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Author Topic: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses  (Read 7014 times)

Usul

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[44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« on: January 25, 2018, 06:27:36 am »


Fear of the Dark
I am a man who walks alone...



What's that?


I apologize in advance for the wall of text, I'm not a native english speaker but I just can't help it.

Fear of the Dark started as an update of the Fear the Night mod by Xangi for my personal use. Since then it has grown into something a little bigger as I added several features. The mod's focus was (and still is) to add better and more diverse night creatures and offer harder fights. A quick warning though : if you played Xangi's mod, please don't expect this one to be just an update and keep everything untouched. I changed a lot, for both balance and my-mod-now reasons.

The mod still isn't that balanced (not that the base game is any better, DF wasn't made for balance anyway), but I feel like it's at least playable and probably ‼FUN‼ as well.

So what exactly does this mod add, you ask?


New Vampires


Cursed by a god to prowl the night in search of blood, these are significantly stronger than vanilla vampires while not having all of their advantages. As always, you can become a vampire by drinking the blood of one, but there are others ways...

The mod adds three tiers of vampires :
  • master vampires : the strongest and fastest of all, they also benefits from all the immunities vanilla undead have. They can transform into giant bats, give themselves a temporary buff of speed and agility, paralyse targets with only a stare or make an entire group dizzy with just a scream
  • elder vampires : less powerful than the master vampires, but still way stronger than human beings. There are three kinds, each having different powers :
    • Canine : transform into a wolf, buff to speed and agility
    • Feline : transform into a panther, scream can disorient foes
    • Avian : transform into an owl, can inflict nausea upon targets with a stare
  • minor vampires : quite weak compared to the higher tiers but still stronger than vanilla vampires, they lack several undead immunities. There are three types, again with different abilities:
    • speed : lesser speed bonus
    • stealth : slightly stronger and more agile
    • transformation : can transform into a rat


Stronger Werebeasts


Also the cursed result of a god's wrath, they behave mostly like the vanila ones except that you are free to transform whenever you feel like it (you still turn at full moons, I think that's a nice touch). The werebeasts are also bigger and stronger than in vanilla and very resistant to all metals except one.
  • werewolves : the size of a yeti, they are fast and weak to silver :
    • red werewolves : can become berzerk, stronger human form, sharper claws but both human and wolf form are very weak to silver
    • white werewolves : weaker human form weaker but stronger and faster wolf form
    • brow werewolves : high recuperation
  • werebears : the biggest and meanest, they are powerful and weak to copper :
    • polar werebear : bigger and stronger but slower
    • grizzly werebear : can rage, sharper claws
  • werescorpions : because why not? They can attack with their tails and are weak to bronze :
    • non venomous : not venomous (surprising, I know), larger and more powerful attacks than the other one
    • venomous : slightly weaker but venomous
  • werelizards : more or less equals of the werewolves in size, they have sharper claws and are weak to iron :
    • werelizards : stronger, even sharper claws
    • werechameleon : a lot weaker, they are supposed to become invisible but it doesn't work anymore since a recent DF update. They are pretty useless, don't be one of them

Diversity in Necromancy


Like in vanilla, they learn their powers from gods or books and live in towers. Unlike vanilla, they can do other things than animating undeads. There are currently three types, I'm trying to make each of them unique but it's still a work in progress :
  • dark sorcerers: the closest to vanilla necromancers, they have spells debuffing their foes.
  • infernomancers : transformed permanently into a platinum shelled creature, they can use fire to destroy their ennemis. Their zombies are on fire
  • liches : very hard to kill, can fly, weaker undeads


Real curses


Unlike in vanilla where being cursed by a god is a good thing for an adventurer, the mod adds a number of "bad curses". You can still save-scum near a temple to get the vampire you want, but you'll find yourself reloading a lot because your adventurer has been turned into a goat or otherwise incapacitated.


Mummies a little more forgiving


Rather than cursing you with a permanent chance to fail a random action, these ones avenge the profanation of their tombs by trying to kill you and making a better job of it.
  • draugrs : can freeze their foes and throw ice spears. Zombies are frozen
  • tomb lords : covered in gold, they are skilled fighters
  • wights: cannot raise the dead but hard to kill


Night trolls everywhere


The mod replace vanilla's night trolls by its own creatures. They behave very much like vanilla night trolls, hiding in cave and lairs and turning random people into more of them. Drinking their blood gives you small bonuses. Some are fairly weak by the mod's standards, others are stronger. The majority of them shouldn't be a trouble for a semi-competent adventurer.

There is also a special kind of night troll that is also a kind of vampire and whose bite can turn you into a minor vampire.


Bogeymen you will fear


Because the name of the mod isn't just a Maiden reference. :)

But seriously, the vanilla bogeymen that an experienced adventurer can roll over are (mostly) gone. Scary creatures will appear among more vanilla ones and you should avoid traveling alone in the dark if you aren't sure of your abilities.

If you feel like trying anyway, some of these bogeymen carry within themselves the secrets of a random form of necromancy and may give them to you. Not without having a honest try at killing you, but you know what they say : with great risks come great rewards. And an even greater death, most of the time.


Megabeasts to add to the ‼FUN‼


  • Ancient Vampire : More powerful than any other creature in the mod, they are primal beasts knowing only the thirst for blood. Their bite carry the master vampire curse.
  • Vampire Lords : A more civilised version of the above, their bite can quickly drain you of your blood but also turn you into an elder vampire.
  • Golems : Ancients beings formed of rocks animated by some unknown force, they are rumored to be impossible to overpower. Quick  thinking is the key when pitted against a seemingly invincible opponent...


More crafts


Because slaughtering countless creatures just isn't that fun if you can't make trophies out of it, the mod allows you to create useful tools but also primitive weapons and armours from the bones of your ennemies. You can also make accessories out of horn, teeth and shells, much like vanilla allows you to make those out of bones.


Installing the mod


First you need to download the mod (here).

Installing a mod for Dwarf Fortress isn't that hard most of the time, you just need to copy the "data" and "raw" folders into your main DF folder (where the game is). Having done that you need to create a new world. The mod comes with customs worldgens optimized for it, but you can use your owns if you want, just remember to set the number of vampires, werebeasts, necromancers and night trolls to 0 and the number of bogeymen to 1 (not 0, 1 is needed for this part of the mod to work correctly).

Known issues

Because you just have to have those. :)
  • the ability of some vampires and werebeasts to turn invisible isn't working properly
  • You cannot make crafts out of an intelligent creature's corpse. It's a vanilla bug.

This is just a list of bugs that I know of. If you find one that isn't listed (or any issue, really, even if you're not sure it's a bug), please post about it in this thread. I play with the mod, but I can still miss issues for a long time if they just don't come into my attention. Also if something about the mod is unclear, please ask about it.

Spoiler: Changelog (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: January 26, 2018, 07:15:32 am by Usul »
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GM-X

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures
« Reply #1 on: January 25, 2018, 03:56:45 pm »

For the record, Fear of the Night has been completely overhauled with permission and input from Xangi in Dark Ages.
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Xangi

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures
« Reply #2 on: January 25, 2018, 07:46:02 pm »

Do whatever with it, I was actually doing this same thing today. Enough people have grabbed bits and pieces of the mod over the last few years that it doesn't matter anyways. As with any mod I've made for other games, I don't believe in restricting use for any reason.

*Back to the void, wooooooo*
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Previous mod (34.11):
<<Fear The Night!>>
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=103747.0

Enemy post

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures
« Reply #3 on: January 25, 2018, 07:59:03 pm »

I'm happy to see this revived, I liked this mod.
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GM-X

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures
« Reply #4 on: January 25, 2018, 08:05:22 pm »

Do whatever with it, I was actually doing this same thing today. Enough people have grabbed bits and pieces of the mod over the last few years that it doesn't matter anyways. As with any mod I've made for other games, I don't believe in restricting use for any reason.

*Back to the void, wooooooo*

You been hiding in the wings all these years! Wooow.
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Usul

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures
« Reply #5 on: January 26, 2018, 07:13:30 am »

Do whatever with it, I was actually doing this same thing today. Enough people have grabbed bits and pieces of the mod over the last few years that it doesn't matter anyways. As with any mod I've made for other games, I don't believe in restricting use for any reason.

*Back to the void, wooooooo*

Wow, I didn't think you were actually still active. Now I feel a little reckless, but I guess it's a bit late for that.

I absolutely loved your mod, it's what drove me to learn DF modding! Does that mean you are planning to update Fear the Night?

For the record, Fear of the Night has been completely overhauled with permission and input from Xangi in Dark Ages.

Nice, I didn't know that. Now I'm curious to see what you came up with, I'll definitely try it. :)

Dark Ages feels like a big change from vanilla though. One thing I liked about the original mod was that it was modular and could be used with other mods.
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Xangi

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #6 on: January 26, 2018, 05:31:51 pm »

Wow, I didn't think you were actually still active. Now I feel a little reckless, but I guess it's a bit late for that.

I absolutely loved your mod, it's what drove me to learn DF modding! Does that mean you are planning to update Fear the Night?
Don't feel bad at all, but you'll have a bit more trouble porting this than you might imagine. USAGE_HINT:FLEEING is currently broken so all regeneration and werebeast transformations need to be reworked entirely. I'm not updating FTN, but depending I might do a sort of "re-imagining" of it. DF modding, especially for adventure mode, is an art of compromising with partially broken/missing features to make something that's actually playable, which is one of the reasons I haven't gotten back into it. Perhaps DFHack can help me do something the way I want to, but honestly I'm probably just going to hold off until the adventure mode AI is more sane and things like CE_ADD_TAG support more options. Ideally I'd also like to have more transformation flexibility and partial transformation, but at that point I might as well just make my own game or something.

Anyways, have fun. I'm usually very busy IRL with work and stuff but if you continue with this I look forward to seeing how it pans out. I actually came up with almost the exact same set of "bad" curses you did in my own thing, so maybe you'll come up with the solutions I'm envisioning to the other major issues.
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Previous mod (34.11):
<<Fear The Night!>>
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=103747.0

Usul

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #7 on: January 26, 2018, 05:40:32 pm »

Quote
Don't feel bad at all, but you'll have a bit more trouble porting this than you might imagine. USAGE_HINT:FLEEING is currently broken so all regeneration and werebeast transformations need to be reworked entirely. I'm not updating FTN, but depending I might do a sort of "re-imagining" of it. DF modding, especially for adventure mode, is an art of compromising with partially broken/missing features to make something that's actually playable

Trust me, I know that. 40.01 broke a lot of things (the speed change was a big nerf for vampires, for one) but I'm mostly happy with how things are at the moment.

This version is actually complete already, everything has been updated and/or reworked and I made quite a lot of balance changes. I also added some creatures, reactions and moved around the existing ones (mostly so the semi-megabeasts wouldn't die in the first years of worldgen).
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hertggf

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #8 on: January 28, 2018, 10:53:39 pm »

looks very interesting, ptw
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Usul

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #9 on: January 31, 2018, 02:54:32 pm »

I'm thinking of adding summoners. Here are my plans:

Summoners:
They are a kind of necromancer specializing in demon summoning. Demon summoning is a difficult and dangerous art and it should reflect in the way they are played. The summoning ritual has to obey strict rules and will have a small chance of going wrong to follow the chaotic theme of these guys. Demons will be companions with all the implied advantages compared to undeads and will give bonuses to the summoner depending on the type of demon.

The ritual:
The basis of the ritual is using souls to pay for a specific kind of demon. The first step will be to use a power "Extract soul from a deceased creature" on a corpse. The targeted corpse will be turned into a sacrifice for a few turns (the rationale being that its soul is being sucked away, but it's really just a creature meant to die quickly). When the extraction is done (i.e the sacrifice is dead), you must butcher the resulting corpse and get a charged core. Then you'll need to use the reaction make soul (under the menu create) in Summoning. It will create a soul which you can store in your backpack or whatever. Note that for technical reasons souls disappear when in contact with water. Let's just say water is the element of life and purity and can dissolve your evil magic and move on.

Those souls are then used to make scrolls in the reactions under Summoning->make scroll. Performing the reaction will give you the ability to summon a demon using a corpse as a conduct. Note that depending on your luck the ability may not appear immediately but you will learn it in the few turns following the reaction.For other technical reasons you must not be wearing gloves when performing the reaction in order for it to work. Unfortunately I don't have a way to turn that into lore. Demon's costs range from 5 souls for the lower tier demons to 70 for the higher tiers. As that means keeping a lot of souls with you I also added a way to fuse souls into bigger souls (so 10 small souls can be fused into one soul which counts for 10 of them). You can currently have souls of sizes 1, 10 and 50.

Now you can summon a demon into this realm, but it doesn't mean it will automatically follow your orders, it may even want to kill you. You'll need to get it to stop attacking you and follow you using the standard conversation options (like any companion). Demons are made to be prone to accept invitations so convincing them shouldn't be too hard.

That's it for the ritual. For the lazy or desperate there is a second ability called "Open an unsafe portal" which targets a dead sacrifice. It will summon a random demon with a chance of failure and a high chance of it being hostile. Demons summoned this way won't give summoners their bonus.

Demons and bonuses:
As I said earlier, demon grant their masters a unique buff depending on the type of demon. In general higher ranked demons give better bonuses but they are pretty diverse so you may want to keep a low tier demon if you like what it gives. A summoner without any link to a demon suffers from a small debuff, but nothing too serious.

Here is a complete list of demons along with their abilities and costs:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)


And that's all. I've got mostly working summoners, but I'm still figuring out the costs and I need to test them so it'll be some time before I can release them. Everything is still subject to change, so if anyone wants to chime in feel free.
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MottledPetrel

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #10 on: January 31, 2018, 03:46:12 pm »

I thought that the demons were supposed to give you a buff, why do the tier four demons give some serious debuffs? Also, are the ritual and summoning skills going to be a secret that you have to find?
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Usul

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #11 on: January 31, 2018, 04:00:42 pm »

That's because they are so powerful. There really is a gap between the tiers, the lower demons are good enough against bandits but the last three are pretty much megabeasts.

Summoning will be a secret, yes. NPC summoners will mostly use the random demon ability, though.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2018, 05:59:25 pm by Usul »
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MottledPetrel

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #12 on: January 31, 2018, 06:48:07 pm »

I personally think that there should be a few more lower demons, maybe even something that only costs one, an animated soul orb of sorts that only functions as a living distraction created to be sent on a suicide rush against enemies. Even without that, it feels like a bit much to jump from a little chaos runner to something that has steel weapons for body parts in only one tier. Plus, as a whole you could in theory just strangle 68 gophers, steal their souls, and then summon a mega beast companion. Maybe you should make it so that souls have to come from sentient creatures or something, to even it out.
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Usul

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #13 on: February 01, 2018, 09:34:50 am »

I could add some low tier demons. The first tier is the only one with only two summons and I agree they do feel a little underwhelming. Demons are meant to quickly become powerful though. That's needed as summoners have no ways of matching the raw power of other creatures of the mod like liches and infernomancers, not to mention vampires and werebeasts who are even stronger.

I'll definitely change the soul extraction to require a sentient creature, I completely forgot about that.
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squamous

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Re: [44.05] Fear of the Dark : better night creatures and curses
« Reply #14 on: December 08, 2018, 03:16:38 pm »

Sorry to necro, but how exactly did you get non-procgenned werebeasts to spread their curse during worldgen? In my own attempts to make unique werebeasts, I can't get them to infect others, only kill them. Posting in public here instead of a DM because someone else might have the same question and could find it here.
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