Proposal: Umsala, God of Afterlife

[Noisewar]

Umsala is the neutral god of spiritual communion and transportation, who gathers and ferries souls across the underworld river to the afterlife that awaits.

Purpose:
Provide a viable god choice to broad race/class combinations that offers AOE offense and rewards a playstyle around engaging enemies in the open and tactical positioning.

Appreciates:
- Chance to gain piety for each soul gathered.
- Killing ghosts and wraiths.

Deprecates:
- Creating or controlling any non-living beings.
- Summoning wraiths or ghosts, or attacking neutral ones.
- Inactivity (lose 1 piety every 200 turns)
- Abandoning Umsala (penance)

Note: Any mention of "living" denotes any enemy type except "non-living".


Given Abilities:
- Soul Whisperer
Soul Sense - (passive) - Upon killing a living enemy, there is a chance a soul is released into a nearby empty space (which must be empty). Higher HD enemies may release additional souls. Collecting spirits by standing next to them increases the player's HP and MP regeneration temporarily, especially when collected in succession.

* - Echo Medium
River of Reverence - (10 MP, 300 Hunger) - Summon a Spirit Guide next to the player. This spirit will create a glowing path of shallow water to the next nearest Spirit Guide (if possible). This water does not slow the player, and all living beings on the path are silenced. Only 3 Spirit Guides are allowed per floor.

** - Psyche Channel
Warding (passive) - Player gains the warding intrinsic.

*** - Soul Diviner
Echoes of Self - (4-8 Piety, 15 MP, 25% current HP, 50 Hunger per soul) - Sacrifices 25% of the player's current HP to turn all souls in LOS into clones of the player with HP equal to the sacrifice. These clones only deal up to (Invocation / 2) damage per attack, and do not cast spells.

**** - Astral Mindwalker
Astral Vision - (2-6 Piety, 100 Hunger) - Grants shared vision with a random one of the most dangerous living enemies on a floor for one turn. If monster is awake, it will make a visual stealth check from your position, potentially becoming aware of you.

***** - Afterlife Docent
Emancipate - (12 Piety, Breath) - Detonates all souls in LOS, causing them to explode and deal 1d(Invocation/2) damage to all living enemies around them, with a chance to cause distraction.

****** - Netherworld Conduit
Greater warding (passive) - When summoned enemies are warded, there is a chance (based on piety) that it will change allegiance and become an ally. This only applies to enemies that would have been living.


Punishments
- While under penance, killing any living enemy has a chance to spawn hostile wisps, shadows, phantoms, spectres, or even player ghosts.
- Undead or necromantic enemies have heightened ability to detect player.
- Using any vocal abilities including speech, casting spells, reading scrolls, praying, invocations, etc. has a chance to afflict the player with drain status.

[Tiktacy]

We certainly have had a lot of god proposals recently.

[Noisewar]

We certainly have had a lot of god proposals recently.

Yeah sorry, had it Evernoted for copy paste, and didn't notice that trend til after I submit

[reaver]

This is definitely one of the best if not the best god proposal the Tavern has ever been graced with.

Soul Sense definitely has the potential to be a major mechanic on a similar scale to Ash curses or Chei slowing.

There are only a couple things that I feel could use a bit more polishing in this proposal:

River of Reverence seems a little niche. I think having the spirit guides make a single line would make it too easy for monster to get off the paths. Furthermore, this would make fighting in corridor better due to control of the terrain, which is against the design goals. Focusing on the "3 guides per level" thing: What if making 3 guides caused the silence effect on the entire area enclosed? I think that would encourage more strategic use in open terrain, similar to Corrupt.

The Flavor is a tiny bit off. Crawl has a very well established idea of souls (see Yred's Enslave Souls), which high HD monsters releasing multiples contracts. Echoes of Self doesn't really make sense as cloning yourself; I don't see a reason they couldn't be generic ghosts. I'd focus more on the "Astral Plane" and "Life Energy" aspects of the backstory.

Changing the allegiance of summons is just something which doesn't work in Crawl. For example, you could dance in front of boggarts until you had an army to take on a tough enemy. I don't think this idea is salvageable. Maybe it could be replaced by an ability which lets you move the Souls around to better arrangements?

This is the only god proposal I've seen on the Tavern that I feel could actually make it into the game. It would be a long march with a lot of changes, but there is potential here to create a god as fun as Ash.

[Noisewar]

Thanks, high praise!

I think your feedback is spot on.

- River of Reverence was something I originally wanted to also give some proximity vision down the path so that you could utilize all three entrance stairs to a floor to recon, themed as spirit guides. If the silence were of the entire enclosed area, that effect could be far too large. I agree silencing a corridor as counter to the design goals, but doing that is not without it's risks for the player, as you in the open you could simply step off the path.

- Flavor is definitely off... took a backseat to the mechanics, and the idea of spiritual communion is somewhat abstract. Basically, I see Omshala's philosophy as the Fedhas equivalent for souls, a neutral shepherd that dislikes things that disrupt the natural transition from life to afterlife.

- I didn't think of exploiting Greater Warding, very good point, although I wonder in practice how useful it would be considering summons don't last forever, and it's still chance based so probably not the best strategy? Also, demon summons in particular don't need to strike you to damage you. Might have to wizlab experiment this.

[twelwe]

soul sense should have a guaranteed spawn 2-3 tiles away from the player so the regeneration effect never starts immediately upon killing a living being, which would bee to close to the demonspawn mutation and existing god mp/hp for kills (veh,mak). Likewise, a soul should only linger for a few turns and dissapate if not collected so that collection becomes a tactical choice during battle. This either kills off the potential of Afterlife Docent or forces it to be just as primary a use of souls as collecting them, in which case you should buff the ability massively - say, like IMB in that it can AOE but the player will not be affected by the damage. I would move Afterlife Docent to ** and move Soul Diviner up to *****

I don't understand Netherworld Conduit, it does sound like every summoned monster in los would be affected anyway so why make it conditional based on whether you have warding, when warding is a guaranteed ability at **? Or do you use "warding" in some other sense when describing Netherworld Conduit?

[Noisewar]

soul sense should have a guaranteed spawn 2-3 tiles away from the player so the regeneration effect never starts immediately upon killing a living being, which would bee to close to the demonspawn mutation and existing god mp/hp for kills (veh,mak). Likewise, a soul should only linger for a few turns and dissapate if not collected so that collection becomes a tactical choice during battle.

Definitely yes and yes, that's how I imagine it. Also, in case it's not clear, souls will choose a space within range to spawn, and if there are none, they don't spawn. This makes corridor fighting a lot poorer at generating souls... or even generating them on the other side of walls.

I don't understand Netherworld Conduit, it does sound like every summoned monster in los would be affected anyway so why make it conditional based on whether you have warding, when warding is a guaranteed ability at **?

Warding in DCSS happens when you are struck in melee, to my knowledge, where it then cancels out the attack.

[Volteccer_Jack]

Emancipate - (12 Piety, Breath) - Detonates all souls in LOS, causing them to explode and deal 1d(Invocation/2) damage to all living enemies around them, with a chance to cause distraction.

Obviously numbers are subject to change, but I'm wondering how powerful this ability is meant to be. For comparison, Yred's Drain Life invocation does something like double the damage of this ability, and it also heals the player, and it hits all non-rN monsters in LOS regardless of positioning, and has a low piety cost (although it does cost 6 mp as well).

[Noisewar]

Emancipate - (12 Piety, Breath) - Detonates all souls in LOS, causing them to explode and deal 1d(Invocation/2) damage to all living enemies around them, with a chance to cause distraction.

Obviously numbers are subject to change, but I'm wondering how powerful this ability is meant to be. For comparison, Yred's Drain Life invocation does something like double the damage of this ability, and it also heals the player, and it hits all non-rN monsters in LOS regardless of positioning, and has a low piety cost (although it does cost 6 mp as well).

Yeah, reasonable powerful, hence the breath cost. When I math it, at max Invocations, Drain Life deals something like 18 dmg average to all enemies in LOS. Emancipate deals damage to enemies 1 tile away from a soul, but the same enemy can be hit by multiple souls. Hitting an enemy with 3 souls would do an average 20.25 dmg, and the distraction caused could be very useful. Also, no piety cost. I can see it needed some more damage tho.