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[LordBaal]

Hard facts on elves? They are dicks.
No pun intended.

[Joost66]

For example, how do the humans generally view dwarves? Elves?

As far as I can tell, the humans don't seem to really care. Of course, I'd assume the humans would be quite jealous of the dwarves for their steel making capabilities. As far as the elves, I'd imagine that they'd regard them a bit worse than the dwarves. They'd probably consider the elves to be savages of some sort, living in forests and such. Obviously the dwarves and elves don't seem to get along at all, but that we all know.

Why are the goblins all a bunch of assholes?

I remember Toady saying something about all the goblins being sociopaths. I think there was something about that they don't get 'the warm feeling you get from being friendly'. I'd assume this means they're much more used to doing everything based on survival. Due to this, they're culture is probably a lot more cruel, and being brought up around a cruel society makes you cruel. I'd imagine if a goblin where raised in say, a dwarven city, they'd understand the idea of being kind, but they still wouldn't really get it because they don't ever feel nice about being kind.

[LordBaal]

Maybe their brains actually don't produce any "feel good" chemicals from being kind. Of course our culture and how we are raised dictate a lot of what actually make you "feel good", and in our human world, be it by culture or evolved instincts, the vast majority of people are raised to be helpful or at very least sympathetic. People that know the difference and still act wrong is called "bad people", and people that can't tell the different because their brains chemistry is haywire are usually called psychopaths or sociopaths. This is of course a very light resume of the situation.

I imagine that a goblin civ would be something where the vast majority of them would have brains that don't discharge any kind of chemicals while being good in a sentient way (or even while being bad, maybe they simply don't enjoy things, I really don't know if they have likings on DF), acting more like animals or maybe Chinese Rooms, that's it, intelligence without actual consciousness.

Only a few goblins with "bad" brain chemistry would receive stimulus from their actions, and those would be the goblin sociopaths. Of this some would be cast out from trying to be good, but as their society is geared towards cruelty, the vast majority of this weird goblins would become masters of their race, more cunning and driven by seeking pleasure upon the tormenting of others.

Or maybe their it's a simple case of culture, they being more earthly spawns of the HFS, are simply geared towards cruelty and oppression and this kind of culture will drive any of it's members to find joy on inflicting pain on others.

I imagine the dwarves being very indifferent towars humans, but hatting goblins and barely tolerating elves at all.

Elves are pretentious dicks with fucked up morals and a superiority complex only surpassed by they aforementioned dickness.

And humans are a wild toss of a dice, they can range from being worst than goblins to being the stereotypic good heroes.

[Gargomaxthalus]

     Well Kohaku, I don't know if anyone's brought this up before, but your contract magic actually sounds a lot like Darklands' miracles system. In Darklands, your characters have to curry Divine Favor with the Saints that they have learned how to commune with in order to get anything form them. In order to get the most out of the Saints a character needs to be virtuous, be literate(which includes knowing latin and even being able to speak it), and have actual religious training. All of this makes Darklands "magic" extremely difficult to make use of and even if you have a 100% percent chance to have your prayers answered, the Saint can still still not to give you what you want. This is just a small facet of the current reigning  king of fantasy simulation a grueling but ultimately extremely rewarding experience.

     DF needs to end up being like Darklands and Demons' Souls in order to really work. By this I of course mean that the game needs to be brutal but fair. Toady needs to make players work for even small victories. I've said in one of your threads that alchemy is intrinsically dangerous and it is. All DF magic should be like this.You need to be constantly weighing the benefits of success against the dangers of failure. This is shown in magic concepts in every thing from D&D to Harry Potter to Charmed. There is always a chance that a spell will backfire with anything from comical, to catastrophic consequences."He who shall not be named." encountered a prophecy, tired to stop it, and a mix of a backfire and a parental miracle caused him to create his own destroyer. R.A. Salvatore gave us the Harpel family. These mages all have their own serious issues and treat magic like a game resulting in all sorts of shenanigans including one of them creating a spell that allowed him to save "The Companions of the Hall" only to end up forgetting that he created the spell in the first place.

     Uhhh as usually I ended up creating a rambling post that has no real direction, apologies. I don't do much communicating and as you can see I have some decent reasons.
Well I guess that what I was really trying to say is that magic needs to be BOTH structured and inherently chaotic just like how the universe works. What we need to do is come up with a set of "Magical Laws" or, even a set of sets of "Magical Laws". Once these magical versions of the Laws of Physics are defined, we can start to throw in various variables. When it comes to Spheres, Toady was pretty clear that that is just an arbitrary term meant to be the header for a set of tags that pertain "Ideas".

     Uhhh... damn. I just worked myself into a corner. Now I need to try to describe a personal concept of mine, I apologize for the way that this is going to come out in advance. Look at it this way, as shown in stories like the ones that influenced the Digital Devil Saga and other MegaTen games, everything really boils down to binary data. Hell, Shakespeare pointed this out when Hamlet said "To be or not to be.", that's really what everything boils down to: yes or no. Everything has two co-dependent sides that can't exist without one another. You can't be dead if you were never alive. If you haven't ever seen the light, then how do you define darkness. These are all basic concepts that don't really exist without an observer ,in other words the well known "Observer Effect" theory. I see it, therefore it is. As described in Planescape these concepts have their own raw power, but the thing is, this just ain't magic. This is simple "will" that were talking about. The Planes are quite moldable and tend to shift, merge, and diverge as the majority decides it should. In the multiverse these things tend to be taken for granted and things tend to be pretty polarized. Now my personal view comes into play when you start talking about the Prime Material Plane which is effectively made up of concepts. 

     The Spheres are simply rough guidelines that have no meaning on there own. Lords of Magic does a good job of explaining this with its 8 elements that serve as the primary building blocks of our reality and this is of course also used in the Mana games i.e Secret of Mana. As far as the first game goes these are, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Life, Death, Order and Chaos. The first 6 can be said to directly, and mainly, pertain to matter. We all know how these things interact in order to form our reality. These are all easily quantifiable and in the end mean precisely dick when it comes to our main problem. The difficult thing is how our reality may be influenced by the thought processes of sentient beings. Again I cite a MegaTen series, this time Persona, because of a concept that I learned from it- The Universal Unconcious. This combined with Xenosaga's "Universal Consciousness"................. Oh dear God what hath my mind wrought. What the hell am I even trying to say again?

     I hate trying to explain stuff and well, by now you can likely tell what I do with the bulk of my time and what my physical appearance is like. There's some really deep stuff referenced here that could be useful with a little Googling so I'll leave it all despite the fact that it's a maddeningly disjointed mess............ much like my mind actually. Alright lets try a simple approach. As I said "Sphere" is just an arbitrary title for a list of tags pertaining to basic concepts. Own their own they are completely worthless. Even with "child" Spheres, they are still worthless own their own. This is why you need another arbitrary title such as "Domain". A "Domain" would consist of a collection of similar concepts and a few ancillary ones that bridge the gaps between the Domains. You know what, fuck it, I'm done. I've gone threw 3 or 4 Kelly Clarksen albums multiple times typing this, and my neck hurts. Take this mess as you will and do what you will with it I need to lay the fuck down before my head explodes.         

[Urist McUristsonson]

Wasn't one multi-page derail enough? Really?

[Spinning Welshman]

     Well Kohaku, I don't know if anyone's brought this up before, but your contract magic actually sounds a lot like Darklands' miracles system. In Darklands, your characters have to curry Divine Favor with the Saints that they have learned how to commune with in order to get anything form them. In order to get the most out of the Saints a character needs to be virtuous, be literate(which includes knowing latin and even being able to speak it), and have actual religious training. All of this makes Darklands "magic" extremely difficult to make use of and even if you have a 100% percent chance to have your prayers answered, the Saint can still still not to give you what you want. This is just a small facet of the current reigning  king of fantasy simulation a grueling but ultimately extremely rewarding experience.

     DF needs to end up being like Darklands and Demons' Souls in order to really work. By this I of course mean that the game needs to be brutal but fair. Toady needs to make players work for even small victories. I've said in one of your threads that alchemy is intrinsically dangerous and it is. All DF magic should be like this.You need to be constantly weighing the benefits of success against the dangers of failure. This is shown in magic concepts in every thing from D&D to Harry Potter to Charmed. There is always a chance that a spell will backfire with anything from comical, to catastrophic consequences."He who shall not be named." encountered a prophecy, tired to stop it, and a mix of a backfire and a parental miracle caused him to create his own destroyer. R.A. Salvatore gave us the Harpel family. These mages all have their own serious issues and treat magic like a game resulting in all sorts of shenanigans including one of them creating a spell that allowed him to save "The Companions of the Hall" only to end up forgetting that he created the spell in the first place.

     Uhhh as usually I ended up creating a rambling post that has no real direction, apologies. I don't do much communicating and as you can see I have some decent reasons.
Well I guess that what I was really trying to say is that magic needs to be BOTH structured and inherently chaotic just like how the universe works. What we need to do is come up with a set of "Magical Laws" or, even a set of sets of "Magical Laws". Once these magical versions of the Laws of Physics are defined, we can start to throw in various variables. When it comes to Spheres, Toady was pretty clear that that is just an arbitrary term meant to be the header for a set of tags that pertain "Ideas".

     Uhhh... damn. I just worked myself into a corner. Now I need to try to describe a personal concept of mine, I apologize for the way that this is going to come out in advance. Look at it this way, as shown in stories like the ones that influenced the Digital Devil Saga and other MegaTen games, everything really boils down to binary data. Hell, Shakespeare pointed this out when Hamlet said "To be or not to be.", that's really what everything boils down to: yes or no. Everything has two co-dependent sides that can't exist without one another. You can't be dead if you were never alive. If you haven't ever seen the light, then how do you define darkness. These are all basic concepts that don't really exist without an observer ,in other words the well known "Observer Effect" theory. I see it, therefore it is. As described in Planescape these concepts have their own raw power, but the thing is, this just ain't magic. This is simple "will" that were talking about. The Planes are quite moldable and tend to shift, merge, and diverge as the majority decides it should. In the multiverse these things tend to be taken for granted and things tend to be pretty polarized. Now my personal view comes into play when you start talking about the Prime Material Plane which is effectively made up of concepts. 

     The Spheres are simply rough guidelines that have no meaning on there own. Lords of Magic does a good job of explaining this with its 8 elements that serve as the primary building blocks of our reality and this is of course also used in the Mana games i.e Secret of Mana. As far as the first game goes these are, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Life, Death, Order and Chaos. The first 6 can be said to directly, and mainly, pertain to matter. We all know how these things interact in order to form our reality. These are all easily quantifiable and in the end mean precisely dick when it comes to our main problem. The difficult thing is how our reality may be influenced by the thought processes of sentient beings. Again I cite a MegaTen series, this time Persona, because of a concept that I learned from it- The Universal Unconcious. This combined with Xenosaga's "Universal Consciousness"................. Oh dear God what hath my mind wrought. What the hell am I even trying to say again?

     I hate trying to explain stuff and well, by now you can likely tell what I do with the bulk of my time and what my physical appearance is like. There's some really deep stuff referenced here that could be useful with a little Googling so I'll leave it all despite the fact that it's a maddeningly disjointed mess............ much like my mind actually. Alright lets try a simple approach. As I said "Sphere" is just an arbitrary title for a list of tags pertaining to basic concepts. Own their own they are completely worthless. Even with "child" Spheres, they are still worthless own their own. This is why you need another arbitrary title such as "Domain". A "Domain" would consist of a collection of similar concepts and a few ancillary ones that bridge the gaps between the Domains. You know what, fuck it, I'm done. I've gone threw 3 or 4 Kelly Clarksen albums multiple times typing this, and my neck hurts. Take this mess as you will and do what you will with it I need to lay the fuck down before my head explodes.       

I agree with alot of your points here. I like the idea of magic acting like an extension of our own physics, I.e, it has logic, and definite rules. (Even if it's users don't know or understand these rules) And it should definitely be incredibly dangerous. When I think about how dangerous it is to let dwarves have children, it demands that magic be an order of magnitude more risky.  It's a difficult balance to strike though. On one side, you have magic being something you can master through understanding it's laws to the point of nullifying risk. I don't think this is the way, as it removes the mystery, and I feel that that risk is an absolute necessity to keep away from the "magic siege engines" that mages turn into in alot of rpg environments. However it needs to avoid being TOO risky, because that would turn it into a pandora's box that no one uses in earnest need, but rather just to see what will happen. To summarize, magic needs to be dangerous, but not too dangerous to be useful.

I also really like the idea (if I understand you correctly) of a plane of existence which is entirely constructed from it's observers perspectives. The possibilities are endless. I could have hours of fun sending my most insane dwarves there to twist it into some horrible vision of hell resembling M.C Escher's cheese-induced nightmares.

[Scoops Novel]

*points to Kohaku's thread, unless you've got ideas relevant to the topic*