Shulal Ru'ubthak: God of Eldritch Magic (Redraft)

[bcadren]

Shulal Ru'ubthak the Unspeakable is the god of Eldritch (old, forgotten and chaotic) magic. He offers invocations, which allow the player to use ancient spells through his grace and passively infuses the player's normal magic with Eldritch power.

[Note: There is already an "Eldritch Tentacle" in Crawl which lays some of the foundation of what Eldritch means in crawl lore. It's overall taken to mean, using chaos for power here.]

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

Vers. I "Chaos Magic":

Theme here is Invocations for Archmage and Chaotic Casting.

Gaining:

• God is chaotic, but not evil. (Hated by Zin, but not TSO or Ely).
• God is a temple god.

Piety:

• Gain: Kills.
• Loss: Fast Decay (Trog/Oka Tier).

Costs of Worship: The severity of miscasts is boosted significantly; additionally Eldritch miscasts may occur in place of normal ones. These use normal miscasts rates. List of Eldritch miscasts:

• Your Eyes Begin to Bleed - Pain. No scrolls for a few turns.
• Your mouth disappears from your face. - No potions or food 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 Casting: You gain a universal enhancer (Archmage) that scales with Invocations and Piety (Spellpower x (1 + (2 + (2 x Invocations/3) x Piety)/2000). And all casting becomes chaotic. Details follow:
  • 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)
  • Non-Elemental Conjurations (and Airstrike) are treated like chaos-branded melee hits, they do their normal damage, then apply the random brand.
  • Elemental staves have randomized added damage type and chance of chaos effects. (But enhance only their original spellschool.)
  • Summons may come in with a random buff or debuff (Berserk, Might, Haste, Slow, Paralyze, Drain, Confused, Poisoned, Invisible, Shapeshifter, Corroded, Malmutated, Chaotically Infused, Chaotically Guarded, Deep Chaos).
  • Summons may come in as a random (any) other creature of similar HD.
  • Charms/Hexes may apply an unexpected buff/debuff instead of or in addition to the intended effect.
  • Translocations may trigger instability (other creatures blink around randomly). (Small Chance).
• ****.. - Eldritch Power - EVP of armour is reduced for the purposes of spellcasting penalties (x100/Piety).
• *****. - Cast from HP - When out of MP, you may cast spells from your HP, instead.
• *****. - Spirit Shield

Vers II. "Mostly Summoning":

Theme here is just a fairly plain god of summoning with some Invos.

Gaining:

• God is chaotic and evil. (Hated by Good Gods).
• God is a temple god.
• God is Heavily Pan Themed with additional altars around Pan.

Piety:

• Gain: Kills.
• Loss: Medium Decay (Yred/Vehu Tier).

God Gifts: Kiku style spellbooks, all summoning. First book, levels 1-4; second 5-6; last 7-9. Last will contain some, but not all of the Grand Grimoire and may also have haunt and/or Dragon's Call.

Passives:

• *..... - Partial Abjuration Protection (Weaker than TSO). Scales with piety.
• **.... - Warding
• ***... - Abjuration lengthening - The base amount of time a summon remains in this world is longer. Scales with Piety.
• *****. - Summon Cap Increase - Summons with caps [Excluding Malign Gateway because of its exceptional nature.] have their cap increased by two.

Actives:

• *..... Heal Ally - 3 HP, Very Small Piety (0-2) - Heal a summon (similar amount to Ely's Heal Other, but only useful for actually keeping summons around).
• **.... - Chaotic Incursion - 5 HP, Small Piety (3-7) - For x turns. Anything summoned receives a random buff. Including the unique Chaotic Infusion, Chaos Guard and Deep Chaos buffs.
• ****.. - Gatekeeper's Key - 8 HP, Medium Piety (10-15) - Forceful Abjuration (All hostile AND allied summons explode), nothing can be summoned for several turns (enemies attempting cantrip instead). Duration depends on Invocations.
• *****. - Ultimate Summon - 15 HP, Large Piety (25-30) - Summons an allied Pandemonium Lord. HD, melee strength, melee brand and spell set ALL scale with spellpower. Due to high piety cost, summon cap on this spell is effectively 3.

Note: This version doesn't use Invo, all invocations depend on summoning.

Vers III. Eldritch Power:

Theme here is sacrificing (sufficiently large) amounts of HP for temporary power gain. To make the large amounts of HP scale well with level, they are effectively self-torment. Have Fun! Keeps the Pan theme. Bit more melee and panic buttons here.

Gaining:

• God is chaotic and evil. (Hated by Good Gods).
• God is a temple god.

Piety:

• Gain: Kills.
• Loss: Medium Decay (Yred/Vehu Tier).

Passives:

...... - Regen (Scales with Piety) [no effect on DD]

Actives:

• *..... - Hellfire - 1/10th total HP, 0-7 Piety - a Hellfire Ball, similar to those used by Deep Elf Priests. Spellpower scales with Invocations. [3d3-3d30].
• ****.. - Chaotic Infusion - 1/4 current HP, 0-15 piety - You give yourself Chaotic Infusion and Chaos Guard statuses.
• *****. - Shulal Revealed - 1/2 HP, 0-50 piety [2d26-2] - 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.
  • Several "Chaos Cores" appear X which is roughly Tentacled Monstrosity + Chaos Spawn.
  • Blood is Ignited.
• ****** - Brand Weapon - Grant a Weapon Chaos.

Statuses: These are used in multiple:

• Chaotic Infusion - (Random -2 - +9 slaying on every hit). Chaos-branded melee and ranged (including auxiliaries).
• Chaos Guard - Same effect as a Dragonskin Cloak (random chance to add resistance on every hit).
• Deep Chaos - On death applies a random effect to the creature that killed the summon. (Explosions, direct damage, status debuffs).

[chequers]

I like the idea of more chaos, but again this is a very complex god. You have to be careful about stepping on Xom or Lugonu's thematic territory. The passive powers + eldritch miscasts are a cool idea, except for the fact they turn a variety of spells into the same thing. eg what's the point of learning freezing cloud if you already know mephitic? What's the point of learning bolt of fire if you already know bolt of magma?

[bcadren]

I like the idea of more chaos, but again this is a very complex god. You have to be careful about stepping on Xom or Lugonu's thematic territory. The passive powers + eldritch miscasts are a cool idea, except for the fact they turn a variety of spells into the same thing. eg what's the point of learning freezing cloud if you already know mephitic? What's the point of learning bolt of fire if you already know bolt of magma?

Bolts are fairly close to the same thing as it is (save which monsters resist it). Meph vs. Freezing; well meph is beam targeted, noisy and affects the same area as a fireball, freezing is smite targeted and silent and affects a lot more area...*shrug* I don't think spells turning too similar because they are changed to the same damage type is an issue; it just marks that the existing spells are already very similar.

[TeshiAlair]

1. I think the actives step a bit too much on Makhleb/Lucy and the god is plenty interesting enough as it is.

2. Rather than fully transforming every spell, what if spells apply a "chaos" status effect similar to inner flame that has an effect on monster death. It could be a chaos cloud explosion, or a localized polymorph, or berserk+confuse the monster, or turn the nearby walls into octopodes, or other insane things that are more localized and unique than xom effects.

[ontoclasm]

I feel like this (like pretty much every bcadren suggestion) might be a bit more reasonable if it contained, like, a quarter as much stuff as it currently does. This god concept, in and of itself, is as complex as any three other gods combined. Ru is perhaps the most complex god, and has 3 actives (each of which can be described in like 3-4 words), one passive, a handful of unique mutations, and a weird piety system. In comparison, Shulal has five actives, all absurdly complex things covered in special cases, four passives, one of which would require rewriting like half of Crawl's spell code by itself, plus a crazy-ass miscast type (which has almost four times as many effects as any other miscast type), special-case piety, special-case Invocations, special-case MP costs, and oh yeah, a unique monster with a randomized spellset just thrown in for kicks. Any good ideas there are are lost in this giant pile of dumb ones.

Pick the two lines that you like best out of this, what, page and a half? Then focus on those, instead of just pouring out every single thing that comes into your head when you hear the word 'chaos.'

e: oh yeah and it makes you a Djinn as a bonus, because that worked out great the first time

[bcadren]

Yea, I kinda half want to cut the actives off and make the passives and miscasts a god, full stop. The actives are mostly hanging around because in an earlier draft of the god, dpeg stated that he really liked revealed (when it gets down to it the majority of what revealed is supposed to do is the same as a chaos-branded shatter (IE everything is hit by an eldritch tentacle in one turn and a chaos ally is summoned to take care of whatever is left after that)).

One correction against ontoclasm, the miscast type actually has the same amount of effects as all the others, it's just not split into level 1, 2 and 3 (generally each spellschool has 2-4 at each level; this has 10 with no splitting, it's very close).

[bcadren]

bcadren: Separate wheat from chaff in a god proposal like this before posting. You may be afraid of losing some nifty ideas, but it is much, much better if *you* make a decision and show us the improved (i.e. shorter) results.

I'm not going to lie. I think the current version is two different gods.

a. "Chaos Magic" god (the passives) which would be complicated under the hood, but to the player would fairly simply be " Train invo for archmage. Miscast effects are worse than normal. Magic is chaotic (generally more powerful through the chaos, but more random). Chaotic magic means damaging spells have random brands, summons may call random creatures instead of the inspected ones, charms/hexes may cause different buffs than expected." That's a lot of work under the hood, but ultimately not that complicated to the player.

b. "Eldritch" God (the actives) which are comparatively simple (both to implement and for players to understand (the intricacies) of.

EDIT. Editing on the original post here.

[bcadren]

Alright. I edited the original post to pick apart the separate ideas that rolled together into one god.

[koboldina]

To echo a few sentiments here, I think this is a great idea although it is a little lengthy/overcomplicated. The first version is the one I'd go with, and then I'd pare it down significantly. IMO the unique "gimmick" of this god should be that your spells often become more powerful/chaotic/have different effects, such as some of the eldritch miscasts you mentioned, but the eldritch miscasts simply cannot be avoided even if you have 0% regular miscast rate.

Xom is kind of like this, insofar as there are significant downsides to worshipping him basically at all times. But, this guy could be different insofar as he's directly upgrading your *active* abilities at a cost to your sanity/soul/body/whatever, rather than just always being "on".

PS: One of the eldritch miscasts should be a random bad mutation, I think. The eldritch stuff should veer towards pretty bad stuff (worse as you use higher level spells), since your spells should also be enhanced in significant and unique ways. We're stepping a little bit into Ru's territory with the "sacrifice for power" thing, BUT it is markedly different from Ru in that you are risking sacrificing of yourself every time you use your abilities.

Anyway, tl;dr I like this as a concept and think it could fit in really well in the pantheon with some tweaks.

[archaeo]

I've split off the Nemelex argument into its own thread.