The Tavern

It's a ridiculously trivial thing, concerning one word of flavour. But... 'knight' just isn't doing it for me. Death Knight sounds good, and works well for Yredelemnul's powers- his worshippers are generally melee monsters trailing a horde of undead monstrosities. Lugonites are something more subtle, weirder...all of the religious titles back it up, ' Unweaver', 'Agent of Entropy', 'Schismatic'.
'Abyssal Cultist' seems more fitting.
Is anyone else this picky about background names?

P.S. Crusaders aren't even a religious background!

AK is fine but Chaos Knight should be changed to Stochastic Warrior.

randominator.

"cultist" or "zealot" (even though the latter is already used in-game) sound more appropriate, but they also sound terrible. i'm partial to "heretic", but again, terrible-sounding (and i'm not even sure it makes any sense).

I like Stochastic Warrior

Or how about a Normally Distributed Knight, armed (after Mieville) with a possible sword?

Chaotic Stranger (...stranger and stranger said Alice)

Before he opens the box of beasts, the beasts are both alive and dead.

Like Schrödinger's felid?

Got it! "Schrödinger's Knight"! Let's make it happen, dev(a)s.

"The Heisenberg Uncertainty Fighter"

"Welcome, Werner the Heisenberg Uncertainty Fighter.
Will you be the one to retrieve the fabulous Higgs boson from the depths?"

hahahaha

FeSK - Felid Schrödinger's Knight
HuUF - Human Uncertainty Fighter

Joking aside, this raises the possibility of a quantum roguelike.

All roguelikes are a study in quantum mechanics. Each move collapses a number of different probability matrices into a single observed result.

You hit the giant cockroach.
The giant cockroach is heavily wounded.
The giant cockroach bites you.
You hit the giant cockroach.
The giant cockroach enters a state of quantum uncertainty!
You see here a giant cockroach in an indeterminate state.

I am laughing literally out loud.

But what I meant by quantum roguelike was: a procedurally generated permadeath game set in a quantum subworld. You are a particle or quark or heretofore unobserved quantum lifeform adventuring in a world that adheres to laws other than Newtonian. In ascii graphics. Could be hot.

(With apologies to all physicists out there.)
Your boson applies half-integer spin to the fermion.
The wavefunction of the fermion's system changes sign.
The fermion analyzes the system using Lagrange multipliers.
Your boson turns the fermion into degenerate matter.
The fermion obeys the Pauli exclusion principle!
You see here a topologically twisted skyrmion.

I don't know... seems like your quantum roguelike might have limited appeal.

This sounds like either the prequel to Spore, or it's Katamari Damacy. You're an up quark trying to combine with other particles to form more massive particles, while trying to avoid decaying into a burst of photons. In early stages you can only interact via the strong force. As you get more massive (level up), you get access to more forces. By the time you're massive enough for gravity to come into play, you're starting to make progress. You ascend by becoming the Higgs boson.

Certainly you wouldn't have the problem of pillar dancing or drawing enemies into chokepoints, since at that scale, the size of corridor openings are close enough to your wavelength that you'd diffract around them and you'd have to deal with some maneuvering weirdness.

It would be absolute hell on measuring game turns, though. Either you know how fast you moved, or you know where you moved to (or how you got there). Not both with absolute certainty.

I would play the hell out of this. You invoke Quantum Tunneling! Your amplitude has decreased.

There is a kraken corpse here.
You cast Animate Dead.
The dead are squirming!
You hear music in the distance: "Do do do do do do do do, do do do calimari necromancy!"

Also, Portal Projectile would be SO much awesomer if you could use it (recursively) on an Aperture Science High Energy Pellet

There could be some great uniques:

You enter The Shoals.
You are on a beach.
Einstein comes into view.
Einstein screams, "The Old One does not play dice!"

You hit Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer is moderately wounded.
Oppenheimer goes atomic on you!

Feynman comes into view. He is wielding an orcish set of bongo drums.

etc.

You hit Schrodinger!
Schrodinger may or may not be wounded and/or dead!
Schrodinger's wave-function collapses!
Schrodinger casts Summon Small Mammals!
You are displaced by an indeterminate number of cats in various states of life/death/undeath!

Hmm, that gives me another idea... Cheesy Sci-Fi Crawl! (Though I guess they call that "Nethack"...)

You hit Grunfondel!
Grunfondel demands that demarcation may or may not be the issue!
You are paralysed with indecision!
The Dalek attempts to go up the stairs, but fails. (30x)
You are no longer paralysed.
The Starfleet engineer mumbles strange words.
Your polaron flux matrices begin to glow strangely! (-4 Stealth)
Grunfondel is too busy designing fjords to notice.
Kryten attempts to step up to red alert, but can't find the bulb.
The Dalek fires a particle beam!
You almost die, but instead fall into a temporal anomaly!
Unfortunately this temporal anomaly is a time loop set at the exact moment of detonation of the Shofixti sun!
Xom is *highly* amused!

You open Oppenheimer like a pillowcase!
Oppenheimer dies.
Oppenheimer rises from the dead!
Oppenheimer says, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds!"

I think you're being a little unfair to Oppenheimer, there...

You think he'd get me first?

No, it was J Edgar Hoover who got him first...

Didn't know that part of his life. Factoid for the day.

I know mainly because I'm currently reading (and recommend) this:
http://www.americanprometheus.org/

(Getting increasingly off-topic here but what else does Crazy Yiuf stand for?)

Hammers, naturally...

Actually, now I think about it, Crazy Yiuf is the archetypal Stochastic Warrior.

SWs should have permanent shoutitis that utters Yiufisms.

This made my inner philosopher tingle.

I swear I never laid a finger on him, officer.

I think we should begin a cult of Yiuf, warrior-hermit and leader of the Stochastic Warriors.

I have certainly sacrificed (myself) to him on occasion...

You offer a prayer to Yiuf.
Yiuf's attitude towards you is indeterminate.

Going back to the quantum mechanical roguelike concept, I did an unhealthy amount of thinking about this over the weekend, and it would put an interesting viewpoint (almost wrote "spin" there, but that's one of your attributes as a subatomic particle ;) ) on some traditional roguelike mechanics.

As a particle, you have rest mass, which represents your experience level, or some other "base" level from which certain combat attributes are derived.

You also have speed. At zero speed, you're fully at rest...but you also have no potential to do anything, and so you're effectively dead. So your life is directly tied to your speed. (And that's speed, not velocity or momentum...let's not get the vector math in here yet.) This means that you can't just "stop" and rest or wait for things to come toward you.

Collisions with other particles influence the energy of both colliding particles, dependent on their mass and speed (therefore momentum). There's the bump-attack model right there. If the combined energy of the collision isn't enough to overcome any repulsive forces that are in play, the particles bounce off of each other. Otherwise they combine into something bigger. If you think slime creatures combining are bad, imagine the shock and horror when you see three little quarks coming your way and they suddenly merge into a proton or neutron that is a lot bigger than you.

That's where the real potential for interesting play mechanics comes in. This neatly ties up the issue of a strong actor (player or monster) being able to be nibbled to death by popcorn opponents -- small particles would have to pick up a LOT of energy from somewhere to have a hope of influencing the speed of a big particle. It also makes it more difficult for higher level actors to heal once they've taken some damage and lost energy -- more massive particles need more energy to be accelerated to a given speed. In the absence of environmental energy sources, the best way to gain energy is to bounce off of things that are a little bigger than you or a little faster than you, but not too much. So unlike conventional roguelikes (except the Angband family), your best opponents are things that are slightly beyond your level.

Ranged attacks would involve sacrificing some energy to emit photons, or sacrificing mass to emit particles. Either cast from your hit points, or cast from your base attributes.

You REALLY want to stay out in the open, unlike most roguelikes where walls are your best friends. Collisions with walls drain energy for no gain. At least when you hit another particle, you might absorb it, or (if it's slightly above your level) you'll actually come out ahead in the energy department, albeit going in a completely different direction.

That's all that I'm remembering right now...

Do you think this would be best realized as a roguelike rather than some other type of game? See e.g. Osmos (http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/) for something along similar lines.

Osmos is abstract; for our proposed roguelike you could take the mechanics and "skin" them with suitably freaky text and visuals. Create a whole new type of world for the player to explore, figuring out the mechanics as he goes. The feel of Glumbuster is sort of what I had in mind. Imagine what sort of cultures exist among the quarks, and the photons.