you are there.
  
  
• The Bubble Boy Very simple. You only need to find an amulet of abjuration and start with a spell. Use spells without energy until you have 4 hp left. Now cast another spell on empty stomach. If it causes one or two damage, regen back to 4 hp. If you deal three damage, use the spell of the amulet and regen back to full health. At no point you are in danger of dying.
  
  
• The Prodigal Son This one is also really hard. You need your pet, but it will most likely die at some point. Your best asset are your starting spells. Problematic is, that you cannot get focused cast so your damage will be sub par. This makes money and equipment management even more important. Get spell damage on your staff. Also, it is very useful to start with divine reach. Use wands and scrolls as needed. Banish demon and turn undead are even more valuable for this challenge. You can for instance rob graves and hope for undeads for easy xp.
  
  
• Merchant's Tale This one is fairly simple. Probably easiest it is done as a mage because of the charisma. This challenge becomes much easier with the new update. Just save a lot of gold by shift clicking it when in repair mode. When you have enough, buy expensive things and sell them, the resulting money should flow into your inventory.
  
  
• The Bigger They Are This one took me the longest, but that is probably my own fault. The key is to realize that heros that are capable of one-shotting monsters are not great heros in general. Let me explain. We want to kill a monster in one strike, which rules out Blade Flurry. The probably easiest monster is the mamalob. It doesn't attack too hard and has not many hp itself. Also they can be baited by just hanging around in a spiders web and waiting (and killing lesser spiders). The mamalob has about 50 hp, so we want to have a character than can more or less reliably hit that. At lower levels this might be achieved with silent move (gives double damage), at higher levels that is not feasible. Pretty much the only way is to have a strength based fighter with a double handed weapon. This gives an additional attack bonus multiplier of 1.5. To get maximum strength for crushing blow, you should get two blessed ring of brutality enchanted with strenght. While being good at dealing damage, you are quite a glass cannon and trust me friends, it is very painful to lose (several) lvl 20 fighters with 17 or 18 Str to a cave bear or other things. Instead, keep the rings and amulet in your inventory and walk around with a ring of fortitude, evasion and a shield. Once you have all the rings and amulets you need, you have to decide on a 2h weapon. I chose the Mangler because it can deal double damage (technically only to weak monsters. Weak means that they have less than half your strength modifier in physical resistance. For our fighter, an enemy would need 10+ physical resistance to be exempt from that rule)and looks cool. I was experimenting and on average a double D6 enchanted weapon is more powerful than a weapon with battle enchant and strength modifier, because the monsters we go after don't seem to have that many resistances. With 19 STR you're weapon should do 3D6+D3+(19-7)*1.5 D3 damage - resist damage. That is pretty strong and in theory you should be able to hit above 100 damage (with doubling), even though I have never seen that. Then again, I am uncomfortable running around with a character like that. But even without doubling you deal on average about 45 damage and there is about a one in three chance to one-shot the mamalob. User Byuunion reported that the tentacles in the quest count as a monster each, which makes them the easiest target.
  

The Challenges III

• That's Cheating This one can be considered hard, since you have to kill the king. For this I refer to my other guide on mages. To die, it is allowed to kill yourself with spells. To revive you need an amulet of nine lives (anyone knows a better way?). The only question remaining is, whether we should use a normal amulet of nine lives early and don't lose much time if we fail, or whether we should level our character and grind for a blessed amulet of nine lives. I found that the regular amulets of nine lives are quite unreliable (and also not that common to begin with), where the blessed version protects you fairly often. Hence first leveling and then killing yourself is in my opinion better.
  
  
• The Epic Splat Just like The Loose Knot, just get first the reflex heritage and Sixth Sense.
  
  
• One Nasty Flu This one is more grindy than difficult. You will most likely have a run where you want to identify all potions, you can do this quest on the side, along with Poison Blade. Probably the easiest way is to get one of every disease potion. Wear a ring of control and a ring of clarity so you can still do all the actions. When you find a magic trap that causes disease damage, walk on it, get dungeon fever and then drink all the potions. That should do the trick, as there are two diseases per stat that lower them, so it is actually sufficient to have two potions per stat, they don't have to be different from each other. This seems to be one of the achievements that many people get without overthinking like me. But my way still works. Clear out the floor you are on, so that no enemies attack you in your state of weakness and keep a potion of antitude for afterwards. Also plenty of gold can be useful to get rid of your debuffs afterwards in the hospital.
  
  
• Just A Scratch Contrary to the earned title, in my opinion the best character to attempt this challenge is the mage. It is not that easy to find an enemy that can dish out 25 damage in one hit. However, you can use an amulet of ghost form to get double magic damage or a ring of regen to get the vulnerability to fire (they don't add up though). I found the easiest setup was a amulet of ghostform, a ring of fortitude and a ring of elements (to prevent burn/shock effects). Even with the extra vulnerabilities, it won't necessarily get you over the 25 damage threshold. That is why you use amplify magic on the enemy first. I tried it on an orc mage and it worked just fine. Keep a scroll of invisibility ready, just in case you don't feel like risking your life by getting hit three times.
  
  
• Idle Bookworm Any mage should try to achieve this anyways. My mage guide deals with this in more detail.
  
  
• Bad Romance This one is simple. Find a wishing wand, wish for true love and then kill her. Feels great.
  
  
• Undead Party You need to get to lvl 20 first and obtain an amulet of necromancy. The only difficulty might be, that your undead servants die quite easily. A good strategy might be to find a blessed one and just order your skeletors into a safe corner and keep them out of fights. Merchants or bandits are great to leave a large amount of corpses at once. Remember to not search their bodies, lest you want to destroy them. Once you have 8, go to the Kings Quest. Don't expect them to survive long though.
  
  
• The Red Mist To kill five enemies with one strike is not as hard as it seems. You obviously need Sweeping Blow and a reasonably strong (12+STR) character with decent armor. Get yourself a nice mangler and an amulet of pestilence (not blessed though). Use it and let the rats come. Use "v" to see their healthbar and gently hit them (maybe with a one handed weapon and shield) to reduce their life to a small sliver of health. When you have five rats down, switch to your mangler and finish them with the sweeping blow. You can even enchant the weapon to make failure even less likely.
  
  
• Poison Blade This one is a bit grindy. This one can be done together with Nasty Flu when you identify all potions anyways. To keep inventory management simple, get a small weapon you don't use but is still equippable. My preferred choice is the hatchet. Just equip it everytime you find a new potion and poison it. Unequip it afterwards, otherwise your progress is lost. After you gained the achievement you can throw it at a particularily annoying enemy to severely cripple him.
  
  
• Frosty Touch Again, get a good mage (-> guide ;-) and amulet of frost ward and kill a drake. They do not have that much frost resistance. Keep a health potion or healing spell ready just in case. Remember that reflected damage doesn't work.
  
  
• My Precious This one takes a lot of time and effort, but can be well worth it. Get a blessed ring of outcasts and enchant it until you have all four stat enhancer on them. Don't worry, they don't get lost under continued enchantments. As a result you will get a ring that can hold 12 enchantments, which can be quite useful. Also, as long as you have not killed the king it makes you invisible forever!
  
  
• Dark Shroud This one took me a long time to figure out, but Brandy suggested a connection between curses and dark soul stones that helped me to discover a neat little trick.
  Notice that when you find a black soul gem and use it and it doesn't explode it is called Soul Gem of Agony, or Gluttony or so. Collect all ten of them. For every soul gem you have, casting the curse spell works every time. Not only is this great to superboost the otherwise lackluster curse spell, you can also cast it onto yourself to have all ten curses at once and get the achievement. If you want to live afterwards it is adviced that you clear out the level first so you can quickly teleport home and that you maybe have a little food, but not too much in your pockets. Also having Strong Will helps greatly. You will need a lot of money to rid yourself of the curse, or the remove curse spell. To farm soul gems, simply cast collect soul on an enemy before you kill it.
  
  
• Fully Buffed Again, a mage is the way to go here. Once you know all spells, simply cast those that give a long lasting effect. Additionaly use scroll of invisibility, potion of insight/antidote/healing/energy and Swiftness. Lastly you can apply Renewing Touch and you should be good. An amulet of free action might be useful here, since it gives you more time to cast.

The End

I hope this guide was at least a little bit helpful to you. If you have improvements, additional insights or questions, let me know in the comment section. Thanks for reading!

[Mustardoish]

Oh, I was not aware that the increased critical chance affects the amulet. Cheers!

[Epix]

For that's cheating, an easy way is to grab a blessed amulet of nine life and triple enchant your equipment with increased chance to crit to increase the chances of success

[Mustardoish]

Of course not, that is great. I was wondering why it wouldnt show. Lemme try to find a way to categorize it.

[Pear]

Hi, people couldn't see it because you didn't categorize it, also I went ahead and wrote a challenge guide of my own based on this, expanding to all challenges up to ver. 1.14. hope you don't mind ._.
-Pear

[Mustardoish]

Thanks for the reply. So far I havent even done them all, as I am mighty busy. I also dont know why this guide is not visible.

[Fail Tank]

I saw your post about being unable to see your guide; I am also unable to see it except by going through your profile.

Secondly, any thought on updating with Page 2 challenges?