Rhenaya's Drow mod, updated for 44.12
Download the mod here (http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=14103)
beta 0.9.0 is out! "Rushed Creatures Edition"
As Arkenor pointed out (thanks) some creatures were causing duplication bugs with creatures in other mods using Rhenaya's old files (Masterwork, to be specific). Changing the creatures names is going to prevent further duplications without asking other modders to touch their files.
I took this as a chance to revamp the creatures: now we have three kinds of rothen and three kinds of lizard where there was one, and I added a first draft of the Shriekers, Sword Spider and Cavvekan pets.
I added some reaction to roduce armor in full sets - something to help lazy players to inmerse themselves in the luxury-used drow way of doing things, relatively free of micromanagement when it is not needed.
But this is a rushed edition: I had 'almost ready' things in the works I talked about in a forum post, I felt to share them as they are as a start, there will be more developed versions of this.
Because i kind of focus on that mod i make a new thread for it without the other stuff:
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=2176
This mode includes a standalone playable drow race.
On embark you can choose them too (just like changing through dwarf civs in vanilla, it adds occasional drow civs).
Features:
* 1 new playable entity of drows: underground dwelling dark elves
* 1 new fearsome underground entity: the driders, half drow half spider
* 4 new domestic animals for your drow use: rothe (cattle), giant drowspider (hunting trainable), drowspider (vermin hunter) and giant lizards (war trainable)
* 7 new plants: fire lichen (expensive wine and powder), blue lichen (standard wine), white lichen (clothing), cave barley (standard powder and cheap "slave" drink), cave sugar beet (drink, sugar and syrup), cave strawberry (sweetwine and syrup), poison cup (dont eat it!)
* full set of drow equipment, including parry offhand weapons and the famous drow piwafi
* 2 new metals: mithril and mithral
The drow are evil like goblins and as enemys they mostly feel like them too, but the drow have high end weapons in steel just as dwarves, also beware the females, they are slightly bigger and stronger than the average male drow.
Drider use metal armors, a larger array of weapons and are considerable bigger than the known subterran civs and if you have some on your site: fun ensues!
The Drow civ has many positions:
Grand Matriarch (like Queen, female only)
High Priestess (female only, Matriarchs military officer)
Priestesses (female only, various officers under the high priestess)
Captains (can also be males, more officers under the priestesses)
Site Specific:
Expedition Leader, this is the first noble you will encounter just as with the dwarfs: he or she is on outpost embark site (handels diplomats and work complaints)
House Overseer, after the Outpost grows into a house the expedition leader will become this (main jobs diplomats until the bigger nobles arrives and work complaints)
House Administrator, a merged form of the bookkeeper and manager in one entity, apointable by the player
House Broker, just like normal broker
House Cleric, just like the chief medical dwarf, but also has a squad for law enforcement to keep your fellow drow in place (female only)
House Priestess, this is the military officer inside your outpost (female only)
House Captains, if you need more squads, they will lead them
House Guard Captain, law enforcement for the man (male only!)
Nobles:
Tiny House Matriarch, she will join your fortress rather early, you dont need as much stuff as you would need with the dwarfs, but she doesnt also need much of office or demands
Small House Matriarch, Your site will now be known as "small house"
House Matriarch, after you develop she will maybe get to be no longer a small house matrairch and considered a normal one,
Big House Matriarch, even more wealth has spread.
Great House Matriarch, even greater wealth and strength, you are now very near to attract the grand matriarch herself!
Subnobles:
Weaponmaster, any House Matriarch will appoint a weaponmaster, he acts like the royal guards and has a squad too, and handels executions. basicly a mix of the champion and hammerer.
Tax Collector, the Weaponmaster will not only make the internal secure for the House Matriarch, he will also look into getting economic wealth, so he will appoint the tax collector.
Dungeon Master, just like Dwarfs, Drow love exotic animals, so the nobles will appoint the appropiate dungeon master too.
Drow use the basic elfen language, but unlike their treehugging cousins, they use the darker and evil side of the word spectrum.
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Due to the reasons explained here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70258.msg4122522#msg4122522
Rhenaya's Drow mod wasn't being updated anymore. I'm talking of this mod: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70258.0
Due to this thread's idea: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161028.msg7209543#msg7209543
of recovering old mods not updated anymore I started this, both as a way to learn modding and as a way to make Rhenaya's marvelous work more easily available to the community even in the new versions of the game.
All of the creative work here is Rhenaya's, I'm just updating it to the new version, and I wouldn't mind if other people would work on these same files in some other ways.
This mod is Rhenaya's work, with me just updating it to the latest Dwarf Fortress versions, even if I am starting to add and tweak things.
Some addition includes a version of reactions seen here on the forum and on Meph's Masterwork as well as some other mod around.
The graphic part of the mod, too, is in debt in various ways with Meph's work - and Obsidian Soul's and Denzi's though it - and with Vordak, more on that in the readme.
This mod's folder still includes Chariot and Doctor_Nic's 16x16 tilesets as a variant option too.
I also have to thank Kat, Manu_G and SQman for their feedback, corrections and general help at various time in this forum,
as well as all the members of the modding community, for teaching, helping and stimulating me.
I am starting taking more and more 'artistic' decisions about this, so it is less of a simple translation and more of an interpretation of Rhenaya's work.
I still include the files needed to have it 'pure', but that's not anymore the only criterion. The other direction is the inmediate compatibility with other mods. I don't want to add to the "arms race" of metals (and bones) "almost as good" or "slightly better than" steel.
In this version I still have the "filological" translation added as a standalone alternative: copy either one of my two folders in your Dwarf Fortress folder.
Changes for Med's Less is More:
- Titanium and its colleagues are cool but not really drow, nor really needed in Dwarf Fortress; I left them out. This also helps compatibility with other mods introducing exotic metals - too much can be too much.
- Darklight Iron is out too, for the same reasons.
- I left out mithralsteel and mithril too.
This will get some people mad, but to start with it, mithril is a Lord of the Rings thing. Mithral is its Forgotten Realms' version. They are a duplicate.
Both are silvery metals, stronger and lighter than steel, that don't exist in our world. Both are made from a deep ore mined mostly by dwarves in concrete places, risking to dig too much to get it.
In Dwarf Fortress the silvery metal, lighter and stronger than steel, that is mined mainly by dwarves and only in well defined very dangerous places - with the risk of digging too much... already exists: it is called adamantine, and is already in-game. Even if the word for it in Sindarin is mithril, and in the Forgotten Realms it is mithral. Even if in the Forgotten Realms it does exist a different metal (a dark one) called adamantine.
Changes for both versions:
- I'm trying to start using the animal tokens to limit the access to drow's animals (spiders most of all) to other entities, even if you play this guys in a mod with other playable evil civs. In this iteration I will try to have the drow use ONLY their animals as created by Rhenaya, while instead making it more difficult for other entities to get access to the same animals - even without a spidery to make good use of them, the giant spiders are double the size of the vanilla cave ones, are tameable and produce silk. It is a work in progress, and more elegant ways of writing the same things are surely available - I'll try to get it improving.
- I tweaked again the personality/values axis, far less then the last time, to stress the drows' hedonism: it was to be faithful to the source material, but it could help in improving socializing and baby output, I hope.
- Some tweakback in biome organization. I'm already stressing Rhenaya's work in other directions now, and I didn't really know what I was doing there,
neither mechanically nor from a lor point of view.
- I had to edit the entity file to specify that the "female only" positions only allow dark skinned female drows. For how the Quaggoth are written right now, they are citizens and would have been elegible for the positions, which they shouldn't. It may be wiser to put them in an hybrid situation, like the Troll in the Goblin entities: half pets, half usable pawns, to be more faithful to the lore's spirit. Time and test will tell.
- A last minute change was to the caste numbers composition for the drow creature: we had almost three times as many chances of having females than males, not an ideal situation for how Dwarf Fortress works. It can explain in part why the drow had so little babies too: let's see how it plays now.
Cheers!
PS: looking at the creature files, I started wondering if the Quaggoth being shearable was or wasn't aleftover from them having been created starting from the Troll from standard_creature file. They still had "T" as their identifying letter in last Rhenaya's version and it could have been an oversight. Do anyone have a recorded instance, in any lore-original material, of Quaggoths sheared for wool? Either in novels or game manuals. I don't.
Albino driders are no big deal, just recolored castes for albino drow to turn into when they eat too much spider meat.
I don't want to make any more civs right now. Sure, there are the scorpion-worshipping jungle drow of Eberron, though I don't think they are worth inserting into the mod.
The weapons are good as they are, but there's no need to specify that they are drow-made, same for clothes.
Goblins use animals from the first cavern layer and the evil ones. Lizards are evil for some reason. I'll remove the EVIL tokens so goblins don't bring lizards anymore. Same for spiders and quaggoths. Drow should be able to use either only drow pets, or cave pets other than trolls. Beak dogs don't fit drow all that well.
Expansion problems might have been fixed, I don't know for sure. Once I finish working on entities, I'll do some test runs. Meanwhile:
General:
-Changed file naming scheme;
-Changed many tokens so they end with authors' signatures instead of beginning with them;
Mammals:
-Consolidated rothe and cavvekans into a single file;
-Tweaked the sizes of various rothe species;
-Gave rothe trade capacity;
-Gave rothe cheeses distinct names;
-Gave cavvekans some natural combat skills;
Reptiles:
-Remade pack lizards almost completely - they are now lazy, sluggish creatures useful for carrying large amounts of trade goods and pulling wagons. Also made them capable of whipping with their tails;
-Lowered riding lizards' size, but greatly increased speed;
-Nerfed spitting crawlers' acid. Only pain is guaranteed now, and necrosis happens rarely;
-Changed descriptions somewhat so they're less awkward;
Fungi
-Removed shrieker altogether;
Spiders:
-Made sword spider trainable and rideable;
-Renamed sword spider attacks;
-Gave all spiders eight eyes;
-Made sword spider talons tougher and sharper (I think);
-Changed hairy spider venom somewhat;
-Changed the colors of both kinds of drowspiders;
-Made monstrous spiders unrideable;
-Made monstrous spider way smaller, yet much more expensive;
-Added a curse to all spider materials;
Drow themselves:
-Changed body sizes and baby/child ages to those of regular elves;
-Made drow immortal again;
-Removed natural skills in favor of skill learn rates;
-Added petting interaction;
-Nerfed faerie fire SEVERELY, and I mean BIG TIME;
Quaggoths:
-Cleaned up the file;
-Added some more fur colors;
-Made quaggoths a bit more violent;
-Added petting interaction;
Driders:
-Lowered frequency and cluster size;
-Added albino castes;
-Changed the curse so that genders match up, or at least I hope so;
-Added the petting interaction;
Scorrow (NEW!):
-Added scorrow and an associated curse;
Metals:
-Renamed mithralsteel to mithril steel;
-Renamed nitinol to nickel titanium;
Plants:
-Renamed white lichen to stringy lichen for clarity;
-Added deep juniper and drow gin;
Items:
-Removed or renamed "drow X" items;
-Added a special piece of clothing that has always been missing;
-Made the rapier stab deeper;
-Changed the "pair of katars" into a single "katar";
-Rebalanced the scourge of fangs;
Stay tuned for more info on Rhenaya's Drow, unofficial branch! Coming soon in a separate thread once it's ready for release.