I'm not sure what happened here. I was on the second level. I popped open a monster zoo...No vampirism, but I had some very nice equipment from level 4 smithing so I was borderline one-shotting everything than only taking a couple damage per hit...So I was content to sit in a chokepoint, eat an omelet, and beat everything into a fine pulp for awhile. It was working...Then I decided, what the hell, I'll try out the tentacular wand. I used it a couple of times on the blob in front of me. After a few turns, I started spontaneously taking damage. I kept hearing the "bump" sound when you take damage over and over, like I was repeatedly mashing the spacebar and letting stuff hit me...but I wasn't. After about 10 seconds of this, I died. I know I wasn't hitting the spacebar, and nothing really threatening was in front of me. I did manage to hit myself with the tentacular wand, however. The wiki doesn't say it does anything than subtract 5 Nimbleness from you. Does it have hidden side effects (like horrible, horrible death) or something? Was my space key stuck? Were the Gaming Gods pissed off that I was taking so little damage per hit that they just decided to smite me into submission? Halp!
sometimes actions queue up, specially in low FPS environments like zoos, so even if you're not pressing anything, it's playing your last keystrokes from a while back
The only debuff I noticed was the -5 nimbleness from the wand. I was not having FPS issues; everything was being responsive up until that point.
Tentacle Wand hits something / an area with a horrible curse that propagates and pretty much sets of random traps. Explode, acid, everything! Open door to zoo, cast once in there, close door, ???, experience! Don't... don't get hit by it. And don't use it at close range.