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Messages - SixOfSpades

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616
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 24, 2015, 12:46:38 am »
Quote from: Batgirl1 on November 22, 2015, 07:29:16 pm
I like the idea of "imperfect knowledge", where the game rolls up a pantheon and cultures obtain pieces of the puzzle as gods manifest or otherwise reveal themselves to members of that population, with falsehoods cropping up due to the passage of time . . .
Later, further appearances by this diety result in more accurate depictions, although if he doesn't appear, a dwarf conversing with a human might conclude that, hey, maybe the wooden sword is right after all...
I was going to point out the necessity of the game having perfect knowledge of the gods, even while their worshipers might not (as opposed to the game generating the gods piecemeal, with each detail coming into being as it's discovered by a mortal), but I also like the flavor of the gods altering themselves to best suit what their faithful expect of them. Maybe an amalgam of the two would work best, where the god of Hospitality randomly gets assigned a hoe as a tool, but later on might choose to swap that out for a spindle if he has no other spheres that would take him outside the home.


I've been thinking about gods & demigods, and about spheres & domains. (I should point out that I want to swap the last two terms--a "domain" sounds like something that you control, and "spheres" are the various qualities associated with that domain. e.g., the domain of Fishing would have ties to the Water, Animal, and Food spheres, and so a deity with the Fishing domain would do well to pick secondary traits that were also associated with those same spheres. But I'm aware that I'm probably in the minority here, and I will try to stick to proper DF terminology in this respect.)
Demigods certainly aren't essential to a good pantheon, but given the vast range of potential importance, it's almost a given that somebody's going to get short shrift, relatively speaking. (I think I once got one who was the god of muck and salt. That's it.) Those could be the "Primeval" demigods, those who were born not-great.
Another type of demigod could be a former (possibly still?) mortal. If you defile a temple, that god will curse you. But if you hallow a once-profaned temple, that god will probably take you as a Priest. Perform another such service, and become a High Priest. Do one more act that's extremely pleasing to the same deity, and they might take you on as a demigod, and assign you a sphere from their own portfolio. (To prevent this from becoming commonplace in Adventure mode, the 3rd task would have to be REALLY discouraging, like "Live as a hermit for 6 years" or something.) These could be the "Transcendent" demigods, those who achieved not-greatness.
And interactions between the gods could produce a third type. If Legends mode treated each pantheon as something akin to a distant colony of its civilization, it could simulate events there--though at a noticeably slower pace than Fort mode. Gods could form and break friendships, marry, etc. Children of gods would need spheres to control, so at least 1 parent would have to surrender something. Some gods might have spheres stolen from them by other gods. Deities so impoverished could be the "Olympian" demigods, those who have not-greatness thrust upon them.
I'll have more to say about this "Godville" later on.


As for the Elemental spheres, my current thoughts are that they all preclude each other (to prevent any 1 god from grabbing too much & unbalancing the structure), and are all of equal power/importance--except for Earth. Earth is the parent sphere of Metal, which stands on a par with the other elements, and of course dwarves would favor Earth anyway. (Humans, meanwhile, place Weather at the top, elves think Wood is most important, and dwarves might not even recognize Wood as an element at all?)

But that's on the Preclude list. What seems to be called for in this thread is a cheap fantasy Preclude list generator: During worldgen, before history starts ticking, the game runs through the Divinity section of the INIT file and comes across a snippet that looks something like this:
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SPHERE_ART
     SPHERE_VANDALISM[45:-40]
SPHERE_FUTURE
     SPHERE_PAST[100:13]
That would mean that if a particular civilization has a god of Art, then they have a 45% chance of also having a god of Vandalism, and there's only a 10% chance (50/50 odds, minus 40%) that both spheres will belong to the same god. Meanwhile, a dwarf civ that has a god of the Future has a 100% chance of also getting a god of the Past, and these have a 63% chance (50/50 odds + 13%) of being the same god. Once that's done, the game checks two of the advanced worldgen settings mentioned earlier: the Pantheon Weirdness, and the Weirdness Deviation. Pantheon Weirdness would affect every civilization on the map, equally, and could potentially invert the commonality between the spheres: if the PW is set to 100, then it will take each individual sphere-relationship and go 100% of the way towards reversing the relationships, so that the Art god now has a 90% chance of controlling Vandalism as well, while Past & Future are now only 37% likely to belong to a single deity. Weirdness Deviation, on the other hand, is calculated independently for each civ, and imposes a random modifier (with the WD setting as the upper & lower limit) upon the global PW. So the Pantheon Weirdness determines how different the world's gods are from the settings described in the INIT file, and the Weirdness Deviation allows the various cultures to be different from each other. Once all those numbers are crunched, that creates a new Friend/Preclude list--one for each civilization, in fact, and the RNG can populate that with gods as it does currently.
I realize that my text snippet doesn't include a value for how likely Art & Vandalism are to be Friends (if they don't happen to be Precluded or identical), but you get the idea.


Back to Godville: Gods might be able to craft/discover unclaimed spheres, and either take them for themselves or trade them to other gods. Gods might even kill each other, at which point the lost spheres might be up for grabs, or vanish. This gets really interesting when you consider that the game might have events in Godville reflect what's happening in your fort, so that if you wall in and focus on feeding your population & making babies, then your gods of Agriculture & Birth would be more likely to acquire additional (related) spheres, while those controlling War, Fortresses, Hospitality, & Trade would wither away, losing worshipers in the process. This would give gods a whole slew of motivations to have their respective Priests make demands of you. Also possible would be deities from other civilizations migrating to your civ's Godville . . . perhaps filling a void, perhaps merging with (or even deposing) a native god. This seems like an interesting way to simulate a spreading religion, or at least the assimilation of certain elements of same.

That's enough blathering for now.

617
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 21, 2015, 06:00:01 pm »
Quote from: LMeire on November 21, 2015, 03:19:12 pm
He kinda did, founded a bunch of cities while he was there too.
So, he conquered India in the same sense that the British won the War of 1812. Yeah, they burned the White House, but . . .

Quote from: GoblinCookie on November 20, 2015, 11:14:12 am
Quote from: SixOfSpades on November 19, 2015, 03:49:24 am
Another common logical fallacy is to believe that correlation implies causation. Simply because Hinduism is one of the oldest extant religions on the planet is no reason to think that it's the Colonel's secret blend of humanity & divinity that has made it so. It's far more likely that it survived because its major worship centers happened to be located in an area with a historically low sociopolitical metabolism.
Hinduism is interestingly 'strong' because it is a pagan religion that did not succumb like it "should have" according to the apparant rules of historical evolution.  This makes me think that what killed off paganism was a kind of intellectual 'poison', which Hinduism was isolated from which preceded the rise of the monotheistic religions and indeed facilitated their rise by weakening the competition.
Are you using "pagan" to mean "non-Christian", or to mean "pantheistic"? Words like pagan, heathen, and infidel are almost defined by their connotations of "Not a member of OUR religion," which is useless in this discussion because we're not speaking from the framework of a shared faith.

"Hinduism is strong because it did not fall" is indeed a tautology. You would have been perfectly fine if you had said, "Hinduism is interesting because it did not fall," so for the sake of good manners, I shall pretend that you did. Even so, I still directly disagree with your proposal, that Hinduism endured as a direct result of some ideal ratio of Celestial Approachability possessed by the majority of its gods. While it is true that strong faith sincerely held can indeed strengthen a culture's courage and tenacity, that doesn't change the fact that a civilization defines its gods, NOT vice versa. Religion is a recreational activity practiced by a society that has the leisure to do so. Hinduism still stands not because its gods wait the appropriate amount of time before calling you back, it stands because
Alexander the Great uses CLASSIC BLUNDER--LAND WAR IN ASIA!
It's not very effective.
It stands because India is just so heavily populated, it's pretty much impossible to conquer. It stands because polytheistic religions are excellent (even more so than modern Christianity) at assimilating aspects of other faiths. It stands because it has stood--the older the faith (and the longer that your family has been part of it), the greater the pressure to carry it on.

(removed)

Quote from: cochramd on November 20, 2015, 09:39:46 am
Let me elaborate a bit: each of the elements feeds another element . . . and controls another element.
Yeah, I did the did the research too (a couple of ago, for an entirely unrelated project, but that's another matter). Whether you go by the Greek setup of 2 pairs of opposing elements or the Chinese layout of 5 (although some versions have more) elements interconnected by symmetrical chains of creation and destruction, both plans have their own internal consistency and balance--precisely as you'd expect from a good cosmology, one stable enough to allow creatures as frail as dwarves/humans to flourish. But when you allow the god of 1 element to spread & control another element, the symmetry is broken and the structure seems likely to fall. So, when you said that
Quote from: cochramd
water and fire are no more or less sensible than any other elemental combination
I agreed, in the sense that I don't really think ANY of the primal elements should be allowed to combine, even in cases where they might collaborate nicely. Now, what exactly constitutes a "primal" element isn't absolutely clear (the DF spheres list Metal as being a subordinate subset of Earth, but Chinese cosmology holds it as separate and equal), but I think it's agreed that we'll let Toady be the judge of that.

With that said, I do disagree with Toady on one count: (paraphrased)
Quote from: Toady One
A deity will never choose a parent/child sphere of any of the spheres they already have.
This seems unnecessary, and at times quite awkward. Why shouldn't the deity of Courage control Valor as well? A goddess holds domain over Art, but not Painting? And it was this rule that allowed one of my favorite gaffes, when the god "Rain Rainflew the Rainy Sky-Heaven of Rain" held sway over the entire sphere of Weather--until "Fragrance" came along and stole his favorite sub-sphere of Rain right out from under him. To me, it makes far more sense to arrange the rules so that if a god claims a parent sphere, its daughter spheres come along for the ride . . . at least, until we can arrange stricter rules for demigods.

618
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 20, 2015, 03:31:23 am »
Quote from: cochramd on November 19, 2015, 08:10:36 am
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As for the whole water/fire debate, you're too stuck on the preconceptions of Western classical elements. When viewed through the lens of Chinese classical elements (wood, water, fire, metal and earth), water and fire are no more or less sensible than any other elemental combination.
Wood + Water = boats. Earth + Metal = mining. Earth + Fire = smelting, and magma. Fire + Metal = smithing. Earth + Water = farming. Some combinations make perfect sense, at least from the POV of their applications.
Wood + Fire? Fire consumes wood. Wood + Metal? Metal kills wood. Metal + Water? Water rusts & corrodes some metals. Some combinations make very little sense, as one of the partners is destroyed in the process.
Fire + Water? If the two are very precisely balanced, you get either a still for creating (some types of) booze, or obsidian. If the two are unbalanced, however, either the water extinguishes the fire or the magma instantly vaporizes the rain. So the combination both does and doesn't make sense.

Yes, I've been influenced by the Greek classical elements, but they also had Air & Earth in direct opposition, too, and you don't see me arguing for that rivalry--because it doesn't really apply to the real world. In addition, Toady seems to agree: As the game stands, the spheres of Fire and Water block each other, but Earth and Weather do not appear on the preclude list at all.

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Quote from: SixOfSpades on November 19, 2015, 03:49:24 am
. . . Contrarily, others like Hades & Thoth were distant & aloof, simply performing their functions and with very little in the way of recorded personality traits.
You say that as if preferring to keep one's nose to the grindstone/in a book to the point of not really interacting with the rest of the world outside of work were not a perfectly human trait that we've all seen in someone we've met. I think that, much like those people, such gods could be quite conversationalists if you got them talking about their line of work.
I specified that those gods had a lack of recorded personality traits, so we don't know much about them. Sure, they could love conversation, they could have any number of quirks & eccentricities, but we just don't know. And if WE don't know, their worshipers arguably wouldn't either, making those deities more difficult to personally relate to . . . but, and this was my point, that doesn't seem to have made them any less effective as gods.


Quote from: GoblinCookie on November 19, 2015, 08:18:01 am
Quote from: SixOfSpades on November 19, 2015, 03:49:24 am
And, tell me, would this "balance" that you've been talking about, this ideal of a perfect mixture of both Human and Divine aspects in a civilization's god(s), have anything at all to do with your own Christianity? It sounds awfully like you're reaching for arguments that try to spin all of history and anthropology into saying that your personal faith is somehow objectively superior, and/or essential to the long-term survival of a culture. You imply that there is only ONE really successful way to run a religion . . .
The ideal religion in these terms would be Hindiusm.  Because it was able to achieve (or mantain) that balance it was able to survive while the other pagan religions did not.  Christianity actually leans too much towards the human side of things and this is it's weakness, why it lost out to Islam and to unbelievers.
Another common logical fallacy is to believe that correlation implies causation. Simply because Hinduism is one of the oldest extant religions on the planet is no reason to think that it's the Colonel's secret blend of humanity & divinity that has made it so. It's far more likely that it survived because its major worship centers happened to be located in an area with a historically low sociopolitical metabolism.

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If the fire god becomes overly inhuman then there is a danger that it will simply become the same thing as fire and will become redundant.
Let's discuss the most impersonal example of this that I can think of: The Force. There most likely *is* an intelligence behind it, as users can be guided by its influence. But if so, it is an intelligence that apparently lacks a bodily avatar, and even a name; the god has merged with what it controls. But that hardly means that it's ceased to be a functioning religion, what with its thousands of clergy and at least one major schism (were the Jedi and Sith ever a single body?) to its name. But there is no actual worship, per se, and its rituals seem to be purely functional--you don't meditate to be closer to your god, you meditate to clear your mind of clutter that might make you lose a fight. Does this make the Force (or its sects) a less effective religion, at least in terms of the spiritual energy paid to its god(s)? Perhaps.

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If the fire god becomes overly human then there is a danger that the clergy will simply become regents of the fire-god, authorities in a sense but also lacking in authority at the same time; a deadly mixture.  The personal nature of the religion requires a personality to head it, but the fact that the fire-god is not physically present undermines the effective authority of it's own priests; an authority it vitally needs.
The most humanlike god that comes to mind is Bacchus / Dionysus. Dude was throwing outdoor orgies everywhere he went, and people were freely doing likewise on his behalf when he wasn't around. Did the lack of his direct presence somehow weaken him, or his worship? Somehow, I doubt it. ;)

619
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 19, 2015, 03:49:24 am »
Quote from: GoblinCookie on November 18, 2015, 08:16:16 am
Yes the Norse had a similar situation god-wise as the Greeks+Romans did but remember they also ended up going the same way, they fell to Christianity despite having the 'defender's advantage' of being the established religion and the traditional religion of the culture at the same time.  They also did not fall because of Christianity's militery might, they fell despite having autonomous states with their own independant armies.

What I am suggesting is that things 'went too far' along that route, the stories/myths initially exist and strengthen the religion because they allow people to relate to the gods on a non-abstract level.  As I have mentioned before, I believe the strength of a religion depends upon it's ability to balance out the abstract divine spiritual/elemental 'presence' with the quasi-humanity of a bieng with which human beings can relate.
And, tell me, would this "balance" that you've been talking about, this ideal of a perfect mixture of both Human and Divine aspects in a civilization's god(s), have anything at all to do with your own Christianity? It sounds awfully like you're reaching for arguments that try to spin all of history and anthropology into saying that your personal faith is somehow objectively superior, and/or essential to the long-term survival of a culture.

You imply that there is only ONE really successful way to run a religion . . . and yet you say that *I* am closed-minded and hidebound because I keep insisting that fire & water don't get along?


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Quote from: SixOfSpades on November 17, 2015, 03:11:38 am
The Religion arc will surely give us Priests, but it may not be until the Magic arc that those Priests can cast actual spells in relation to one or more spheres in their god's domain. One can certainly argue that these spells would not "profit" the god in terms of spiritual energy unless they were performed before a fairly large audience, but that only seems fair. The deity's physical manifestation itself could be looked on as miraculous, and seems appropriate for the anointing of a new priest. Whether or not the god possesses a human-like personality seems irrelevant.
If gods can cast fire spells by drawing upon the 'god of fire' unless we have a quasi-human intelligence to relate to then all he is doing is using the power or force of fire.  That is the other side of the coin, what you end up with if you identify the god too closely with the thing that it is god of, the god comes to mean nothing but the thing itself and is redundant.
Oh, I was drawing a distinction between "an intelligence" and "a human-like personality." All gods must have the former--at the bare minimum, a deity must appear as a voice in at least one priest's mind, state his name & the major spheres of his dominion, and inform the priest of what pleases & displeases him. In contrast, whether or not a god has what we would consider to be a believable "human" disposition seems entirely optional. Deities such as Mars, Juno, and Loki were rich with personality, and usually easy to relate to. Contrarily, others like Hades & Thoth were distant & aloof, simply performing their functions and with very little in the way of recorded personality traits.

If the god of Fire is of the former group, with a set of personality traits that at least some of his followers can match closely enough to get chummy with their deity, then he might even make a personal appearance when invoked by a favored priest, ensuring a strong worship base from any witnesses. But even if he's extremely reticent, he would still answer priests' calls to make fire behave in unexpected ways, simply because it would strengthen faith in him to do so. Being confused with his own domain is avoided because it will be observed that only his priests can direct fire in that way, and the priests cannot claim that they alone are controlling the fire, because they know that to steal their god's credit is to risk being turned into a wereguppy or whatever.


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A female pregnancy goddess however cannot initiate a pregnancy or else she is male . . . A male pregnancy goddess can initiate a pregnancy
You didn't get me there. What I was proposing was that the conception resulted as the combination of three partners: The husband, the wife, and the deity. In this regard, a god of either gender would be equally effective in promoting fertilization, but only a female one could ever stand for the stress, nourishing, protection, and pain of carrying a fetus to term.

620
DF Suggestions / Firewood and gravel
« on: November 17, 2015, 09:30:57 pm »
When your Wood Crafter takes a log big enough to make a coffin out of, and instead produces a ring, an amulet, and a figurine, what happens to the rest of the wood? Even when your Carpentry shop is running full-blast, churning out doors and beds, you're bound to have some leftover scraps.

I propose that jobs such of these use the relative size of the finished product(s) and use that to calculate how much of the principal reagent is left unused--but still theoretically usable. Each workshop keeps track of 1/10ths of logs (just as Smelters do with 1/10ths of bars), and, when there's enough for a full "log", out pops 1 unit of firewood (pretty much all woods are functionally identical, so I see no need to differentiate). This wood is good for nothing but the Wood Furnace. Appropriate workshops would also have the ability to destroy finished wooden objects (which you might want to do if they're xXdamagedXx), creating similar fractional logs--although if the objects have been further embellished by material decorations, those decorations may be lost, depending on their composition.

Gravel would be similar, but rather more complicated. Stonecrafting and Masonry jobs would result in waste gravel, but the main source of it would be mining: every mined rock tile would generate some gravel, let's say 1/10th of a stone, which would clutter up the tunnels until it was hauled away in bags or barrels. Gravel could be used as cheap road material, a means of filling aqueducts to make them water-permeable but impassable by most creatures, a prime component of mortar (why doesn't the game have mortar yet?), or simply to fill holes. The problem lies in keeping track of the various types of gravel: Flux gravel seems a given, as realistically even 1/10th of a load of flux stone would be ample for both steps of a complete steel-making process. Gravel of brightly or richly-colored stone, like cobaltite or orthoclase, would be rightly prized for use in mosaics or decorating pottery . . . but that would mean keeping track of the root stone type of every tenth of every unit of gravel (at least, until it gets used--I don't really see dwarves deconstructing a gravel road to salvage the gravel for future use), and that seems unnecessarily cruel to one's FPS.

621
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 17, 2015, 03:19:39 am »
Quote from: Batgirl1 on November 15, 2015, 10:44:26 pm
Obvious solution: Sliders at world gen.  Choose whether a world's religions will be Plausible, Strange, or Completely Random.  This way, every player can set it at the level they're most comfortable with for what they want to get out of the game, whether it's logic or a creative exercise or just a bit of hilarity.
Modified suggestion: Advanced worldgen could have two settings, one for the average Pantheon Weirdness, and one for the allowed Deviation from that Weirdness setting. So choosing a mid-range Pantheon Weirdness but a very large Deviation would result in *some* dwarf civs having perfectly "normal" gods, while the neighboring civ's pantheon is batshit-crazy.

622
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 17, 2015, 03:11:38 am »
Quote from: GoblinCookie on November 15, 2015, 02:52:24 pm
This [the 4 elements of Greek alchemy] is not something that just springs up from direct observation, the fire "thing" as observed directly by dwarves is opposed to the water "thing" (along with all the other smothering things).
I agree that the Fire vs. Water, Earth vs. Air oppositions are definitely more open to interpretation & opinion than many, more absolute, oppositions like Gaiety vs. Misery, Food vs. Poison, etc. So I say [again] that the RNG should have differently-weighted odds of certain combinations; Flat-out contradictory domains like Law and Chaos should probably have a 1% chance of being given to the same deity (who assumedly would be interpreted as the god of the Chaos-Order continuum), while those with some grey area could be more in the 5-25% range.

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It does not work and never has to have gods simply as souped up mortals.  When gods start to be taken literally as just more powerful human beings then the religion is basically decaying and about to be overthrown by a new religion with a less literal, more metaphorical view of their gods humanity.
I'm not going to trouble myself with the academia nuts running rampant in the handful of recent posts above, but rather take a different tack: The Greek playwrights depicted their gods as vain, debaucherous, jealous, lazy, wrathful, and indignant, for all the same reasons that men would be expected to feel such emotions. Moreover, we find that the tradition of writing gods in this way lasted for hundreds of years, even longer if we include the Romans' wholesale co-opting of the pantheon. This is a far cry from "basically decaying and about to be overthrown". The Norse gods are a similarly flawed and rambunctious lot, and although their sagas are much more difficult to date (Viking bards hardly ever wrote anything down), they do seem to have lasted for a similarly long time.

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A religion based upon literal human-like divinities does not work unless those divinities are actually physically present and possess overwhelming power, but in that case why call it a religion at all?  That is because the presence of a divinity must be 'felt' in a non-literal sense by the believers in order for the effort expended by the worshippers in sustaining the religion to 'turn a profit' as it were.
The Religion arc will surely give us Priests, but it may not be until the Magic arc that those Priests can cast actual spells in relation to one or more spheres in their god's domain. One can certainly argue that these spells would not "profit" the god in terms of spiritual energy unless they were performed before a fairly large audience, but that only seems fair. The deity's physical manifestation itself could be looked on as miraculous, and seems appropriate for the anointing of a new priest. Whether or not the god possesses a human-like personality seems irrelevant.

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While women do have the ability to carry a pregnancy to term without male help, they are completely unable to become pregnant themselves.  Since it is the arrival of a male being that brings pregnancy 'into' a woman, it makes sense to represent pregnancy as a male god that enters it's female devotees *as* the pregnancy itself.  As I have pointed out, the matter is indeed 50/50 because a female god of pregnancy can get pregnant making her symbolic *of* pregnancy, nothing really connects her divine pregnancy to that of mortal women.
A . . . female god of pregnancy wins the symbolic war but has less relationship to it's pregnant worshippers than the male god of pregnancy which is able to represent both her relationship to the father that impregnated the woman and the fetus inside the woman at the same time.
As if a female pregnancy goddess couldn't initiate a pregnancy every bit as easily--and making the deity male would raise the question of "if it was the god who got her pregnant, then what exactly did the husband contribute?" Personally, I prefer a goddess who visits every conception to bless the union with a tiny spark of new life broken off of her own unborn fetus. She provides neither sperm nor egg, she merely controls the merging of the two, and protects the fetus during gestation.

623
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 14, 2015, 07:29:53 pm »
Quote from: AceSV on November 13, 2015, 05:28:07 am
I would expect to encounter something strange and unique about the way a fantasy civilization would analyze the world and form its mythologies and beliefs . . . a new culture in a new world should be able to have its own connections. Sure, there will be combinations that are completely ridiculous, but I like it when something ridiculous happens in Dwarf Fortress, and I would rather put up a few mind boggling wtfs than limit DF's mythology system to something bland and predictable.
Agreed, for the most part. I'm a big fan of "random" WTF, but have a low tolerance for "stupid" WTF. But in future, when the embark window will give the particulars of the pantheon of each of the available civilizations, we will have forewarning of contradictory gods, and simply choose another civ.

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I still think we should acknowledge that a lot of our mental connections are completely arbitrary . . . it comes down to whether you believe that the connections we make in western culture are absolute, or if a fantasy culture would develop new ones that seem strange and random to us.
Male vs. Female is anything but arbitrary, nor is Day/Night, Left/Right, Life/Death, Chaos/Order, Truth/Lies, Music/Silence, etc. I feel justified in saying that any culture would make these associations, and acknowledge the fundamental conflict (and cooperation, in the case of true yin/yang pairs) inherent in each one.
There are also pairs that simply don't make sense for reasons other than direct opposition. Sun/Caverns for instance, or Mountain/Ocean. Where do they meet? Would gods of such disparate domains be effectively halved in power, due to only being able to access the spheres that match their current location?

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A lot of Earth's mythology is, and by extension so should DF's be, poetic or allegorical in nature.  So if, say there's a god of Fire and Water, there is meaning within that.  The Fire-Water god might represent the power that can come through balance . . .
All right, say there's a single Fire-Water god. Will the Earth and Sky gods have to team up, or even merge in order to compete with balance this deity's power?
Not that I feel that the gods all need to be balanced. If a pantheon includes deities with dominion over, say,
A) Fortresses and war,
B) Agriculture and trees,
C) Wealth and trade,
D) Fire and volcanoes,
E) Craft and thralldom, &
F) Misery and deformity,
it's pretty clear which god drew the short straw, and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. There could be dozens of shrines to this god all over the sector of your fort devoted to giving your amputee veterans another shot at very slowly getting their revenge on the goblins that took their limbs.

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The god could represent inner struggle, adaptability, invention, power of nature, etc, rather than Fire and Water specifically.
Then the god's domain should include those spheres specifically, and not mess around with ANY of the "fundamental building blocks" of the universe.

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There's also the question of whether or not gods are "real" in DF.  If . . . the ancient dwarven ancestors beheld the world about them and concluded that there must be a persona that encompasses these powers, or is there actually a divine entity that has the power to ignite you with his right hand and drown you with his left.  If gods are real, then heck, why would any combination be impossible?
That's a good question. It would seem likely that the gods depend upon their followers for existence, because AFAIK gods vanish when their civilization goes extinct. But there's ONE god who predates even the time before time, the god of beards, alcohol, anvils . . . and blood. It is Armok who determines the logical order (or lack thereof) of each pantheon.


Quote from: GoblinCookie on November 13, 2015, 05:16:04 pm
I cannot see why a god of pregnancy would have to end up being female, the matter is basically 50/50 I think.  Is your god a god of pregnancy because she gets pregnant herself or is he the impregnator, the god that makes it's followers pregnant; a phallic deity basically.  As women do not get pregnant all on their own and it takes both genders to create a pregnancy, a male god of pregnancy makes as much sense as a female one.
Nitpicking time: It takes both genders to create a conception, but once that's been done, the pregnancy itself is 100% female. Now, male fertility gods are perfectly OK, there's certainly been more than enough precedent on that count, whether we're talking about the fertility of people, or animals, or the land itself. But as soon as you throw the word "pregnancy" in there, that immediately throws the needle over to female (or hermaphroditic at best). Portray a male god as being pregnant if you wish, but without a vagina that's going to get real awkward real quick. (And the god would want to be called "Loretta".)

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DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 13, 2015, 04:03:14 am »
Quote from: XXXXYYYY on November 10, 2015, 09:42:12 pm
Don't forget Thor and his goats.  Not fiery or stormy or whathaveyou, just goats.
Quote from: Bumber on November 10, 2015, 10:48:13 pm
Or jolly St. Nick and his reindeer.
Quote from: LMeire on November 10, 2015, 11:13:05 pm
Also Poseidon was said to have invented horses for no other reason than to prove he could be as creative with making a land animal as he was with sea creatures.
Hey, my point was that maladapted pairings wouldn't be good for DF, not that they didn't exist. :P Although I do have to say that (the various incarnations of) Santa's reindeer were very likely perfectly normal, land-bound reindeer at first, until somebody said, "Oh hey, you know what would be even cooler? They should totally be able to fly." And that story about Poseidon creating horses is pretty plausible, actually--just don't put any normal horses at the bottom of the sea. (Fun Fact: Horses are actually fairly good swimmers. You wouldn't think so, what with those skinny legs that don't look like they could push much water.)


Quote from: XXXXYYYY on November 10, 2015, 09:42:12 pm
And I don't think that spheres can truly render each other nonsensical. Even pregnancy & virginity, which you pointed out, don't render each other meaningless. One ends the other, yes, but they don't cancel for the same reason death and life don't cancel.
I can see a god of the "Life Force" bestowing Birth (or Rebirth) with one hand and dealing Death with the other (and perhaps animating Undeath with its third hand?), particularly because most animals, in order to prolong their own Life, must inflict Death upon something else.
I can see a god of Daily Cycles, whose hair changes from black to blonde and back depending on the time of day.
But barring the extremely rare case of non-penetrative conception (and fat chance Toady is ever going to code sexual specifics that detailed into the game), virginity and pregnancy are 100% mutually exclusive. The two can never coexist in the same body. While Day/Night is clearly a cycle, and Life/Death can be viewed as one, the change from Virginity to Pregnancy is strictly one-way & irreversible. Now, it's true that every (successful) pregnancy results in the birth of a new virgin, and therefore perpetuates the "cycle" of virginity . . . but by that exact same logic, the deity should be a goddess of "Pregnancy and Armpits", because every newborn baby has armpits. The pregnancy/virginity pairing is also not a cycle due to the fact that the vast majority of virgins (unmarried females and all males) never become pregnant.

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They might belong to a god presiding over children growing and becoming adults, perhaps. Both halves are there, and both would be needed for the god to perform their duty.
Both virginity and pregnancy do have direct ties to the sphere of Youth, yes, but from opposite directions. The goddess cannot be both mother and daughter to herself. (Unless you want to show her umbilical cord running from her navel into her own vagina--again, good luck getting that past Toady). It just makes a far neater arrangement to align virginity with a Youth deity, and pregnancy with a separate Mother goddess.


Quote from: XXXXYYYY on November 11, 2015, 07:39:43 pm
Heck, virginity being a primarily female thing is a rather strange link even in our culture.
It's based on the old "females as chattel" traditions. A family would get a much better price for a daughter if they could assure she was a virgin because A) her husband wouldn't be catching any STDs from her, and B) any kids that she squeezed out were assured to be his (provided that he himself would be similarly controlling after the wedding, of course). Young males, on the other hand, were allowed--even expected--to screw around, because obviously they wouldn't be popping out kids, and who cares if they infect a few worthless females with syphilis. So pretty much every patriarchal culture become obsessed with preserving their daughters' virginity, and celebrating their sons' promiscuity.
But, as said, none of that is reflected in DF. What with the game's zero instances of sex outside wedlock (in the current version, at least), and marrying for life, then the two sexes are absolutely equal in this regard, and every marriage is between two virgins. So while virginity is very closely tied to femininity in RL, in DF it's purely genderless.


Quote from: GoblinCookie on November 12, 2015, 07:34:19 am
The population is not divided by gender, instead they are simply divided into the pregnancy-prone and the non-pregnancy-prone populations.  Female virgins are classified as part of the second category, so effectively they are lumped in with the men.
My 2 cents: I would consider actively married males to be "pregnancy-prone" in the sense that they contribute to your fort's population. If you've got a married man with good stats & attributes that you would like to see propagated in future generations, you get that guy OUT of the military, whether he's got a baby clinging to him or not. While I still consider pregnancy itself an overwhelmingly feminine condition, and any deity of pregnancy would have to be portrayed as female (barring seahorses as the exception), the social/military dynamics of DF do demand at least this token acknowledgement of the male.

625
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 10, 2015, 08:56:44 pm »
Sorry it took me so long to reply, I was off scuba diving in the Mojave and digging for dinosaur bones in the Pacific. It was great, the sand was crystal clear & the perfect temperature for swimming, and of course the ocean's low humidity & erosion are perfect for preserving fossils.

Quote from: Bumber on November 06, 2015, 08:09:47 am
Quote from: SixOfSpades on November 06, 2015, 02:12:24 am
Anyone who's seen a still do its work (as I suspect roughly 90% of your dwarves have) knows what fire can do to water. Rather than treating magma as a tertiary state between fire & water, I expect dwarves would treat it as another form of fire, given that they frequently use it to power forges & the like.
That's through an intermediary material being heated up, and it's not entirely certain if DF stills even use heat. (Isn't the purpose of a still to boil the alcohol and not the water?) Rain, maybe, but a greater quantity of water combines with magma to create obsidian.
True, there's an intermediary, but as nothing can happen without heat, I think it's safe to say that dwarves should be smart enough to realize that the vessel is of trivial concern--the real reaction is between the fire & the liquid. (And yes, for distilling booze, the alcohol would boil off & condense out well before the water would. But ideally, a still would be present in the Kitchen, too, so Cooks could make things like bouillon and condensed milk.) Stills currently use no fuel, yes, but neither do Forges if they're operated by a moody dwarf (the theory is that the dwarf simply glares at the metal until it spontaneously assumes the desired shape). As for magma, water shouldn't be necessary for obsidian at all--the lava will simply cool into basalt, or dacite, or whatever, all on its own, no water required. Dwarves would rightly recognize that magma is an intermediate stage between Fire & Earth, not Fire & Water.

Yes, I'm discussing real-world physics & game improvements as if they were already implemented in DF. This is the Suggestions forum, wherein we discuss how the game is supposed to be, not how it currently IS. Unless you *prefer* your magma to be able to simply evaporate into thin air.

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I should note that I'm not claiming combining "opposing" spheres is good gameplay for DF, just refuting the point that such combinations must be nonsensical.
Only some of them make zero sense (like pregnancy & virginity), while others can make perfectly valid dual-aspect gods if they happen to combine that way. Between those two extremes is a fairly wide "plausibility spectrum", suggesting that in future versions, certain combinations might carry percentage weights, so that pairings that make little to no sense could be unlikely, but still possible. (Or perhaps even more likely, if "paradoxes" was added as a sphere.)


Quote from: Detoxicated on November 07, 2015, 04:04:31 am
Well they were changed, yet they were horses in the sky, isn't that crazy and opposing.
They were Fire horses in the sky. Fire is aligned with the Sun, the horses pulled the sun. So if you're okay with the sun being in the sky (which I am), you should be good with the horses too.

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I personally would like to see a god of magma in the form of a carp
As long as it's some kind of fire carp, sure.

626
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 06, 2015, 02:12:24 am »
Quote from: Bumber on November 04, 2015, 02:10:16 am
Does fire annihilate water? No so much. It's at a severe disadvantage when you mix the two.
Anyone who's seen a still do its work (as I suspect roughly 90% of your dwarves have) knows what fire can do to water. Rather than treating magma as a tertiary state between fire & water, I expect dwarves would treat it as another form of fire, given that they frequently use it to power forges & the like. Toady's decision to make the Fire & Magma spheres friends of each other (and opposed to the Water sphere) reinforces this. It's in magma form that fire has the greatest power over water--realistically, even a heavy rain falling directly onto an active volcano would simply puff into steam without even putting a dent in the churning lava.

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It's no more ridiculous than unrelated combinations such as poetry and salt.
Oh, I've never been against gods having different, unrelated domains. Indeed, with over a hundred spheres, each pantheon would need dozens of gods, if each deity was restricted to just 1 sphere & its close relatives. So while it would be a neater package to have a deity of, say, oceans and salt, instead of poetry, having disparate (but non-contradictory) domains seems just the thing to keep pantheons unpredictable, but still quite plausible.


Quote from: Detoxicated on November 04, 2015, 10:42:26 am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios#Greek_mythology
So this guy was pulled by horses through the ky, pretty crazy, if it wasn't an actual myth...
In that link, the very same paragraph that mentions the horses describes them as being affiliated with fire. This is just another example of altering the animal to make it a better fit for its (new) environment.


Quote from: TheBiggerFish on November 04, 2015, 04:00:53 pm
All the tenuous connections we've made, and we deny the right of anything else to make them.
I'm not disputing anyone's right/ability to make weak connections, only the plausibility of anyone worshiping a deity held together by such frail bonds--especially when they have a wealth of alternative gods to choose from.

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A god of balance someone found:  Symmetry Balancedequal the Symmetric Stability of Neutralization.
My favorites are still the god of food, "Garlic Spicymuffins the Brunch of Peppers" and one of my own, a god of fortresses named "Castle Bastionshields the Defended Barricade". :)


Quote from: Snukkems on November 05, 2015, 12:12:50 pm
Those oppositions [yin/yang bombs], are mostly rooted in our culture rather than something inherent.    A totally different creation myth, with a totally different different pantheon of Gods, could easily see Light and Dark as equal, easily see Earth and Sky as Equal, and easily see desert and Ocean as equal.
Mostly agreed--some opposing matches can be combined and still make sense, while others cannot. For examples, I can imagine a god of War that at the same time represents Peace, because very often, wars have an almost completely defensive side, for whom the only reason for waging war in the first place is to maintain their peace. But a god that stands for Childbirth and Virginity simultaneously invites far more disbelief: Even if the goddess herself could somehow accomplish both qualities in the same body, her mortal followers surely could not. [The annoying thing here is that it has precedent: Quite apart from the Virgin Mary, the Greco-Roman goddess Artemis/Diana held both domains. One can only presume that she helped her followers through pregnancy while she herself remained virgin, but even so it would make far more sense to hand the childbirth aspect over to Hera/Juno (as many people in fact did), as Juno was already the goddess of marriage & women in general.]

And oh--simply because a desert can be likened to an ocean does not magically equate the two.

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However, the point is rather moot, as Sphere's of influence are in the game and wouldn't create directly opposing concepts like this.
The spheres *themselves* avoid creating conflicts, yes, we're just talking about the secondary aspects of the gods--in the current version, that only means their name & physical depiction, but in future it might include other iconic tokens such as garments, tools, attendant animals, etc. Gods' names & descriptions can already run directly counter to their domains (a male god of pregnancy, or a god whose name mentions "rain" 4 times, even though Rain is actually controlled by a different god in the same pantheon, etc.), and I'm hoping to correct this behavior.

627
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 04, 2015, 01:45:47 am »
Quote from: Dirst on November 03, 2015, 09:22:24 pm
I meant a DF totem, which is basically just a trophy.
Yeah, sorry, brain fart. I was confusing "carve the dragon's skull into a work of art" with "take the dragon on as a religious icon associated with yourself".


Quote from: Vattic on November 03, 2015, 10:10:06 pm
I disagree as the connection between the god and his totemic creature is their shared history, not any other similarity.
A sky god visiting a cavern and walloping a cave dragon is a far cry from the relationship between Bellerophon & Pegasus. Shared history is important, yes, but how the hell are you going to identify with a beast that opposes a good portion of what you represent? At the very least, I think we should declare a blanket moratorium on animals that are horribly adapted to their god's preferred environment (if any such is implied), and would hate every moment spent there.


Quote from: Bumber on November 03, 2015, 11:10:29 pm
Quote from: GoblinCookie on November 03, 2015, 07:24:01 am
Quote from: endlessblaze on November 02, 2015, 10:32:12 am
Also keep in mind yin-yang bombs. Fire and water, darkness and light, earth and sky,  desert and ocean.  They don't have to oppose.
They do if you have a functioning brain.
More like an unimaginative one.
I defy anyone to say that *I* lack imagination, and I can plainly see that there are no lack of equal & opposite yin/yang pairs to be found in every corner of religion and cosmology. Creation/destruction, chaos/order, mind/body, matter/antimatter/energy, etc. Sometimes the two (or more) form a literal yin/yang combination, complementary elements that form a whole greater than the sum of its parts . . . but then again, sometimes they do not. Sometimes, such as the case with Fire and Water, they simply have to oppose. Sure, go ahead and form another weak connection mentioning underwater geothermal vents, and the extremophile bacteria that grow there. But come on--that's pathetic. Do you really expect to convince anyone that Fire and Water don't annihilate each other, argued on the basis of a handful of bacteria? Can you really picture dwarves basing an entire religion on such an idea?

Didn't think so.

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DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 03, 2015, 08:34:01 pm »
Quote from: endlessblaze on November 03, 2015, 07:15:13 pm
or a sky god might have gone underground to fight his brother who was hiding there. and while there he subdued and tamed a cave dragon. I would honestly like to see something like that.
If and ONLY if he either uses his divinity to grant the cave dragon wings, or chooses not to adopt the creature as his totemic animal at all.

629
DF Suggestions / Re: More depictions of gods
« on: November 03, 2015, 03:36:28 am »
Quote from: XXXXYYYY on October 31, 2015, 07:23:07 pm
. . . why couldn't a mountain goat be tied to a god of the ocean, climbing the many cliffs and valleys of the waves during storms, or a giant desert scorpion to scuttle over the dunes of the calmer waves?

. . . In fact, a case could be made that birds are creatures of earth, not sky.

. . . Is it not possible that that dwarf might see [a blind cave bear's] sudden detection of them as a decree given to them as a sky god of some form, and the bears are the god's symbol in the depths?

. . . A bone-like male body-part gives rise to a pregnancy.

. . . In fact, [being maimed] could even be seen as a luxury, in some cases.

. . . And could it not be said that someone thrashing in the throes of a nightmare is performing a dance, of sorts?

. . . Imagine an origin story where the kobolds were once a grand and civilized society . . .

. . . Something is only counter to a category if you look at it with our tinted eyes.

No. Just no. Flat-out no. Absolutely not. Wrong. Thank you for playing. It has been quite some time since I've disagreed with something so strongly as I disagree with the ideas above. I applaud your diligence in bending over backwards in order to fabricate these tenuous connections, but hardly any of them make even a damned bit of sense. And who would worship a god that didn't make a damned bit of sense?

As I've said above, anyone who thinks that waves and billows are terrain to be casually climbed / wandered over by land animals is displaying a frightful lack of knowledge of hydrodynamics. Similarly, anyone who pretends that the capacity for powered flight is not absolutely critical to the survival of the vast majority of bird species is deliberately being unforgivably misleading. Your attempt to justify the use of a [MALE][DEATH][UNDEAD] symbol to represent a phenomenon that is firmly, obviously, and undeniably lodged in the [FEMALE][BIRTH][LIFE] spheres is the very definition of facile. Etc., etc.


Now, endlessblaze had a point about "yin-yang bombs":
Quote from: endlessblaze on November 02, 2015, 10:32:12 am
Fire and water, darkness and light, earth and sky,  desert and ocean.  They don't have to oppose.
Yes and no--it depends on the qualities of the precise pairing, or sometimes grouping. Light and Darkness are actually directly opposed, but can be combined in one god because of the clear evidence of the surface world's endless cycle of the solar day. [True, dwarves are rather insulated from this phenomenon, but even the most cave-adapted hermit can't deny that it exists.] Moreover, Light and Dark are inextricably linked--they are strictly relative, and neither concept could even exist without the other. Similarly, the game frequently gives examples of gods that have both Fame and Rumors in their domains--I chalk those deities up as gods of "Reputation". Any god that controls the spheres of both Life and Death (& possibly Birth / Rebirth) could easily be seen as a nature god, presiding over the entire life cycle (and would be a perfect match with a Phoenix for an animal companion). These are all valid opposing pairs.

But when a god has ONE half of the matched pair WITHOUT the other, it would be a mistake to try to associate symbols and traits from the WRONG side of the balance. Sure, you can draw all the feeble connections you want ("A living body is just a body that's waiting to die! A dead body nurtures and hosts future life!"), but that will never change the fact that life is life, death is death, and there's an end to it. A Life god and a Death god need not be enemies--they could even be BFFs--but they don't go around stealing each other's names, or domains, like "Rain Rainflew the Rainy Sky-Heaven of Rain" not being the god of rain. I can see them exchanging animal companions or whatnot, but ONLY if the animal would make sense being associated with the new god's domains.

Besides this, some pairs simply ARE in direct opposition, and that's all there is to be said. Fire and water hate and will destroy each other. It's dead easy to have earth without sky (caverns), or deserts without oceans (as far as I know, the western edges of the Sahara & Namib are the only places on the planet where desert meets ocean).


Quote from: XXXXYYYY on October 31, 2015, 07:23:07 pm
Why would I want to see Generic Sky God Number 374? Once we clear away our preconceptions, we can start to get interesting things.
Now this is a valid argument. There's no point in generating a pantheon that's basically just like any other that's ever been generated. That's why, as I said, I'm completely in favor of gods picking random associations with their animals, clothes, tools, and other symbols of religious iconography--provided that the elements so chosen are not opposed to any major aspect of the god's domains. Your sky god's associated animal is a vulture, a gift from her friend, the god of death? That's cool. Just as long as it's not a kangaroo, or a whale, or a monitor lizard, or a magma crab, OR a fucking blind cave bear.

I'm in favor of pantheons being fairly unpredictable. I'm fine with them being kinda weird. But I am NOT cool with pantheons, or their individual gods, being downright stupid or nonsensical. There is nothing wrong with that position, nor do I expect there ever will be.

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DF Suggestions / Re: Idea for myths, legends, books, songs, poems, & any other stories told within DF
« on: October 25, 2015, 11:57:14 pm »
There would probably have to be some kind of tag to notify the reader (the player, if not the adventurer) that the work is fictional, so that he doesn't confuse gods, minotaurs, and elves that don't exist with the gods, minotaurs, and elves that DO exist.

With that said, would a culture steeped in divine intervention, Evil weather, and dragons even bother to think up their own fictionalized versions of same?

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