The Tavern

I can foresee a rain of stones coming down on me from every corner, but I had this idea floating around in my head, and someone else just made a proposal for a mummy buff, so what the hell, here is mine.


Make mummies unique among the undead in that they are allowed to join good gods.

Mummies have always been holy, religious things, and while that can be true in Crawl for neutral and evil gods, the concept of a mummified person makes perfect sense for solar/light/pure religions too. The mummy concept doesn't include a predatory lifestyle (such as vampires or ghouls) nor are they inherently touched by evil (such as demonspawn). Even better, by definition, they aren't predatory at all, unless you count mummies using Sublimation of Blood, Vampiric Draining or vampiric weapons, which are by themselves shunned by the good gods anyways.

In fact, mummies can't even drink blood, commit cannibalism, eat the flesh of sentients, gain mutations or cast self-transmutations. All this means that, behavior-wise, the good gods could rest assured that any mummies dedicated to them would actually be much more unlikely to offend them than mortals.

The rationale behind this could be that mummies aren't necessarily animated by necromancy, but can be created through advanced burial rituals too, deities willing.

An in-game argument for this is that mummies *can* be touched by the light of Elyvilon.

Caveats:
Holy energies from god abilities (such as cleansing flame, recite or sanctuary) could exact a toll on mummies, similar to how some necromantic effects harm the living. Elyvilon's self-healing could have a reduced effect, similar to how the healing invocations are less effective on the undead. Also, holy wrath and retribution from good gods would be much, much harsher on a mummy.

Other, non-god related undead limitations still apply in full: Mummies would still be unable to wield holy wrath weapons, and other holy effects would have their usual negative effects. Really, good god abilities are the polar opposite of necromancy (that's why there's no spellcasting holy magic) so holy mummies would be in a very similar position to a living necromancer without being an exact mirror image (wasn't one of the design philosophy guidelines the "subtle symmetry"?)

Basically, holy mummies would have to face:

-Undead forced restrictions on holy items and effects.
-Undead limitations on transmutations, necromancy and other effects that "only affect the living".
-Religious commandments on evil / chaotic / necromantic effects.
-Mummy-exclusive food clock related restrictions.

...quite a bunch of restrictions piled onto more restrictions, in exchange for better access to healing, stat and rot healing, cure confusion and stat buffs; which are three things that mummies are hard-pressed to find.

Fedhas Madash would still reject mummies on the grounds of violating the natural cycle of birth and death. While we're at it, we could set mummies' invocations aptitude to 0, just like their necro aptitude.

I think there's a guy selling stones on the way out, don't forget your fake beards either

Foodless Elyvilon worshippers are very problematic.

IIRC, the limitation on Gods for undead was implemented because of OP foodless Ely and TSO worshippers. TSO isn't a problem now I believe, but with Ely you are just going to pacify dudes all the day.

Thanks for the sensible feedback

Hmmm... Right, right. I can see that this happens, but why is it grossly more overpowered than any other hungerless god abilities, spellcasting or evokations?

I'm not saying it isn't, I'm just asking why. Elyvilon's healing abilities have an MP cost and a piety cost too, that's still one cost more than spells to worry about. Trying to pacify everything as a living character has had my toon starving, but it has also costed me piety stars at the worst moment. Self-healing abilities could work at 0.75 effectiveness, just like the factor for undead with healing other, and the "same species" case could simply not apply (and if it's applied, it would be applied only seldomly).

The piety and/or MP cost of "heal other" abilities could be raised for mummies, with the rationale that they have to be fueled with something, and food isn't there. This would also make them much less spammable, which I gather is part of the problem. I am aware that this would be special-case-ing, though.

Clearly you haven't played an elyvilon game.

The only thing about Ely that pretends to be balanced is that you spend an absolutely enormous amount of nutrition over the course of your game to use Ely abilities.

Special-casing Ely to heal mummies less is awful and shouldn't happen, just like it shouldn't have happened with Dj.

Sorry but I had to correct your sentence above



So really, Elyvilon is *the* conclusive argument against my case, right? Not so much going for Zin or the Shining One... I can see what you mean about special-casing, and it's true; but your argument also means there is a precedent. Since now we have two hungerless species, there is actually an opportunity for standardizing rather than special-casing.

When I played Elyvilon, it didn't feel balanced, it felt like the Friendly Dungeon Serial Butcher, but I don't want to shoot myself in the foot by making this OT.

Yes, the standardization should be that dj is also not allowed to worship ely because dj of ely is actually even more silly than dj itself.

I would honestly be much more in favour of fedhas accepting mummies than TSO accepting mummies since TSO is so anti-undead (whereas fedhas doesn't really hate undead except he sometimes does and it's not really clear why he dislikes mu or vp). I guess mu of zin would be ok though?

Remove Elyvilon.
Problem solved!

Well the real problem with this proposal, for me, is that there isn't any argument *for* your case. I don't think you've followed steps 4 or 5 from here: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7178

which is probably the most common reason for topics in this section to fail.

Instead of removing ely as a choice for Djinni, we should just up the MP cost for them. That way they CAN pacify things hungerlessly, but it'll take more than 1 or 2 of their health to do it. Additonally, the peity cost for self healing should probley be raised, as spending 1 hp to gain over 1 hp needs to be balanced. Orrrr, maybe they just don't work for ely.