Bay 12 Games Forum

The merchants that came with my outpost liason got jumped by a huntsman (robotic nasty from The Long Night) and seem to have given up on life afterwards. They're just sitting there while the bodyguards loiter around. One of them was in a boulder, but smoothing it out didn't solve that either. Is there any hope for me to make them wake up inside?

The highest class of demon are the dikrohir. They are too stupid to have any way of escaping to the surface and are therefore completely harmless despite their immense size, array of powers and infinite bloodthirst. Some occultists engage in futile attempts to summon them up for weaponization or exotic goods.

The next class beneath them is the kulurrohir or "bogeymen" as the commoners say. For those of you who do nothing like adventuring I will tell you that they are as easy to invoke as they are to banish, for any idiot can do it by simply staying out and alone and then returning inside. They are a lethal annoyance and nothing else.

Further below these bothersome imps are the aborohir. All of you will likely understand that I mean goblins, but other many other names exist thanks to their worldly presence. Peasants will call them small-trolls, dwarvish humor knows them as bucks and some other philosophers will entitle them to be "hellves" in much the same way that dwarf is a portmanteau of dwarf and elf. Though useless from an occult standpoint, enterprizing slavers value them for their almost nonexistent needs and commission elaborate machines to secretly exploit their intelligence. Purity Theory holds that this is because demons are so evil that they have no body-soul duality.

At the bottom are the kastrolrohir, a focal point of many conspiracy allegations aimed at unpopular institutions. What is known is that the goblins are always heralds of their presence-that is the basis of their pagan beliefs! These entities combine the most dangerous aspects of all types above them and fixed to the world like a spear in the ground. Pages upon pages of hack literature talks about how they could be divined, commanded, killed or every other act that you do upon a magical beast. Such writings are the hallmark of a worthless philosopher. Words and symbols have no meaning when dealing upon demons, for they are beings of pure force.

-Undead should be weak to specific substances, I'm thinking specialized INTERACTIONS from both mortals and biomes and holy water as well as magical metals.
-Rename necro"mancers" to liches, since that's what they basically amount to.
-In some evil biomes dead creatures should resurrect into revenants, who retain the sentience and capability for emotion that they had in life but are still undead, with all the advantages and disadvantages that that entails.
-Subterranean Blood Shades, the undead blood of some slain creature from aeons past. They crave the sensation of back inside a body and will cram parts of themselves into corpses, which inevitably rot into new blood shades.
-Titanents, disturbed dead which don't have the ability to animate corpses but are extremely tough and strong.

A while ago there was a discussion on the Future of The Fortress thread about how wild magic should work, mainly about dealing with the "Wild" part in a way that didn't make it completely impractical. Here's how I think decent wild magic should work.

Magical abilities should be flexible, a master of the arts of creating and controlling undead should be able to use that ability in any way that fits the most literal definition of those powers available. For example, she could use her powers to bolster the immune systems by creating undead white blood cells in the recipients bloodstream that terminate targeted parasites more efficiently.

HOWEVER, using magic in an unfamiliar way should have dangerous consequences that fit the type of spell used. Expanding on the undead healing ability earlier, if improperly performed the spell could cause the target have undead skin flakes crawling all over them or worse, suffer from horrific undead tumors! Obviously not something you want to do. This effect scales up with the complexity and power of the spell, a botched fireball will just set the caster's hand on fire, while screwing up an attempt at creating a water elemental could cause a flood!

The best way for this to work is for each class of magic (probably classified by Spheres) to have an associated skill. That skill can be used to create spells, the quality of which can depend on the mages skill. Each spell has its own "skill", which is gained by using the spell and can have a bonus from the associated spell class' skill. The quality of a spell design also affects how easy it is to cast. A ☼Create Fire Elemental☼ can be much easier and safer than a xStart Small Firex, even in the hands of a novice.

Teel Deer: Wild Magic can be used to make new spells if creatively applied. However, botching your Wild Magic leads to a thematically similar effect of the same power to occur.

Since we already have slugs, why not make Hermaphroditism possible ingame? Hermaphrodites would count as both [MALE] and [FEMALE] and thus could both impregnate and be impregnated.

Dwarves

Dwarves have the most familiar ethics, they are the most in tune with what we consider "moral". They have no problem with eating any nonsapient life, believe that there is no possible justification for torture or cannibalism and, most interestingly, appear to consider making trophies out of sapients to be barbaric rather than evil.

Elves
Elf morality seems to be based around what's "natural". This leads to an alien yet semilogical code of honor. They appear to consider themselves to be some form of predator, seeing the eating of what they kill as completely normal even if it's sapient. Another "evil" natural behavior they view as okay is the killing of nonmembers. They prefer social stigma and even torture as a form of punishment in place of execution and imprisonment. They despise "unnatural" behavior like making trophies out of kills, destroying trees, slavery and torturing for the sake of torture.

Humans

Humans have a more "draconian" system of morality where slavery, "enhanced interrogation" and making trophies out of your enemies is acceptable. A lot like older real world civilizations.

Goblins

Goblins have the weakest ethics of them all, almost everything that isn't acceptable is a matter of opinion. An exception to this is treason, which they regard as the only sin. Although I suspect that's more because the "men" in charge will get angry than anything else.

Kobolds

Kobold ethics are a product of their unfortunate situation. The only thing they can count on is their tribe, kill another within it and you're no longer part of it and don't even think of going against it. They see the use of lethal force against other races as a necessity, which is justified considering their vocal handicap and they lack a concept of ownership. Interestingly, they find cannibalism and trophy making disgusting.

Please add this interaction tag. It'd be great for making syndromes that only affect certain kinds of night creature.

Thanks to the new knowledge system, I had the idea to give spheres an associated spell interaction (for example, FIRE would have a fireball spell). Each spell interaction has a [SYDROME_CLASS] associated with it that prevents people from learning spells associated with opposite spheres, for example, a spell associated with CHAOS prevents people from learning ORDER spells. Here's a list of spells (and other things of the sort) that we've came up with:

FIRE: Basic fireball attack.
GENEROSITY: Greeting interaction that generates a small amount of gold.
HEALING: Interaction that induces a brief transformation for a total healing effect.
HAPPINESS: Gas "greeting" that launches "happy gas".
LONGEVITY: Biological immortality.
MISERY: Gas attack that releases a neurotoxin that results in the Misery emotion.
PERSUASION: Ability that temporarily modifies the targets personality to make them easier to influence.
PREGNANCY: Removes [STERILE] token from undead.