Bay 12 Games Forum

Here’s one more thread wanting to inspire the Magic release.
Please note that this is not another praise of the Ars Magica famous magic system. That’s something I won't touch at all. It's how the magical world is intended in the setting that I'll talk about.
I’m fully conscious of how much is already on the plate but I strongly believe that this particular view on Magic can be of great inspiration for Dwarf Fortress. Reading through the AM materials (official and fun based) also feels like reading through medieval manuscripts, so I wonder if ThreeToe ever got his eyes on it

I’ll try to put a whole lot of material (several books) in as few words as possible, and format it for improved readability. I hope you appreciate the effort from an italian whose Super Mario accent goes even into his prose... 
But enough with the rant and preludes. Here we go

Realms of existence.
The world we live in, the mundane world, is barely the only one. It overlaps and interacts with other worlds - aka realms - who lack its substantiality and concreteness and find their essence in something else: ideas, beliefs, thoughts, Gods... These realms interact each with the other and with the mundane, and their manifestation in our world is - in a single word - Magic.
AM defines 4 Realms: Magical, Fairy, Divine and Infernal. The Divine and Infernal are heavily inspired by the Christian/Catholic view of the world in medieval Europe, and I won’t talk about them in this post, as the other two are much more…Dwarf-Fortress-Fantasy-Multiverse related.

The Nature of Magic and the Magic of Nature.
The Magic realm takes inspiration from the Platonic Hyperuranion: a world of pure ideas, whose material non-perfect copies are the consituents of our world. Though inherently imperfect, a particularly fine example of something can hint us to that perfection, radiate magic and acquire a Magical aura.

A perfect mountain, spectacular and ancient forest, and a vigorous active volcano might all acquire a weak Magical aura._CR

In the current language we often label such places as magical and in AM they indeed are.
Combinations of multiple of such fine examples and/or other natural phenomena (e.g austrological alignments, recurring or powerful weather or geological conditions), can give place to stronger auras.

[...]a coastal valley hemmed in by mountains, in which great storms often happen and which faces the midsummer sunrise._CR

Magical activities work the same way: the presence of magical creatures or the magic operated by magicians, are activities that will increase the Magical aura of a place over time.
Finally, sudden powerful event might do the same overnight.

[...]a spectacular magical fight between two powerful magical creatures in which one of the creatures was killed, or the creation of a magical effect worthy of legend [...] can push it [the Magical aura] to the highest levels._CR

note: The book Realms of Power - Magic, chapter 2, has MANY beautiful examples as the ones quoted above.

The power of beliefs and folklore
There's always some truth to the fables we tell our children...since is believing in them that makes them true.

Faeries are creatures drawn in some way from the imagination of the human race. They are thus as varied and diverse as the human imagination, and can be found anywhere from the depths of the wilderness to the centers of cities, from ancient pagan temples to the newest cathedral.
The realm of Faerie is as diverse and strange as those who inhabit it, and as with all faerie things, appearances can be deceiving. After dawn breaks, a pile of gold may prove nothing more than old leaves, while a single oak leaf can hold within it more magical power than the enchanted staff of a mighty magus._CR

Conflicting believes will work against each other in the regard of creating a Faerie aura, that's why fairies tend to inhabit remote wilderness areas, that in turn will grow "stranger" over time, and more whispered about.

Faeries in an area tend to inspire stories about the area, which in turn raise the aura and attract, or create, more and more powerful faeries, who in turn inspire more stories._CR

The feedback loop of the fantastic
As stories create fairies and fairies generate stories, the magical has similar mechanism. For example, a magical forest will attract magical creature whose presence will, in return, increase the aura of the forest. Its trees will also manifest such magic, blossoming flowers with magical properties, and mages will want to come to such a forest to gather such flowers and weave the forest magic into their own trappings etc...
The fantastic realms grow in a feedback loop. If left to themselves, or better if nurtured, they grow over time...until the mundane arrive, destroy the land with always more powerful technologies, pray to God (or another god who openly dislikes Magic and wishes all witches to be burned at least...).
For a real history examples of this, you can get into stories like the fell of the Donar's Oak from Saint Boniface, to get a feeling of how much effort took to the europian civilization to conquer and colonize the forests in central europe. Some wikipedia references for a quick start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donar%27s_Oak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_trees_and_groves_in_Germanic_paganism_and_mythology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercynian_Forest



Magic stuff
A central concept in the AM setting (and system) is Vis.

The power of magic touches inanimate objects as often as it touches the living. Sometimes that power becomes concentrated as raw vis.
[...]Vis is the physical embodiment of magic, essentially raw magical power. Within vis, magic exists in its most concentrated form [...]_RPM

Typical examples of what might contain Vis:

• a flower that blooms once a year and withers overnight
• crystals formations in a cave, that crumble if touched (a mage can etract its vis
• the blood of a dead devil, flowing with a single hearthbeat at every death annyversary

There's plenty of examples online:

• http://arsmagica.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Vis_Sources
• https://sites.google.com/site/hboarsmagica/home/covenant/vis-sources
• https://ars-magica-druesberg.obsidianportal.com/wikis/vis-sources-and-stocks

I won't go into any of the details of how Vis works in AM. I just wanted to list here this concept, to give an idea of how Magic can naturally infuse objects without any intervention of sort. It would be very interesting to see procedurally generated magical objects, the same as Forgotten Beasts.

So much more
There's so much more in the AM settings that could serve as ispiration for Dwarf Fortress, like Regions, pocket realities that mostly result from auras increasing but not having physical space to expand. The whole magic theory, how magical research and laboratories work. The idea that magic is this unknown thing, explored from many different traditions, none of which fully understands it, and how much a single invention (Magical Resistance - Parma Magic, in AM terms) shaped society, allowing for Mages gathering in communities. All these concepts to me resonate so much with what I've heard Toady One say on the theme.

Conclusion: The Dwarf Fortress connection
Dwarf Fortress has in place procedural generation for landscapes, believes, thoughts, and soon an expanded Gods and Magical system. What I just outlined, just fits perfectly in the current Dwarf Fortress frame.

I can see how at world generation, a particularly huge forest gets more and more magical at its core with the centuries going by, repelling all tentatives of colonization from the initial mundane races.
And I imagine these fishes, granted magical properties by the powerful Spirit living in the same pristine lake, feeding unaware Dwarves, that will become blue skinned overtime and feverishly pray to the lake Spirit.
And I can see how the most mighty magical being will inhabit the biggest mountain, generate metals and gems of incredible properties, and unleash its rage to the greedy dwarves mining and exploting it, in an escalation of FUN, where the being itself is caged a legendary achievement of dwarven SCIENCE.
I might go on with the examples but I'll leave to you patient reader, who read until here, to let your imagination do its thing.


Acronyms used:
AM Ars Magica
CR (AM 5th Edition, Core Rulebook)
RPM (Realms of Power: Magic)

Hello everzbody.
I'm running my first successfull fortress ever so you'll forgive me if this post doesn't make much sense or whatever.
I find really annoying to spend minutes selecting accurately all the merchandise I want to trade only to accidentally press "s" and seize everything. Excpecially since Dwarf Hack enable the "s"earch in a lot of screens, it's quite easz (for me) to seize stuff from merchants when I don't want too.

How does it work the relationship with the developer? Should I post this note somewhere or what else?

thanks

Now that my fortress is bigger and has two different quarters, I would like to split people in the two quarters depending on they're work... basically I need to change bedroom to some dwarf. So I assign them the new bedroom but... how can I find which one is the old one, so that I can assign it to someoneelse without having to press "q" on every single bed? Is it possible?

thanks in advance

What a mess... my wounded hunter was resting in his appartment and, after maybe too much time, someone gave him water and food. After a while he was thirsty again and I was awaiting for someone to help him, until I had the following annoucements:

...is taken by a fey mood
...cancels Strange Mood: Too injuried
...has gone stark raving mad

What's strange is that this dwarf doen't have any craft skill. He's an ambusher/marksdwarf/wrestler/grower/armor_user, so I just guess how could he use the fey mood! Now I'm quite sorry about this, my first injuried dies with such sadness, I'm very tempted to load back and hope things happens differently.

Have you got any suggestion? Ever happened that an injuried enters a strange mood?

I'm trying to compact all my stones in a single spot, so I consulted the wiki and implemented the Rock chute! My fortress is actually 5 levels deep, so my dwarves made a 6 level channel and tagged as "garbage dump" every level.

[...] and dwarves will dump stones flagged as "forbidden" down the channel. [...]

It seems like the dwarves dump stones flagged as "dump" and those, after beeing dumped, get the "forbidden" flag. If I'm right, we should fix the wiki.

Until now none of my dwarves used the rock chute and preferred other ground level dump zones... we'll see if it's only a case!

Sorry to bug everyone, but the wiki is not giving me an answer.
I'm finding a lot of trouble when I want to discover various information:
- dwarf skills. So many immigrants and I don't know much about them
- bin/barrel detailed content
- item owned (I mean, present in the fortress)

Some of this information are possible to find in the trade dialogue, so I suppose there should be another way to see it.

and another matter

- training dwarf
This is a question I had in mind at the start and vanished as soon as 20 immigrants arrived. But I'm sure that, in time, I would love one of my dwarves to learn a new skill. Is it possible?

Thanks for the patience and blame me loudly if this information are present elsewhere even if, I swear, I looked aroud!

Hello everybody, it's a fresh new user of this forum who write this topic. I ask excuse in advance since I only gave a quick look at all the topic about suggestions to improve the user interface and plans of the developers for future improvements.
Anyway it seems to me that my suggestion could be a new one, so I take the freedome to... suggest you (I should definitely improve my english vocabulary ):

What about a quick reference of the commands? Something, a pdf would be the best I suppose, a newby could print and easily handle phisically.

I am quite an experienced videogame player, a lover of indie games and a big retrogame player, so I've loved and still love games with a not-so-usable-and-long-to-master-interface (could we talk about NSUALTMI games? It seems like a fascinating word, "n'sualt mi"). I'm not a big expert of ascii games, but I've played for years at ADOM, and I loved that game. But it took me a lot of time to really enjoy it, playing with it as naturally as I play with a WASD+mouse first person shooter so that I could be really immersed in the atmosphere of the game.

But I've tried quite a lot of times to play Dwarf Fortress and everytime I missed the chance to addict myself to this game, because I didn't want to sweat thrice (at least) as much as I did for ADOM.

I'm very sorry that I'm not an experienced DF player who opens a topic like "hey, do you like this handbook I made?", but I would really like to explore the world that the Adams brother created, and I would like to be helped somehow, and I really think that such a handbook would be a good way to help the players and....
ok, I quit this writingandwriting and pass to some...

...practical idea:

code:

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I would love to have an A4,
eventually printed on both sides,
divided in blocks, sections, 
with.... every or most of or the most important
command of the game.

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What do you think about this?