A minion is a monster serving some god:
A minion only appears in certain situations, most of which involve you and an altar. The source code in minion.c controls the generation of minions.
A hostile minion can appear when:
- If you try to convert an altar (regardless if you succeed) and your experience level is at least 7 and also your alignment record close to its maximum, then there is a chance that "The voice of (altar's god before conversion) booms: "Thou shalt pay for thy indescretion!"" and a minion appears[1][2].
- If the god is annoyed with you (easiest to cause by using #pray too much or with the wrong god), then one of the possible responses is "Thou durst scorn (or call upon) me? Then, die mortal (or creature)!" at which point the god summons one minion against you. The god must be very angry to do this, and this is just short of the most severe penalty of lightning and disintegration[3].
- At and only at the sanctum or Astral Plane, if the god is so angry as to zap you with lightning, then hit you with the wide-angle disintegration beam, and yet you still live (and are not still swallowed by some monster), then the god will summon three minions against you[4]. One way to trigger this is to attempt to convert a high altar[5].
The tame guardian angel you can get on the Astral Plane counts as a minion.
SLASH'EM[]
In SLASH'EM, your god may give you minions as servants, from prayer, if you are lawful,[6] or sacrifice, for any alignment. Lawfuls may receive angelic beings or tengu, neutrals may get elementals or djinn, chaotics may get major or minor demons, and any player may receive a unicorn or his or her alignment. These behave much like pets, except that they do not eat your precious corpses, and cannot pick up items, although they will use any in their initial inventory. As minions, they cannot be re-tamed should they go feral.
Source code references[]
- This page is a stub. You could probably expand this page should you wish to do so.
A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:
"A grep -n minion src/*.c shows that there is much more to know about minions."