A while ago, when working in the
Improved Farming, Rebooted thread, the discussion turned to how plants even grew underground, and the ultimate solution I sided with was "well, it just has to be magic". Because of that, there was the
Xenosynthesis thread, which involved ways to create magic ecosystems. Because of how this idea revolved around the previously only vaguely-stated notion that we would have regional magic areas (such as "good", "evil", and "savage" areas we have now), I asked a question in the FotF thread about this:
If you are planning on changing the sphere system, how are you planning on changing it? Are you still planning on introducing spheres as a replacement for the simpler Good/Evil Benign/Savage system of biomes, and if so, how far down are you planning on consolidating spheres (since it would be almost impossible to have different biomes and creatures for 128 different spheres)?
Some of the spheres definitely won't matter as much. A sphere is really just a hard-coded concept, something that should be a basic idea that doesn't really need to be moddable, much like "MATERIAL" or "COLOR" (though moddable extensions of spheres could end up happening). If anything, the sphere list is going to grow but the sphere list used for regions in any meaningful way will be smaller. There isn't a specific plan at this point. I'd like to include as many as possible, especially because it aligns with the deities, etc., but realistically many spheres are going to be shafted, with regions that should have a given sphere association moving over to "friend/parent/child" spheres with meaningful region interactions, etc.
Note,
the wiki has a handy reference on the spheres.
So then, boys and girls, here's the game: We play "make up a magical biome".
Using the current magical regions we already have as templates, we should be able to create a sort of list of potential magical regions which are both Fun and coherent. Right now, for example, "Savage" means "there are giant versions of some fierce creatures, and animal men". "Evil" means "undead and mutant/ugly/vicious creatures and worms or eyeballs for grass". "Good" means "candyland creatures and feathers and bubbles for grass".
The goal is to have a dozen or two spheres that are the "major regional spheres" that all have some sort of sane (for certain standards of sane), consistant ecosystem. This means that there should be more than just "fire biome means versions of common animals that are on fire", but how having an almost unlimited source of heat and fire would actually change the biome itself. If there were fire plants that could beat off common deer by simply shooting gouts of flame into their faces if the deer went to eat some of their leaves, what animals would start growing there, instead?
To make for a useful suggestion to Toady, these magic biomes need to have the ideas they represent carried out to their logical conclusions.
For example, in a biome where the grass is made of meat and eyeballs, and the trees are undead it makes little sense for there to be many herbivores, while carnivores would be expected to fare better, especially the bigger carnivores who can actually fight back against all the zombie and skeleton whatevers that will certainly attack them if they choose to spend much time there - hence, you should see a shift of the animal population more towards apex predator populations and away from herbivorous populations (if not eventually having a zombie apocalypse that kills all non-zombie animals).
To give some further extrapolation of this idea:
On the surface, plants use sunlight to power their ecosystems through the use of photosynthesis. Underground, plants would have to take advantage of a different energy source to power their biologies. The cavern ecosystem simply doesn't run on just the scraps of the surface, and it's not really based on chemosynthesis, either. We have floating guts, hungry heads, and amethyst men living in an environment with underground trees whose wood is permanently at the freezing point of water, even years after they have been cut down. We have a clearly magical ecosystem, and that means that these xenomorphic plant and animal systems need a xenosynthetic energy source.
This means, as an ecosystem, magic is the "sunlight" that powers the plants underground. This means bringing the sphere system into the game as a source of magic power. As the game currently has "good" and "evil" and "savage" biomes, it should be possible to have something like a half-dozen to a dozen or more types of different magic "flavors" that can power the ecosystems of underground, as well as the way that evil biomes already exist aboveground. This means that in the cavern systems, there would be some magical fields that might apply to only one or two levels of the caverns per embark tile. The surface might have evil alignment in the northern mountains, and savage alignment in the southern jungle, while the first cavern might have a "dreams" sphere alignment in the north and a lack of any magical influence in the south, the second cavern might have "dreams" up north again, while the south has "duty" as a sphere. In the third caverns, "darkness" and "blight" might have hold. (And the HFS has a sphere all its own, potentially with some HFS "plantlife" made of living glass tendrils that slice at passerby.) Each of these spheres has their own associated life forms that live in their niches, making the strange yet colorful underground worlds actually vary from place to place like the surface biomes do already.
Writing this now, in the wake of 31.19, however, there is a big opportunity for changing the way that plants and animals in general work. Metals have already been made rare, but plants are always available in the same varieties (excepting only the sphere-aligned ones, and even then, you can trade for those sometimes,) and as such, you can pretty much always have full access to infinite supplies of prepared food to sell and the textiles industry, plus a pretty good chance of either glass or ceramics. Stone materials are, of course, always available in functionally infinite quantities anywhere.
Metals and other ores and minerals could be potentially tied to different magical effects. Plenty of iron and flux is a great boon, so maybe the magical fields in areas that are so beneficial are much less beneficial in other areas. You can harvest much more food in magical fields that only occur when you don't have iron and flux in massive quantities. In many fairy tails, cold iron (wrought iron) is a weakness of magical creatures and magic in general. Maybe pig tails or other textile industry products depend on magic fields that are averse to some sort of magical field disruption caused by iron. That way, the abundance of one material creates the absence of another.
Having access to the magic fields for these plants is like having access to sunlight for mundane surface plants. You can't just import a sunberry and start planting them wherever, they need their magic to grow.
There is a limited amount of this magic in the area for them to absorb. Like photosynthetic plants, xenosynthetic plants might have "leaves" of one form or another that tries to grow to the best spots to absorb as much magic as possible, and in the face of competition, may grow weed-like tendencies to try to "shade out" their competition by growing their leaves in the way of the rival xenosynthetic plants by absorbing all the magical flows for themselves, starving the rivals. This means that the same crowding rules for sunlight might be applied to crowding for magic, as well. (Of course, magic plants might just literally up and do battle with one another, suddenly growing flaming vines to smite their planty foes.)
Rather than having a simple magic field that is unchanging like the way that the evil of a region is unchanging now, or even the way that rainfall is unchanging in a region is unchanging, dwarves could perform some actions that could raise or lower the different magical sphere factors in their environments.
This means the presence of unburied/unmemorialized dead can raise the "death" sphere of the place, causing more haunting, and also changing the environment to have death-sphere-related flora and fauna, as well. Zombies could be powered by a strong death sphere influence, as could corpse berries or the like.
While it is possible for artifacts to cause a general change in the magic of the area around them, it is somewhat problematic to have actual physical objects create magical effects, since you could just move them some place when you want a magical field to be applied, and then try to find some way to just move that artifact (or turn off its effect) in order to have very direct control over magic.
Of course, having a "source of magic" like a crystal glass statue that you can't move, but can shatter if you so choose could be a fairly viable strategy. In the caverns, a strange ruin built around a crystal glass statue could be discovered, and around it, magical plants of great value and rarity are grown, but so too are dangers to your fort. You can try to exploit this ruin's wealth, or shatter that statue and kill the magic, just to be safe. Who knows if the powers of the statue will change if you drink too deep of the powers of this unknown magical artifact, and why did the previous culture fall into ruins, anyway? Well, obviously, it's risky, but just taking a LITTLE won't hurt, right? Wow, that worked out fine! How about a little more, then...
Other sources of magic might be an open portal to another world or dimension. This may not necessarily be a crossable portal (from this side), but it would mean that players would have little they could do about the portal, except maybe try to close it, if that were possible, by going through it and closing it from the other side. The HFS could be a portal, itself, if it is not literally meant to be directly below the magma sea.
The flora and fauna of the region absorb the magic, but it is also possible to have some of the flora and fauna also generate some of the magical energy in the area. Something like a corpse bloom might grow when there is plenty of death in the area, and if left alone, may gradually add some death magic into the area, which might be consumed (dropping the area magic power) by other creatures, like zombies. Zombies would then need to have access to that death magic, and not be able to leave the area of their death magic without gradually growing "hungry" for that death magic, and the zombie will fall apart if they do not have death magic to sustain them. Hence, they can only make some temporary forays into the areas not covered by the death magic. Of course, if they can find and murder a living creature, and desecrate its corpse in a way that adds death magic to the area, they can sustain themselves on the death magic they have released, and maybe spread their death sphere so that more corpse blooms grow in the area.
Conversely, some sort of Memento Morii Morninglory might be planted that could still the dead, and drop the area death magic, so that if you were being attacked by zombies, then, like with pests, you could plant something that actively drained the death magic from the area, depriving the zombies from the death magic they need to "survive" upon. That might even work to repel zombies and such entirely, since they may have an instinctive aversion to even trying to go into areas that have those flowers that weaken their ability to sustain themselves (although they will pursue a living being they see run into that area, they won't go exploring that area on their own).
A pest might even have magical properties. A ghast fly swarm might be attracted to corpses just lying around a battlefield unburied or otherwise removed from the open air. The ghast flies would then generate death magic that could raise some of those dead goblin soldiers on your doorstep to become goblin zombies. Only by ensuring that you have the means to repel some ghast flies can you ensure that death doesn't visit your doorstep with return visitors. Releasing spiders to catch and kill the flies would stop them from being able to raise the death magic levels enough to raise zombies, as would simply burying the goblin invaders in a shallow mass grave.
So, then, I hope that, like the artifacts suggestions, we can have a decent list of suggestions for magical biome types for Toady to browse when he actually gets around to writing the new magical regions/biomes.
I'll make a list, here, of what I would see off the bat as a set of decent "category" spheres that their "friend" spheres are hangers-on to... Also, I'll try to make some "opposites", like the way that Good and Evil are opposite, while things like "Savage" are unrelated to other alignments. Of course, don't get hung up on this idea, and go for whatever you guys think makes for a fun sphere. It should just be a decent starting point.
Instead of having a dualist system (one versus its diametric opposite), however, we can also have a stand-off between multiple spheres - for example, day and night oppose, but twilight and morning stand between the two extremes. (This might be resolved by having a "are any of these powerful" metric, and then having a "which one of these is the most powerful" metric, so that not all terrain becomes one of those spheres.)
- Mortality versus Immortality/Undeath (I do this because I can't really see "life" as opposing "death", so it's sort of "the cycle of life and death" versus the stuff that go beyond/against that sphere. Hence, birth, death, eating other creatures, being "eaten" by parasitic disease all fall under "life" as a sphere.)
- Mortality - Birth, death, fertility, family, marriage, disease, pregnancy, children, youth, food, fishing, fish, hunting, animals, plant, trees, seasons
- Immortality - Longevity, rebirth, dreams, nightmares (also undead, if there is such a sphere)
- Light versus Twilight versus Dark (Light and dark as in the difference between having a lightbulb on or not, not as in good versus evil, which is its own dualism.)
- Light - Light, Day, Sun
- Twilight - Twilight, Dawn, Dusk, Boundaries, Balance
- Dark - Darkness, Night, Moon, Stars
- Order versus Chaos (Ah, good ol'Lawful Stupid debates, how I miss the arguments over what constituted "chaotic behavior" or not.
Anyway, in the tradition of "Law versus Chaos" that extends back to the Ring of Nibelungen, chaos means "emotion" or "freedom" in this sense, instead of "destroy everything", which is what Destruction is for.) - Order - Order, discipline, fortresses, duty, fate, laws, thralldom, rulership, justice
- Chaos - Chaos, gambling, games, freedom, depravity, luck, travellers
- Creation versus Destruction (Creation as in "making a craft", but also healing... kind of blurring the lines, there, and destruction also wound up with fire, partly because I couldn't find a better place for it.)
- Creation - Creation, crafts, art, painting, inspiration, healing, peace
- Destruction - War, Fortresses, murder, revenge, suicide, torture, strength, fire
- Truth versus Trickery
- Truth - Truth, oaths, loyalty
- Trickery - Trickery, lies, persuasion, rumors, treachery
- Beauty versus Deformity (These spheres have an odd prevalence for very subjective spheres)
- Beauty - beauty, dance, love, lust
- Deformity - deformity, blight, muck
- Land, Sea, and Skies (The Greek male god trio... seems to fit much better than the tired fire versus water and air versus earth crap that gets shoveled into everything, and there are many more spheres that fit more cleanly in like this, anyway. You could probably also call this "Earth, Heaven, and the Deep" if you wanted to be more artsy and dramatic.)
- Land - caverns, earth, mountains, metal, minerals, volcanos, salt
- Sea - Oceans, rivers, lakes, water, coasts
- Sky - Sky, lightning, thunder, rain, rainbows, wind, weather, storms, mist
- Wealth versus Charity (Or Greed instead of wealth, but you get the idea, it's selfish emotions versus altruistic emotions. Again, more emotion-related spheres.)
- Wealth - wealth, jewels, labor, jealousy
- Charity - charity, forgiveness, consolation, generosity, hospitality, mercy, sacrifice
- Joy versus Misery (Kind of had no better places to put these...)
- Joy - Happiness, Festivals, Revelry
- Misery - Misery
- Knowledge (Finally at the stuff that doesn't have an opposite. There's no "stupidity" sphere, but presumably, that's because it's everywhere there isn't a knowledge sphere. That, or the god of stupidity locked himself into his own aquarium by building the window from the wrong side, and drowned himself.)
- Knowledge - Wisdom, scholarship, writing, poetry
- Sound versus Silence (Quite a few sound-related spheres for a game with no real sound support.)
- Sound - Speech, song, music
- Silence - Silence
- Glory (Sort of the oddballs that didn't really fit anywhere else. I almost made this an "honor" category to play off "direct glory hog heroes" versus "sneaky trickster heroes", but throwing lies versus truth seems more what some of those spheres were for.)
- Glory - Victory, fame, valor, courage, strength
Anyway, this is what I came up with about a month ago, before Toady came along and decided "Death" meant "Undead". I find that kind of wierd, since you have to kill the undead, and "Death" should mean "you
stay in your grave". I'd actually rather expect that a Death god should be the person you turn to when you want to
stop an undead army.
Niyazov said it well, here:
While I'm not generally a big fan of the Elder Scrolls mythology, I thought that they came up with a pretty good solution for the whole if-the-dead-come-back-to-life-they-will-outnumber-the-living problem that fantasy worlds with necromancers in them run into:
In the Elder Scrolls universe, the god Arkay is the patron god of the natural life cycle. Priests of Arkay will travel to regions where necromancers are creating lots of undead. The priests evangelize and spread Arkay's Law, which is basically a set of proper burial practices that permanently prevent reanimation. Thus, Arkay is venerated and his law is strongly observed in areas that have formerly had problems with necromancy. However, as the evils of necromantic magic fade from living memory, people lose their faith in Arkay because he really doesn't do very much for people who are alive when compared to other gods and daedra (quasi-demonic entities). Observance of Arkay's law gradually lapses and necromancers move back in, causing the cycle to repeat itself.
Toady has stated that necromantic magic will originate from gods associated with the death sphere. It makes sense that other gods from opposing spheres such as SPHERE_YOUTH or SPHERE_FERTILITY would introduce something to ameliorate the uncontrolled expansion of necromancy. Even death gods do not necessarily have to approve of necromancy; in DF terms, Arkay would actually fit within the death sphere but overlaps with the lifecycle spheres. Since necromancy interrupts the natural order, Arkay opposes it and is therefore a benign death god rather than a malevolent one.
In any event, I want to post this while it still seems like Toady is playing around with the ideas.
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Topic: Organizing the Spheres (Read 12868 times)