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Author Topic: Increasing civ culture by basing engravings on gods/national image  (Read 1439 times)

a52

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A lot of the artwork in various civilizations can be fairly similar, especially in sites of the same biome where flora/fauna is identical. Sites will have some individuality due to engravings of gods/historical events, but engravings of gods can be rare and the historical events often are not very interesting.

One way to give civilizations/sites more personality would be to base the likelihood of basic images off of things like national image and popular gods of the civ. For example, if a popular god of the fortress was a Rakust Gubellòr, capybara god of torture, misery, and suicide, engravings or statues of capybaras, death, or weapons would be much more likely to show up -- not just artwork of Rakust himself. Similarly, if the national image included diamonds, triangles, and tree frogs, all those things would also be more likely to appear in artwork, as well as the image itself.

This is something that appeared in the art real-world ancient cultures; the images of the ancient Egyptians featured not only the jackal god Anubis himself, but lots and lots of ordinary jackals. And despite not being necessarily what might be considered a god in DF, the salmon appears everywhere in Chinook art. Having common images for every civilization would increase the sense of identity each nation had, as well as making goblin invasions even scarier when they're marching at you with the blood and flames of their demon god emblazoned on their shields.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Increasing civ culture by basing engravings on gods/national image
« Reply #1 on: July 31, 2017, 03:58:55 am »

Maybe we'll see more of your suggestion when gods become intrinsically more important (as well as physically literal in high magic settings) in the magic arc to civ's being more concerned to add them into things.

  • Having a abstract list for mythgen/gods would be nice besides from fishing them out of historical figures, as well as being able to sculpt & etch down a scene (sort of like the Nativity, setting, actors & props all present in the abstracted scene) of the creation story that the player or dwarves themselves choose
I will say though, dwarves like so many things that inputting your suggestion would mean that self chosen dwarf artworks would start throwing out heavily preferenced images (they do already but its not exactly overkill) that the likely result on embark with your system between seven dwarves is to just throw everything they like onto 1 image because it can have a unlimited amount of detail.
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