The Tavern

This is a god idea. It's also weird as hell. I came up with it brainstorming on how to make Makhleb's Invocations better than just 'random conjurations spell!' and Summon Demon! But it got way too far from original Makhleb and incredibly weird. So Submitting as a completely different god. Piety Costs are more random than any other god, though the HP costs are fixed.

Redrafted for the fifth? time.

Shulal-ruubthak the Unspeakable is a Destructive-themed evil magic god of Pandemonium. God of Eldritch Magic. Eldritch magic is largely forgotten. More powerful than normal spells, but more chaotic and unpredictable. Shulal grants you knowledge of this craft in return for your pain, feeding on your HP.

Altar: A writhing mass of tentacles at the base of a black obelisk. (Reference to the Dunwich Horror).

Gaining Shulal-ruubthak:

• Shulal is a temple god.
• Shulal is chaotic, not evil. (Hated by Zin; but not other good gods).

Piety:

• Gain: Kills.
• Loss: Time. (Piety Decay).

Costs of Worship: Shulal is chaotic and horrible. The effects of using this destructive force randomly cause the player status effects. These are never -directly- fatal; but are usually worse than Xom. These replace miscasts for affected spells and are used as miscasts for god abilities. Additionally (similar to CBoE) there's a chance of these occurring after a successful cast. Odds of happening on a successful cast decrease with Invocations.

• Your Eyes Begin to Bleed - Pain. No scrolls for a few turns.
• Broken and Unintelligible Voices Call Out to You - INT Drain.
• Your body suddenly rends itself with horrible wounds - Flay.
• Your Blood Turns to Acid - *Corrode
• A Tentacle Reaches from the Ground and Grabs You - Constriction.
• You are bathed in an Eldritch light. - 4-6 Transient Mutations. (Wretched Star).
• Distant voices call out to you, begging you to stay. - You mesmerize yourself. (you can't move; but can use any other action).
• A vision of a great and terrible truth assaults your senses. - Confusion.
• A horrible image appears in your vision; you can't help but fear it. - An 8 appears that you are afraid of. The 8 will time itself out, but cannot be damaged.

Passive Powers:

• ...... - Chaotic Elementalism:
  • Fire, Ice, Air, Earth and Poison Magic schools are locked.
  • Invocations is used as a spellschool in place of these. (Poison Arrow and Bolt of Fire are both Invocations/Conjurations, for example).
  • Most affected spells are chaotically branded.
  • Bolts and explosions are randomly: (Flaming, Freezing, Electrocution, Poison, Acid, Draining, Distortion, Vampiric, True Chaos); if true chaos, everything hit gets the same chaos effect (all hasted, all berserked, all paralyzed, etc.)
  • Clouds placed are randomly: (Flaming, Freezing, Storm, Poison, Acid, Miasma, Seething Chaos, Mutagenic)
  • Similarly elemental staves are treated as all "Chaos" Staves. Which act as an enhancer for all related spells and has an Invo/Evo dependent chaos hit that ignores AC on hit.
  • Charms/Buffs such as Repel Missiles and Stoneskin are affected by the boosting, but do not have chaotic effect applied.
  • Complete list of affected spells with a summary of changes; here.
• **.... - Eldritch Power - EVP of armour is halved for the purposes of spellcasting penalties.
• ****.. - Cast from HP - When out of MP, you may cast spells from your HP, instead.
• ****.. - Spirit Shield

Active Powers:

• *..... - Hellfire - 4 MP, 0-3 Piety [1d4-1] - a Hellfire Ball, similar to those used by Deep Elf Priests. Spellpower scales with Invocations. [3d1-3d20].
• **.... - Chaotic Infusion - 7 HP, 5-15 piety [5d3] - The target (can self-target) is granted a slay boost (spellpower-dependant, up to +9), Chaos-branded physical attacks (both melee and ranged, weapons and UC) and a (spellpower-dependant, up to 50%) chance to add an extra + to any element when hit by an attack of that element. If used on a summon adds a random amount to their duration. Spellpower and Miscast Rate Calculated as a Level 6, Charms/Invocations spell.
• ****.. - Gatekeeper's Key - 8 HP, 0-10 Piety [2d5-2] - Forceful Abjuration (All hostile AND allied summons explode), nothing can be summoned for several turns (enemies attempting cantrip instead). Duration depends on Invocations.
• *****. - Shulal Revealed - 1/3 total HP, 0-50 piety [2d26-2] - Cost cannot kill you (leaves at 1HP if it would); but the flame clouds can! All the following happen at once.
  • All wall tiles in LoS turn into 'weird stuff that makes up Pandemonium.
  • The walls begin to bleed. Amount of Blood depends on Invo.
  • Tentacles sprout forth from the ground. (All enemies are constricted and hit with chaos-branded hits). Base damage of hits depends on Invo
  • An "Avatar of Shulal" (Allied Pandemonium Lord) appears. HD depends on Invo.
    • As it's an avatar of Shulal; it's spellset is heavily weighted to include chaos spells, such as B.Chaos and Chaos Breath (Cone of Clouds of Seething Chaos).
  • Blood is Ignited into random kinds of Fire. (Ghostly, Normal, Holy)
• ****** - Bless Weapon - Same as Lugonu, only chaos-brands.

Old Version:

Only one question: is it called "unspeakable" because nobody knows how to pronounce its name right?

I like it. It does seem like a better, more interesting version of Makhleb. It is possible that the negative consequences are excessive - there are various parameters that could be tuned in respect to that. Maybe reduce the HP cost of some of the abilities. Gatekeeper's Key in particular looks to have an excessive cost for what it does. Alternatively maybe give the god some HP gain on kills.

@Sar: actually I called it the Unspeakable before giving it an actual name. Name is from a (Lovecraft) elder god name generator.

@Berder: Maybe, unsure on balance. I don't think I can give it HP on kills though. That would...make it overshadow Vehumet completely.

The problem is you have active and passive abilities that cost large amounts of HP with no way to recover besides resting. So you'll be at half HP a lot, and then you get constricted/flayed/corroded at random while at half HP with enemies around.

NEAT! Some unordered thoughts:

INT drain doesn't go well with a caster god, perhaps Weak instead?

How do you get rid of the Flay effect from "horrible wounds"? Time?

Also consider bad temporary mutations a la wretched star for side effects.

Side effects should probably scale with XL or piety or something, since ~all of the proposed side effects except Constrict are severe enough that a low-level character would be forced to flee or burn a consumable when they trigger. If side effects happen purely at random then Shulal is a de facto noobtrap, because no divine power is worth randomly getting flayed two turns in a row in a potentially dangerous situation... I'd actually consider removing or changing the Pain and Flay side effects to non-HP damaging things.

Are the HP costs of abilities subject to Guardian Spirit?

How would Incursion interact with multi-creature summoning spells: Summon Butterflies, Shadow Creatures, Dragon's Call, etc.?

You'd be able to summon up to 128 butterflies at once, obviously.

I'd probably lower the max miscast rate on incursion, don't let you summon anything over 20% fail. The HP cost of the actives should probably be fixed, rather than percentage of hp. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable giving up 1/3 of my life for an ability, even if that was a strong ability.

As an example, here's how I'd do incursion:

Incursion - ***** - 10-15 HP, Medium Piety - Calls forth summons you know, randomly. 3-4 casts, instantly. No miscast chance; but won't place anything above 20% fail rate.

I don't think we really need to repeat something ~10 times at instant speed - most summons are capped at 3/4 anyways, so let's not go way over the cap. I guess this would allow you to go over the summons which are capped at 1? Maybe have it summon 2 of things that are usually one. Do we want 4 spellforged servitors? Note your version as written would technically allow 16 spellforged servitors to go around casting iron shot/OOD/poison arrow all at once. I understand it's random from your memorized summons, but it wouldn't be terribly hard to cut your summons list to only the ones, or even just one, summon that you want. A lot of conjurers in particular may only learn servitor.

I think the highest cost on a god ability is currently 10 hp or mana (step from time is 10 mana, greater servant is 10 hp). Incursion as above is strong enough to justify going up to 15 or so, but 1/3 hp could easily be 60 hp on a normal hp race, which is just way too much.

I disagree. Self-torment(ish) as the cost of a god ability allows it to be absurdly strong. Consider Ru actives; the high level one is absolutely, insanely powerful because the cost of worshiping Ru is consistently high. Or Chei.

I think you'd probably want a strategic cost to it as well (maybe Drain). And then sure, summon 5-11 casts. Some will fail based on their maximum; so it goes. That encourages having multiple summoning spells instead of forgetting all the early ones to ensure high-level summons.

Edit: Rewrote to use Invo Skill.

If I had time, I'd take a shot at coding this up. It sounds really flavorful and fun.

This is my favorite God proposal of yours Bcadren.

this sounds kind of baller

I'm not sure it's a thing... but this post might be a worthy reverse-move. It feels like it belongs in GDD. It's specific, doesn't fall into anything unimplementable, and in general seems like the sort of thing that actually fits the intent of that forum.

Yeah, it seems like a good starting place at least.

One question though, the description seems to imply that you would no longer use MP for anything except guardian spirit. Is that right? If so, why?

You reminded me of something I meant to add and haven't. I'll add it momentarily; but...

You gain levels of the Mana Shield mutation with piety (Tier II demonspawn facet; I: Spirit Shield, II: MPRegen+, III: When MP is low your HP regen is sent to MP instead, When your HP is low your MP may take ALL instead of half the damage).

Special Case: If you choose Shulal as a Demonspawn who has the facet; you are granted a random extra Tier II from the god instead. Which Facet the god will give is rolled along with your normal facets at turn 0.

In short; it's...supposed to basically mean since you cast from HP; the Spirit Shield makes you less likely to royally screw yourself by casting too much. Cast from HP should be a buff, giving you more total casts, and not something too risky to use afterall.

BUT only conjurations and summonings are cast from HP; if you want to Haste yourself, cBlink, etc. That's still MP.

Ah, ok. So for conjurations, invocations, and taking damage in general, HP and MP is basically one pool. For other spells, MP is used.

What about VS, do they get any special compensation? I mean, not that they need it, but it does seem like they would end up with the least benefit from the god.

This can be moved to GDD if someone wants. I've thought about coding it myself too...but I'd like to actually be on my feet first.

EDIT: MOVE THIS TO GDD, PLEASE!?

We usually let the mods who are also devs make decisions on what can be moved to and from GDD, unless it's an obvious call. I don't think an all-caps edit is likely to encourage any of them to do so, however; instead, a patch people can play would be very appropriate content for a new GDD post. Good luck getting back on your feet!

That said, I personally think "Makhleb-Only-Super-Complicated" sounds like not much fun, especially since worshipping him is also guaranteed god wrath unless you're crazy enough to go atheist long enough to get to the altar in the vestibule.

Talked to dpeg about it; his opinion was basically that it shouldn't be a magic god. What I got from it is it probably should go one way or the other:

One way (purely magic god):
Remove Hellfire and Revealed. Simplify, but keep incursion. Make Key use Summonings skill.

The other (not a magic god):
Remove the cast from HP bonus and the armour penalty reduction. Remove Incursion and Key. Make Infusion boost everything (also give a +Slay, +Chaos brand to melee and ranged).

I'm on the fence about it.

To add to what bcadren said: I really like the flavour, the conduct ("cost of worship"), the generation restriction and, of the active powers, the first one and the last one. (WIth some testing, the last one will make an excellent emergency power.) The other three active powers are too complicated, in my opinion. Also, I don't mind this being a god most useful to magic users -- I mind the approach to support magic: using Summonings and Conjurations as input just does not feel right.

Moreover, someone who has significantly leveled Conjurations can kill monsters from afar -- an active power to increase skills with such a high cost (piety and health) won't do. Similar on summons. I believe that the focus on Sum/Con came from trying to redo Makhleb. But with the new theme, that is not necessary! Better to take a step back, and try to do something else.

Here are some ideas to give it a different drift:
* melee and ranged attacks use up MP, if MP>0 and have a chance to to apply additional thematic brand if MP was deducted
* spells cost MP and HP, but get a power boost depending on Inv
* active power: refill MP, but incur a conduct effect, significant piety cost
* active power Chaos Arena: turns boundary of LOS into temporary walls, everything inside into floor (dungeon features are not modified), moves all monsters in LOS near the new walls and damages them

Given that this is a late-game god, it could come with a clock-like conduct: you get stronger, but you also corrupt over time.

It's crude, but I run out of time.

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