Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Neonivek]

I really do have to object that Cacame is 100% off-topic. There's just no way that this discussion assists in "Working through Medieval stasis"

It was used as an example of all the races being essentially the same and thus the topic is superfluous. Afterall if a "Elf" in a dwarven society is EXACTLY like a dwarf in everyway except taller and with pointy ears... then there are no true differences.

Thus relevant

[NW_Kohaku]

So long as there are many other ways of performing magic and there's always an alternative, i don't see why not. If magic is completely and utterly corralled down and reliable, then it's indistinguishable from science, and magic a can remain magic a while having the opportunity to go magic 8 and hope for the best. Magic is not reliable, magic is holding a blade without the hilt, and we need to have that remembered in the game. Inevitably, there are going to be situations where magic is your only shot. You should have control over that, but if you're relying solely on magic to get things done then you messed up in the first place. The example i gave could be affected, sure, it could be manipulated, or you can throw caution to the winds and hope that you're security protocols suffice bearing in mind that's it's probably suicide. In other words, the act itself was stupid, not the results, and you can learn from that.

Well, again, I'm trying to point magic in two directions, here...

Contract Magic is not reliable because it's controlled by something with a will.  That is, you can get divine magic that gives you better harvests by praying to the harvest god or your soldiers might have a blessing from the war goddess that makes their attacks magically more accurate or powerful.  Elves can get the magic of the forest spirit by behaving in the manner prescribed by the forest spirit (which is why their lives are dominated by their druidistic religion worshiping the forest spirit), but as soon as they go against the will of the forest spirit, they are stripped of their magic. 

This means that magic is dependent upon keeping the particular giver of that magic happy, and they are only willing to give as good as they get in return.  It's always either subject to the whims of a fickle spirit or god or has some sort of ritual contract to fulfill. 

Toady has also said in the past that while he doesn't particularly want to have magic ending up with fire-sword-factories, he's also not completely opposed to the prospect, if that's how the magic system turns out.  (That might be an old DF Talk, though, a quick search didn't turn it up immediately...)

I don't think a pseudo-magical alchemy is out of the question.  After all, we can already use nether cap wood as functional refrigerators, it's just that the mechanics around temperature aren't clear enough to make everything relating to temperature make sense yet. 

Who's to say that at some point, we can't get devices that involve automatically-cooling nether cap wood and some sort of heat-generating material that can have sliding insulation in order to set a specific temperature in a chamber?  It's just the natural application of an already-predictable magical device.  And the magic crops of the underground are already pretty magical and can be grown reliably.  And the magical creatures of the caverns can be tamed and raised and even lay eggs reliably.  And the cotton candy can be reliably and controllably processed. And the necromancy and vampirism and were-creature magic in the game already are reliable and predictable... 

Face it, precedent is more on the side of reliable magic than against it, and I don't think too many people are complaining that farming magic cave wheat (that clearly isn't a mushroom and grows without the sun...) doesn't suddenly produce unpredictable effects like making people who drink dwarven beer grow a second head.

And that brings me to the second path of magic I've been pushing: Xenosynthesis, which is an extension of the notion of farming being a manipulation of an ecosystem rather than a factory for food.  Magic in xenosynthesis means that in a magically-infused ecosystem, some plants and animals naturally "eat" the magic in the area or "produce" magic of their own accord, and letting creatures live or killing those creatures will inherently change the amount of magic in the area. 

This would be a "predictable" type of magic to a very limited degree. Good biomes have predictable effects, for example, like bubble grass and fairies, while evil biomes have somewhat predictable effects with skeletal creatures and the like. You can see and predict the amount of "evil magic" in an area. You can even know what will happen when you release more evil magic into an area. 

However, it's not really all that controllable.  Just like how you can predict what will happen when you leave a forest alone, or you can predict what will happen if you clear-cut a forest and let the soil erode until it becomes like a desert, you can know what the consequences of your actions will be, but you can't really control those consequences very easily. 

Hence, farming or breeding or destroying magic-consuming or magic-releasing plants, animals, or even crystal formations or the like can have somewhat predictable results. Shattering the evil-releasing crystal may remove the blight of evil in a biome, for example, but so could slaying all the foul blendecs if they are actually responsible for the spread of the evil biome.  Hence, a quest might be to reclaim a portion of forest that has turned evil by slaying all the foul blendecs that make the forest evil.  Alternately, breeding tons of fluffy wamblers into the area might consume all the evil and change the area from evil to neutral (or eventually even good).

The two types of magic (contract and xenosynthesis) can also blend if we have the spirits that guide contract magic have agendas for spreading their own spheres and biomes.  If a god of death wants to see the evil biomes spread, then its death magic will be at your disposal for as long as you perpetually push the evil biomes forward, corrupting the land for your dark master in exchange for a taste of his power.  However, the payment is actually measured - you don't get infinite necromancy for just spreading an evil biome by slaying good creatures or something, you get a specific, set number of spells to cast or a specific, set number of days you can cast that magic for each time you spread the evil magic biome a specific, set number of world tiles.  (Of course, the murder god can always set limits to the contract, and change the terms when it comes time to re-negotiate, and skills relating to negotiation may or may not actually be very crucial for a wizard in this system...)

This, I think, would be the easiest way to balance the notion of a not-industrializable magic and not having "LOL RANDUM!" magic that will turn most players off from the whole thing. (To a certain extent, I think the problem many magic threads have is that a large number of people who comment on magic threads honestly don't even want magic for the players at all.  That is, frankly, obviously not what Toady wants, but also somewhat of a difficult position to negotiate with, as it tends to mean that other players can't have something they might want because someone doesn't want any sort of playable magic...  Remember that we're supposed to have wizard towers at some point, and have reasonably controllable magic at some point. The wizards in Cado's Magical Journey obviously had at least some idea what they were doing, as their magic generally only was backfiring because someone else was using reliable magic to force it to backfire.  If there's a magic model to follow there, it seems to be closer to Magic: The Gathering than anything else...)

[NW_Kohaku]

Back on topic, what do people see the "starting point" of worldgen as? If you really want to model everything, you could have the very first mountainhome no more than a bunch of dwarves in a cave, hunting and foraging, with just a campfire to keep warm. Through foraging for food, they could gradually learn how to cultivate crops:

<Plant gathering> -> <seeds growing around middens> -> <gather re-grown plants> -> IDEA <plant crops>

Separately, hunting could lead to domestication:

<hunting wild animals> -> <control wild herds> -> <domesticate species>

Later, it would be nice if the farmers gradually learned to plow their fields, and eventually, it lead to using animals to plow fields & fertilize fields.

Civilization clearly already exists at worldgen. There's just no way for anything different to really make sense. 

The world seems to be "created" En Median Res, where at year 0, a fully-fledged city with humans and elves and dwarves fully-clothed and with jobs as woodcutters and glassblowers is just zapped down onto the land. 

Basically, pure Creationism that starts the world at the Bronze Age. 

Part of Toady's old dev logs includes making the Age of Myth (start of the worldgen) very different from the Golden Age and Age of Man and such, where magic would presumably be much more rare.

Some of the power goals imply that Toady wants the Age of Myth to be a time when Gods walk the land, and creatures are aligned with their spheres and have magical powers related to them, and player-adventurers can be champions of those gods.  (The effects of which would be most related to what I was discussing earlier about contract magic...)

[SirHoneyBadger]

I'd like the choice of Fortress locality (StE spots, if you will), to be a matter of what kind of game you'd like to play, not how much game you want to have access to.

I've got a lot of ideas about magic-that-is-science, and magic-that-is-not-science, and science-that-is-not-our-science, for that matter, and I really like the idea of there being a lot of choice, and consequence, here as well, but where you might see different types of magic playing off of each other, and conflicting, and just adding to the uniqueness and trade-worthiness of game Entities. 

NW_Kohaku's contract magic is intriguing, because it offers one idea of performing mystical  quests, for beings with the ability to grant magical power, after you've already established yourself enough in the "material world" that money and titles no longer have the same meaning, or maybe just when you're that desperate. It could be like entering into a higher dimension of trade, where souls are the currency of the realm. Where earning your reward might cost you something of yourself, while failure might cost you literally everything.


Xenosynthesis (also by NW_Kohaku) is the idea of extracting magic from magic beings by alchemy. This is something that could be moded directly into the game as-is (kill and butcher a dragon, obtain "essence of dragon", mix and match it with dangerous poisons, apply to sword, make dragon-sword, profit!). It can be done already, has been done in atleast limited fashion already that I'm aware, and mostly only needs maybe some slight refinement (or not, someone might have a great mod out already on this) and enough causes (beasts to capture or slay) and effects.

It could certainly add to the reward for capturing beasts over killing them (and the challenge is ofcourse greater), or finding/trading for, and then growing plants, and give direct incentive for adding lots of such beasts/plants, and lots of effects. I just am having a knee-jerk wariness of this turning into a "gotta catch 'em all" scenario.

Maybe if elves only had access to magic plants, while goblins got beastly humours* and dwarfs got alchemical salts, and gnomes got gems--because gnomes really need a hook--and maybe kobolds somehow collected their power from the possessions of others--like they can't use just any gold crown to cast a spell, they need the diadem of an actual queen to make a cap of glamours, or a merchant baron's shoes to make seven-league boots--and maybe everyone could brew magic plants into potion-ales, or healing-spirits, or what have you, while elves could harness the plant effects directly, and more potently--then it might give some interesting incentive for trade, since if you kill all the goblins (or if you let the goblins kill all the examples of a magic species), then you can't have your dwarfs make dragon-swords anymore, and have to settle for bramble-berry baselards, from the damn silly elves. 

I'd suggest though that this be a very rare thing, like the old dungeon master dwarfs being able to tame giant spiders. There might only be a single member of a given society who is allowed to do this type of magic per geographical area (and she's only allowed a bare minimum of apprentices, maybe 3 tops, and they're either all of them slaves, or all royals), to keep the secrets safe.


Necromancy, on the other hand, which is already in the game, I'd like to use as a force equivalent to the Diskworld creatures in the Dungeon Dimensions (all credit to PTerry), where necromancy, and the undead, are on the side opposite of both good AND evil, or the Dark Side in Star Wars, where the power offered is the power to "break the natural order". So, you might get power, and eternal life, and unstoppable armies, but you're getting these things from powers that want to break the universe, or that just break it anyway, because their very presence is so alien to everything else (thanks, Lovecraft!), and you're putting out a giant neon welcome sign made from C'thulhu-candy.   

So, maybe there could be a sort of Ragnarok in the game, after all, but it would represent the ultimate form of losing the game, as a sign that there's no longer any chance of winning, and the gods, demons, elves, goblins, your friends and neighbors, and all the fish in the sea, want to prevent it happening, and are even willing to work together to stop you, because the undead just build and build, and the more necromantic force in the world, the greater the chance that things that are worse than undead--and worse than everything else--will start coming through, and if you allow the undead to build to where there are ultra-liches running around unopposed for too long, they'll start spawning the flying plutonium colossi, and there should be a microscopic chance that every undead in the world could atleast muster up a brain parasite or a hound of tindalos--and these specifically should be critters you *don't* ever want to have to deal with.   

There might be ways of, with difficulty, making undead safe, so that you can occasionally have Great Grandpa Urist McNoHead's haunted armour still defending your Fortress (Rule of Cool), but that might be it's own kind of magic, possibly connected to Morbid moods, or it could just be that there are a few decent Necromancers in the world that the witch hunters haven't burned quite yet--so keep great grandpa away from the windows. 

*pun

[wierd]

Kohaku:

If that's the case, then clearly magic is a finite resource!  If this is the case, but is simply treated like an infinite one-- ("How can scooping a thimble full of water out of the mighty ocean, and destroying it deplete the ocean?" type mindset), then this would produce lots of magic and magic using cultures early, but the waning supply of magic would force those cultures away from it.

It would also make the forest spirits the elves contract with be less and less inclined to grant boons over the ages, as those spirits need to conserve their powers to stay alive, and or-- may require a means of converting something else into the magic they need. This is where ritual really shines.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Maybe one of the ways that magic can be unpredictable and dangerous is through modding any magical being to have a tiny percentage chance of "giving birth" to a set of other beings, many or all of which could be dangerous, in a way that represents the idea that allowing these beings to walk around is destructive to the baseline of the "natural world".

That may not be a bad thing, and you shouldn't need to kill every unicorn you possibly can, just to get some peace and quiet, but there should be the idea that you're living in a world that could become different--and drastically worse--if you don't actively do something about the vampire on your southern border, or the redcap in the abandoned ruins to the north, before they summon other beings like them, or worse than them, one of these years, even if they aren't doing anything now to bother you.

Keeping the unicorns and other beings that represent benign forces, alive, on the other hand, when you could have harvested them for the horns and whatnot, should have the opposite effect, where your world is just a little better overall--even if the murderous unicorns themselves would just as soon stab you in the face.

There's still some jingoism going on here, ofcourse, and the hypocricy is inevitable, but I think the idea of protecting "good" and opposing "evil", and there being choices to be made about taking direct action, and prices to be paid for making those choices, to be a strong enough and valid enough element in fantasy storytelling, that my conscience can suffer a few digital "monsters" to be slain, or saved, in the name of thoughtful entertainment.


Active magic users, like the legendary Wizards in the game, might "summon up" beings fairly rapidly, and could be as dangerous as dragons, as they sort of "build" the equivalent of a goblin seige around themselves. Ofcourse, having a benign one on your side could stop an army of HFS in it's tracks, or take out a Titan that can't otherwise be beaten (enough diamond dogs might eventually pull down even the biggest steel colossus).

[NW_Kohaku]

Xenosynthesis (also by NW_Kohaku) is the idea of extracting magic from magic beings by alchemy. This is something that could be moded directly into the game as-is (kill and butcher a dragon, obtain "essence of dragon", mix and match it with dangerous poisons, apply to sword, make dragon-sword, profit!). It can be done already, has been done in atleast limited fashion already that I'm aware, and mostly only needs maybe some slight refinement (or not, someone might have a great mod out already on this) and enough causes (beasts to capture or slay) and effects.

That's not quite it. 

It's not to do with alchemy, it's to do with ecology that relates to magic.

That is, it's part of the same thread that basically says that farming means you can cause soil erosion that turns a forest into a desert - magic biomes, like good forests, can likewise have their magic eroded or corrupted (or purified) through the actions of the player, whether they understand the consequences of their actions or not.  <Foreboding music here>

The point is, you don't get to see it or control it directly.  Maybe you can use dragon scales to make magic armor, but at the same time, killing that dragon might have unintended consequences to the whole magic "ecology".

Rather than having a chance to create your own golems or something, you instead create more amethyst men out in the wild, and they may be hostile to your fort, for example.

Kohaku:

If that's the case, then clearly magic is a finite resource!  If this is the case, but is simply treated like an infinite one-- ("How can scooping a thimble full of water out of the mighty ocean, and destroying it deplete the ocean?" type mindset), then this would produce lots of magic and magic using cultures early, but the waning supply of magic would force those cultures away from it.

It would also make the forest spirits the elves contract with be less and less inclined to grant boons over the ages, as those spirits need to conserve their powers to stay alive, and or-- may require a means of converting something else into the magic they need. This is where ritual really shines.

I think it's better to consider it like ecological damage...

It's clearly garnered from an idea that the magic can finally die, yes, but at the same time, it doesn't necessarily have to take place, and theoretically, could be reversed. 

The way that Toady has talked about it in the past, and the way that ages are set up,  it's "mythic" when you have more megabeasts, and just a plain, mundane world when all the magic creatures are gone, and only the mundane ones remain.  This follows the sort of Lord of the Rings notion of the magic elves all just "going away" so that non-magic humanity can take over the remainder of the world. 

But if you apply the notions of biology to magic (which is essentially what xenosynthesis is all about), then you can also just logically reverse that process.  (Just like how you can go "Age of Myth" -> "Age of Legends" as megabeasts are killed, but then "Age of Legends" -> "Second Age of Myth" again as the were-creature plague spreads, and there are more were-creatures that fill up the land, keeping the world more mythic, in spite of the loss of megabeasts.)

That is, the magic goes away as you kill off all the dragons, and therefore, you could see it as dragons are "exomagical" and release more magic than they take in. 

Therefore, if you breed dragons in captivity, and release offspring into the wild, you're allowing more magic into the world. 

Like nurturing an endangered species back into full bloom, you could preserve the magical creatures if you so chose in order to alter the magical levels of the world. 


So the trick is to make the process into an actual game mechanic - you need to have an "ambient magic level", as well as a meter for the general nature of the magic you are dealing with. (Such as good/evil/savage as we currently have it, but also the "sky" or "justice" spheres when Toady finally goes into making the spheres part of the magic biomes.)

Killing exomagic creatures kills the magic - your ambient magic starts to decrease.  Letting more exomagic creatures flourish (like having a fairy breeding pit or something) would expand the power of the magic field, and alter the nature of the magic field to be more like the magic type that those creatures release. 

Hence, while it may not be immediate or obvious, what you kill, what you let live, and what you might overtly encourage the growth of (like farming magic plants or breeding magic animals) can have an impact on the overall "magic biome" (that is, whether a land is good/evil/savage) nature of the land your fortress is on. 

This also means that there are sometimes reasons not to go killing everything - maybe that big bad thunder dragon should just be fed virgins to keep it happy instead of slaying it, after all, since you need the magic it releases to keep the world's magic running, and your sky god's blessings of rain for the crops can't come true if the dragon isn't powering the area with more sky magic to fuel the sky god's spell.  (The dragon may even be a "holy beast" of the sky god.)

Also, some magic can obviously be hostile or dangerous.  Evil biomes are obvious examples.  As part of the system of payments/exchanges of actually exploiting magic, you can always set up "costs" that push your environment towards having very evil, corrupt beings around that are angry at you. (But not some utterly random thing - it's something you control and your fault if you start "casting/hunting/farming too greedy, too deep".)  So, for example, if you start abusing shadow magic, maybe ticked off bogeymen invade your fort.

As for what this might look like, you might want to look at this mod for Minecraft which has a pretty well-thought-out system.  In order to use magic, you first have to build up magic... but that magic build-up has corrupting influences, and creates hostile, powerful magic creatures that will come and ruin your day.  You have to constantly find ways to offset the changes you are having upon the environment in order to prevent overmuch corruption (or at least just shunt off the corruption to a place you don't mind completely screwing over...)

And for that matter, rather than trying to exploit magic, you can try to pacify it.  Currently, evil biomes are just challenges, but if it becomes possible to do so, you can make your own goal of "winning the game" be to convert an evil biome into a fully habitable magic-neutral (or even magic-dead) land... or you can make a point of going into the happy-frappy good lands and corrupting it until the sky itself cries blood that turns once-natural creatures into shambling abominations.  (Or you could purposefully wreck the whole planet to the point where you cause that Ragnarok event SirHoneyBadger was talking about that wakes Cthulhu because so much corrupt magic is running wild.)

The point is, it's magic not under your direct control, but it's also not random magic that tells a player not to bother involving themselves in how the magic will come out - it lets you sort of tinker around the edges of magic (and possibly weaponize some of its side-effects) the way that you can't really directly control elves right now, but you can purposefully get them to declare war on you or get them to like your fort.


Ah, ninja'd - will respond to SHB's post in a bit.

[NW_Kohaku]

Maybe one of the ways that magic can be unpredictable and dangerous is through modding any magical being to have a tiny percentage chance of "giving birth" to a set of other beings, many or all of which could be dangerous, in a way that represents the idea that allowing these beings to walk around is destructive to the baseline of the "natural world".

I said this in an old "Bring back the Dungeon Master" thread, but I don't really like the notion of having some RNG-based wizard caste being born.

I'd much prefer having Dungeon Masters be dwarves that, basically, did mystic training, went on some solitary journey of self-discovery, or something, and came back with supernatural understanding of magic monsters. 

That way, it's something you can do on purpose.  (Maybe with a side of "they don't like each other" or else "there's only enough magic here for one" so that you don't get a proliferation of them or a void of them, either.)  It's something you build up to having in your fortress by completing the pre-requisites for either having one of your tamers ready to go off on that journey, or else just attract one who doesn't have a place to live to come to your fort.

Keeping the unicorns and other beings that represent benign forces, alive, on the other hand, when you could have harvested them for the horns and whatnot, should have the opposite effect, where your world is just a little better overall--even if the murderous unicorns themselves would just as soon stab you in the face.

Don't forget that there's still a possibility of understanding the mechanics of how this works just enough to exploit it in some perverse, and highly dwarfy way...

Again, we can always also just capture unicorns, and try to have them start breeding in captivity, and still harvest the horns while eating our cake of magic-producing unicorn populations remaining high at the same time.

(Of course, if we make there be magic spirits and gods, then trapping unicorns and constantly slaughtering them on your lands might just enrage a fairy queen or god of righteousness...)

I'm also going to be a bit glad when we move away from overtly calling biomes "good" and "evil", since having "sky" biomes where you just plain have flying tigers or something doesn't carry the same black-and-white morality connotation that DF obviously really doesn't have. 

[SirHoneyBadger]

I don't think I understand xenosynthesis all that well, then, so I'll go back and re-read the thread.

I'm especially not understanding the idea of making more amethyst men out in the wild, as opposed to making yourself a golem.

Having an ecology of magic is a great idea, and an excellent model of how I feel magic as a whole concept should "lay over the map of the world".

I don't think that there's any absolute problem with exploitation. The problem is when it becomes a standard, obvious, easy way to "beat" the game, rather than a legitimately clever way for a player to gain a narrow advantage.

I figure with unicorns, they just don't lend themselves at all to breeding programs.

Besides making them tough (big as clydesdales, much closer to rhinos than horses in physical stats, although they'd still be beautiful animals, and immune to all diseases, poisons, and old age), with deadly horn, hooves, and bite, nastily-tempered (meaning they'd rage), omnivorous, murderous, and smart--able to slowly learn skills, avoid traps, and destroy buildings--I figure I'd make the baby unicorns as big as full-grown mules, just as mean as adult unicorns, and prone to running in packs, but their corpses would be utterly useless (no horn, infact their corpses would leave nothing behind), and take a thousand years to mature.

Anyone who can figure out a way to breed them that's worth the trouble, would deserve to reap the profits, especially since I wouldn't have them leave behind anything but their horn, (a unicorn horn would indeed be quite precious, worth atleast it's weight in aluminum, but also far from game-breaking), poisonous blood (they'd basically bleed mercury, which could have alchemical value), and a set of four very pure silver shoes (purity of metal is realistically somewhat bothersome to obtain in my mods, so they'd be nice trade items, but not a thousand years nice), so you couldn't actually live on their meat or anything.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, keep in mind that right now, unicorns are just horny horses whose parts are worth more money.  And they can't be tamed or trained in any way - you have to "breed" them by just leaving them in enclosures and letting nature take its course, and you're probably better off butchering them via dropping them through trap doors to fall to their death than trying to actually lead them peacefully like lambs to the slaughter. 

It's just a matter of how much magic you want to put into their body parts...  Instead of going so far out of your way to prevent unicorn ranching, just make unicorn body parts not have some game-breaking magic, and let dwarves get high snorting unicorn horn dust or something.

And ultimately, I do think that it's sort of a DF thing to ultimately find ways to exploit something like GCS web farming. 

If people find a way to pump up the good/evil/savage magic in an area, and then find, capture, breed, and exploit some magic critter, well, that's just dwarves being dwarves.  Going too far out of your way to punish players for doing the things they want to do because you don't want them to play the game that way is ultimately not going to make the game all that much more fun. 

(For example, after Sphalterite's infamous mermaid farms, mermaids were simply not given a value for their body parts, but sea serpent and unicorn farming still was allowed even after becoming famous, as is kitten genocide, even though Toady obviously doesn't like it.  I think it's more just that Toady felt that overt Mermaid-body-trade was going outside the bounds of what civilization might allow, but sea serpent ranches and selling sea serpent burgers wasn't considered something dwarves would balk at.)

So I think that there may be a point where, if there's a powerful magic field in the area, that magic field might have a spirit or god associated with it, and it will have a will and desires and might be negotiated with, but have demands, as well.  The nature spirit of the elves wants dwarves to not chop down trees, for example, and if your tree-chopping count goes too high, they'll attack.  A good spirit might also negotiate with dwarves, but might also get angry and send out a burning unicorn avenger posse if you do mean things to the good spirit's favored children (like abusing fairies or unicorns or something). 

That would be the balancing factor on the over-exploitation of some magic critter... and if you happen to capture some unicorns, but then neutralize the good magic with some evil-magic-producing plants like silver barbs or something, so that the good spirit can't interfere, then there's nothing to stop you from slaughtering all the unicorns you want, now is there? BWAHAHAHAHAHAA!

[GreatWyrmGold]

From what I read it seems like Cacame was completely bugged out, as a result of being an unexpected result of the RNG in the game - he couldn't be normally commanded around, but somehow he was completely indestructible and could punch dragons into a red mist without any weapons, armor or relevant skills. Legendary yes, but more as a result of a seriously bugged game than any "story". Cacame is often depicted with cool armor, but in reality he was a blithering idiot who couldn't pick anything up or dress himself.

Those bugs happened once Cacame got rendered in the game, and were due to the game not being able to handle the paradox of a dwarven citizen not being a [CREATURE:DWARF]. Just like what happens now when you transform your citizens into nondwarves.
The worldgen bit? Not a bug. Just an emergent feature.

If magic is completely and utterly corralled down and reliable, then it's indistinguishable from science, and magic a can remain magic a while having the opportunity to go magic 8 and hope for the best. Magic is not reliable, magic is holding a blade without the hilt, and we need to have that remembered in the game.

The true difference between magic and science is not its reliability but how well it is understood and how disconnected its effect is.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science. It's not a simple binary thingamabobber.
But yeah, magic should be researchable the way technology is, whatever that is.

Kohaku:
If that's the case, then clearly magic is a finite resource!  If this is the case, but is simply treated like an infinite one-- ("How can scooping a thimble full of water out of the mighty ocean, and destroying it deplete the ocean?" type mindset), then this would produce lots of magic and magic using cultures early, but the waning supply of magic would force those cultures away from it.
It would also make the forest spirits the elves contract with be less and less inclined to grant boons over the ages, as those spirits need to conserve their powers to stay alive, and or-- may require a means of converting something else into the magic they need. This is where ritual really shines.

Which would explain those dying empires of superior elves in so many fantasy worlds!

...And thus the spawn for a new forum game was formed.

[Boea]

All I can say is that this Magic, Kohaku's talking about seems like a combination of Paganism with Thaumcraft 2's Vis-Taint Magic system. [Not necessarily a bad thing]

More or less Pagans try to garner the interest, and agreements of greater beings [dragons, spirits, towers/et al] to affect the general atmosphere.. in a social sense. Maybe a bit of enlightenment, and meditation, but that's besides the point.
Anyways the draining energy from abstract creatures, or oddly sentient pools of magic seems, well abstract. How do these creatures attain their auras, or where do these pools form? and what can differentiate it from crude oil, and ambergris?

The whole Vis-Taint mechanic was based on a crude system of Raw Magical Energy that could be distilled, and used to do things, but through such actions caused something called Taint, magical pollution, which could cause corruption, and not much else. I wouldn't want such a boring system.
Also if it interests you Kohaku, Azanor1 already did an overhaul of TC2, it's called Thaumcraft 3, it's based on Essentia [more or less spheres] and less so on Aura Vis, and Taint is replaced with Flux Essentia. We can talk about it over PM's if you want a quick start guide on how it works now

Xenosynthesis seems pretty okay, you just need to make sure that the whole thing doesn't go caput.

Also I thought the Age of Myth was one of three starting Ages, along with Legend, and Heros, which respectively are the times of plentiful megabeasts to a few dozen and many heros.

Other than that I don't suppose anything will get in the way of an intrepid fortress emulating the Chaos Realm as seen in Berserk, or that Goblin Army that guy amassed by abducting women, and the rest involving black flags, and doubled-black flags.

[NW_Kohaku]

The way that magic biomes work now is that there's an integer value for Evil and Savagery throughout the map.  When this value is high enough (such as > 75 evil, I believe), it will make an evil biome in the area. (However, the actual areas affected by evil tend to be stretched out to fill whole oceans or mountain ranges rather than having patches of evil in an ocean, currently... that might have to change to make the spread of magic biomes more gradual for in-play use.)  Good is just a very low Evil rating, by the way. (< 25 Evil.)

So, if you want to make a very crude system for how this would work, you could have some sort of magic energy counter, where every unicorn puts a certain amount of good magic into the area (which would be like -10 points of evil per unicorn or something, and then -1 point for a bubble grass), and every 100 or so points of energy that is put into or taken from the area will permanently affect that regional Evil biome setting by a point. 

So, if you let a cow eat some bubble grass, it adds a point of evil.  If that grass regrows, it subtracts a point of evil.  Each unicorn that dies is +10 evil, each unicorn given birth to is -10 evil. 

If you go and burn away or graze away 40 tiles of bubble grass and kill 6 unicorns, you'll add 100 points of evil magic, and tick over the change on the whole region, adding a point to the Evil Biome score. If that is enough to push the total Evil Biome score above 25, then the area stops being a Good biome, and the unicorns will retreat for "gooder" lands, and the bubble grass might not grow back any more without encouragement. 

If you somehow encourage more bubble grass growth or buy some trapped good creatures from elves that you breed and add to the good energy (negative evil magic as this game puts it), then you can make the biome into a Good magic biome once more. 

That's a basic mechanic for the system, but you can make it more complex, especially when you start having multiple types of magic...

For one, you can have an "overall magicality" in a biome, and then have a "flavor" of magic, so that, even with powerful evil or good magic "flavor", if you suck all the magic out of a region, you won't see any magic effects at all.  (It would be similar to a neutral region now.) Meanwhile, if you have powerful magic but drain away how evil that magic is, it might still be magical, but just be neutral magic instead of evil or good magic.

So what you'd have is a "how powerful is the magic" meter, and then a "what kind of magic is it" meter.  (This "flavor" meter would naturally be multi-dimensioned, though...)

This talk about "flavor" of magic also lends itself well into the breakup of magic biomes - when we have sphere-based magic biomes that Toady wants to move into, instead of having just good, evil, and savage, we might have sky magic and sea magic and land magic biomes, and in a sky biome, everything might fly.  (This thread on brainstorming some sphere magic might be good to look at.) So all sorts of magic creatures and things might be in a region, and producing magic of their own particular flavor, and if there's significantly more sky magic than any other type of magic, then it starts turning into a sky biome, and the natural creatures in the area might start getting turned into sky creatures that might be like normal snakes and tigers and badgers and such, but now they fly because they're sky-badgers. 

Another major portion of the way that Xenosynthesis is supposed to work, however, is that not all things actually add to magic, some drain it. 

A skeletal normal creature, for example, might actually drain some evil magic from an evil region.  Killing it would release some of that evil magic.  If you work from this draining idea, then there's a finite limit to the amount of skeletons that a single evil region can raise before it neutralizes itself for raising too many undead, and you can think of it as a natural sink on the regional supply of evil magic.  In the case of a sky magic biome, meanwhile, then the flying badgers might also be magic-sinks - when the sky magic in the area gets too high, they release some of that excess sky magic by zapping some normal creature into being a sky magic creature.

You also have things that you might purposefully raise - like magic plants - that sink magic because they need that magic to survive, and if there isn't enough magic in the area, they don't live.  Growing too many of these might temporarily neutralize the magic, and you'd need to somehow push more magic into the system to keep feeding those plants.  (This could also work for purposefully raising specific animals that suck up magic.) 

When harvested, however, they no longer consume magic, and you might end up with high quantities of excess magic when you finish harvesting some magic plants. 

Since this excess magic manifests itself by zapping some creature with some odd powers, if the magic levels deviate by a significant enough degree, instead of just giving a badger some wings, it might create something more chaotic and dangerous, or else do something like summon a sky-magic-aligned megabeast, like a roc, or create a titan or forgotten beast on the spot to sink some of the excess magic into. (The same way that corruption, when built up in the thaumcraft, sinks excess magic into bad stuff that comes back to haunt the player.)

When there's a high concentration of magic all of a sudden, magic things happen, and it's just the "flavor" meter's job to tell what exact type of magic will surge wildly.


Now then, for the concept of spirits, the best way to think about it would be to use the sort of "multiverse" concept, as Toady already has talked about different dimensions, like shadow dimensions where the bogeymen come from, or the imaginary dimension from Cado's Magical Journey.

Spirits and gods usually just hang out in their own dimensions, but they can come into the DF world when there's a big enough space that's covered in their flavor of magic to support them.  (They sink magic of their kind.)

Alternately, if there's a large enough zone of magic created, a spirit may be born of the magic, itself.  (Or gods can be created through people worshiping that magic or that spirit if we want to go down that path of gods that exist only through the accumulated faith of their believers.) 

Because they need magic to survive, they will want to see magic in general boosted, and especially magic of their flavor. (Although they will probably despise magic of an opposing flavor, like a sky spirit hating land magic or something.) 

Spirits and gods may also get nourishment from whatever it is their sphere most associates with it, as well, however.  So a justice-aligned spirit/god might gain nourishment from a hammerer executing a murderer, and may become slightly ill from each crime unpunished. 

Sacrifices to the gods (such as a sacrificial ox, classically,) would also be a nourishment to the gods.

Feeding the gods or spirits gives them power, and in return, they'll likely share some of that power with those who actively do things that feed them, like spreading their type of magic, or giving them sacrifices in order to encourage more sacrifices or spreading of that magic sphere's influence. 

A spirit may well be "trapped" inside their magic field - almighty powerful inside their own realm, but incapable of surviving outside their magic biome at all.  Hence, they would want and need henchmen to spread their magic biome out beyond their borders.  (This would be the forest spirit using elves as its emissaries and protectors.)

When there's spirits or gods in a magic zone, they would have the (game-simulated) sentient capacity to determine how excess magic in their area gets spent - hence, if they are angry with your dwarves, they'll make sure every scrap of excess magic they have is spent on creating more forgotten beasts to spew poison on your dwarves.  If pleased, they'll just create some excess winged badgers or something.

Of course, if you do piss off a spirit enough, you can also just "kill" it by draining all the magic power it needs to live away from the region by killing the local magic-producing plants and animals.

So, basically, the "balance" on magic is that if you let magic gain power, it's going to have a semi-sentient spirit that's going to demand things of you that you have to do to keep it happy, or the magic will become hostile to you, and rain organ-melting blood on your parade.


Finally, as for the whole thing going kaput, I think it might actually be okay for dwarves to be capable of causing the extinction of all magic.  (And if they need magic for themselves to survive...) It wouldn't be a bad thing to create this space where dwarves have to keep the magic in order to survive so that you can't go too far to one direction or the other - too much magic causes Ragnarok, while too little magic means dwarves and goblins and elves go extinct, and humans and mundane animals are all that's left.  It would certainly be the dwarfy thing to do to ultimately cause the extinction of their own race.

[Boea]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I can more or less talk about all of these in terms of thaumcraft 3, right about now, the only problem is the ability to produce magic content [mana/vis] but at the cost of pollution/flavor [taint/flux] :v

In TC2 there used to be a mechanic where the Vis level affected the growth rate of plants, and could even convert plains into desert, and petrify trees.. it was more or less needless fluff, but that establishes Vis as a universal energy.
In TC3, it takes a step back from chunk-based aura into node-based aura, where the Vis in a given area is always tied to an Aura Node [Which can more or less stand in for your Biomes] . The only difference is that there are three types of nodes, and it's mostly fixed: dark, normal, pure.. one causing Flux, the other Removing it Slowly. Every Node absorbs the Flux generated nearby, or within its influence.. high levels caused interesting environmental effects [spontaneous combustion, thunder, blindness.. sadly no biome changes] or Wisps which literally zap you. Flux is generated either by appropriate node, thaumaturgy [from radical essentia] , or the environment [crystals/overcharge] , and generally comes in 52 flavors, named in latin [can more or less denote spheres] .
Vis enters the system from either the environment discharging into the Node [exceedingly Slow] or converting Flux in Vis [hahaha] or draining it from adjacent nodes.. though sadly it has little effect other than making all enchantments, devices, and machines fizzle out, probably making the swarms of wisps, as byproduct of your intrusion in the aura an acute danger. It is probably going to be added as further tiers of research are piled onto the already large selection that is currently available.

In the scope of DF, I would generally expect there to be a much finer distribution of these power nodes, and sphere-climates, than simply tying a generic amount to an embark-biome. Possibly magic savvy people gravitate towards the power nodes, whilst silly elves, and goblins cultivate their sphere-climates.

[I am pretty nervous about necroing that old thread, there, Kohaku]

That being said, I don't have much hope for what seems to be just an initial organization.


In terms of whatever the fuck this thread was supposed to be about, I don't know mana, and spheres aren't directly related? And species can tend towards cultivating, spreading, or draining these things? Introducing a new level of resource wars?
It'd be certainly interesting if there is a sphere mega drought that people'd pack up shop and try to go back to their sphere-dimension, otherwise there'd be no "sudden resurgence of x-sphere, oh no" especially in the case of sphere-demons. Which would be akin to failed colonies/cities going back home, or becoming refugees.
Certainly fanciful creatures will suffer malaise, and atrophy from a lack of magic, by why let them completely wink out when they can simply become mundane, given they can survive the initial shift.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Necroing is a good thing.

Even if a conversation or an idea is 10 years old, if it's still relevant enough to "dredge up", then necroing it saves space on the boards, and keeps people from having to hunt and search for the context, the back story, and the old replies they made the first time the idea came around.

Necroing gets a bad rep, but these boards are already crowded to overflowing with ideas, arguments, rebuttals...why was everyone's time and energy repeating and rehashing, with all the added awkwardness of starting a new thread, and in the process make finding anything in the haystack the boards already are, that much harder?

If a thread really is too old to be useful, then just ignore it, everyone else will do the same, and it'll sink back down into the depths on it's own.


Balance aside, I just like the thought of unicorns being paragons of freedom, goodness, and beauty, while at the same time being these terrifying 4 legged landcarp, particularly since it would conform to some real myths, where unicorns were these utterly savage, uncontrollable beasts who could only be approached by pure virgin maidens; otherwise running away or easily slaughtering anyone else who came close. 


NW_Kohaku: I think there might be something to your 'Biome-Counter' idea.

D&D alignment is cheezy and restrictive and promoting of the jingoism we're all so fond of in this thread, and the more simplistic ideas of "good" vs "evil", might perhaps be safely disregarded, but I do like the idea of the land itself being magical, and maybe having it's own..."sub-conscience"?

The game already tracks kills, so if the kill rate starts to really accellerate, then the overall savagery-score, or whatever, could rise, and more lions or wolves or polar bears would start moving in.

This would interfere with an Earthlike ecology, ofcourse, and cause real population disruptions (and where are all these predators migrating from?), but it doesn't have to work that way in the Toadyverse, where new creatures can appear from code, and maybe increased savagery also means that predators in these lands require less food to survive, as the world itself adapts to the needs of it's inhabitants, and changes the laws of the ecosystem, in order to conform to the will of the land.

Ofcourse, once the predators don't have to eat as much, the kill rate falls, lions actually have good reason to begin laying down with the lambs, and the savagery level balances itself out in a "natural" way.

Add in sentient beings, with the capacity for greater and more extended disruptions, and more complex needs and wills, and the land might be pulled in all different directions, and begin to respond with things like dragons, and magic.

Instead of living on Earth, it might be something like living inside of a series of dreams and nightmares the Earth was having.

I don't know that it would be plausible or useful for elements themselves to dominate to a greater degree than a "water" area being a lake, river, or ocean, fire areas being volcanos or deserts, and a "sky" area being, well, the sky.

Some creatures might adapt to these conditions directly, while others might avoid them, but you'd want a degree of Earthlike stability, for modeling purposes, and having insubstantial "lands" where herds of flying buffalo roam doesn't seem like it would be a place my dwarfs could, or would really want to, strike the earth, unless they actually manage to build a tower (or grow a beanstalk) that reaches the clouds, and find they really do have silver in them, and are substantial enough to walk across.

Maybe dwarfs are just naturally earth-dominant, though, so that no matter how hard the Red Bull tries to herd them into the sky, they never grow wings (Thanks, Beagle!).