Portal Vault Concept: Jungle Temple (Serious)

[bcadren]

A bit of design space that isn't really really explored in crawl; extremely powerful, but stationary monsters you have to fight through. I'm pitching this as a portal vault for two reasons (1) all branches/unique vaults/etc. start as portals and (2) in some way it works better as a portal vault as it forces the player to go through the vault all at once, which would be more of a challenge than being able to run and return. If this ever was a branch, it would replace tomb, as it's core concept has the similar fixed elements of "squarish fixed vault full of traps" though the rest of the concept is completely different.

Flavor:

Our aesthetic is flooded, overgrown temple in a fetid swamp. Trees and vines covering ancient statues and jungle animals given free roam of the place.

Enemies:

Enemies in the Temple can be divided into 3 basic types: Plants, Statues and Animals. Common resistance checks: Corrosion, Poison, Cold.

Animals: Most the creatures within the temple that move around freely.

• Poison Dart Frogs - Faster than average in water and curare melee, nasty.
• Normal and Dire Elephants.
• Basic Dragons (Fire, Ice, Swamp).
• Hydrae

Plants: Most Plants are stationary, but respawn after enough time has passed; unless the boss has been killed. Because they respawn, they give no XP (made up for by the boss giving a lot, similar to The Royal Jelly). (Only Thorn Hunters give XP. Examples:

• Oklob Plants.
• Wandering Mushrooms.
• Thorn Hunter
• Living Tree - (This is technically a wall, not a monster). Tree that always sways like Awaken Forest was cast.
• Crawling Ivy - Spawns snaplashers from itself and has poison melee at close range.
• Fleshcatchers - Frail, stationary plants with heavy melee potential.
• Cryotenius Flowers - Shoot Freezing darts (harder base damn than Oklob Plant, but can be completely ignored with rC++ and decent AC); darts leave freezing clouds.

Statues: Many of these are very powerful, but they don't respawn if killed and are stationary. They are treated as stationary humanoids and may spawn with equipment.

• Animus Totem - Summons animals and smites.
• Ancient Manipulator - Dimension Anchor, Blink Allies Encircle.
• Arcane Golem - Uses various bolt spells; uses heal other on statues.
• Aggressive Templar - Powerful melee statue.
• Archer Edifice - Shoots a physical bow.

Traps:

The traps of the temple are vastly upgraded from the basic "you stepped on the wrong floor tile" traps. And are actually intended as a rework of traps in general.

• They are based primarily within WALL tiles, rather than floors.
• They are designed to force movement to avoid damage.

Example trap types:

• Dart trap: Fires curare tipped needles along a straight line, every 30 auts.
• Acid Spray: Places Acid Clouds occasionally.
• Boulder Trap: Creates a boulder which rolls along a set path. Boulders released every 50-100 auts. They move at speed 25-30 and deal huge damage on contact before dissipating (think Orb of Destruction that travels in a straight line).
• Spiked Wall: "The Walls are closing in on you"; used rarely, when used it's a large stretch of wall to force the player to move quickly or burn a blinking scroll to prevent near certain death. Being between the walls when they start crushing deal Titanic Slime Creature tier melee that cannot miss.

Layout:

• When you enter the portal vault you'll be in an open area of swamp outside the jungle temple. This area may have wandering dire elephants, thorn hunters, hornets and shambling mangroves.
  It's like the normal swamp, but mostly the hard and plant end of the spawn pool.
• All doors in the temple close and LOCK themselves behind you, to prevent abuse of LoS breaking in clearing the corridors.
• The floor of the temple is mostly a mix of stone (normal ground) and shallow water tiles; some limited (rare) deep water tiles may also spawn.
• The main hallways of the temple alternate between fast rooms and slow rooms; with a few rooms that are mostly empty to allow some rest (this isn't hell after all).
  • Fast Rooms use Spiked Wall, Boulder or other traps to force the player to leave the room quickly, negotiating position to mitigate damage, but rarely having time to kill many (or any) of the enemies in the room.
  • Slow Rooms require slow careful clearing to progress; being too full of traps and enemies to just charge through.
• At the end is a boss room, featuring a stationary boss creature; which summons snaplasher vines, fleshcatchers and oklobs (they grow and aren't affected by abjuration), casts Corrosive Bolt, Poisonous Cloud and Airstrike. Boss is considered a plant, has no EV and low AC, but high base health and Regen.
• The portal vault's exit only opens on killing the boss; without earth magic abuse to escape, it's impossible to leave the temple without completing it.

Notes:

• Upon entering this place, while worshiping Fedhas Madash, players will be warned that Fedhas's power cannot reach the plants in this place (no pacification of the dangerous plants within).

[tedric]

Great flavor and some of the individual enemies sound cool, but having to beat the boss to escape makes it an extremely spoilery set of resistance/equipment/ability checks. Also some of the traps still suffer from the trivial-but-tedious problem (e.g. counting auts instead of tracking tiles you've stepped on). Sounds like it would be great for an action-RPG but maybe not a great fit for Crawl?

[goodcoolguy]

Unique Concept: Yahoo Serious (Serious)