"Heaven"?

[Jk]

In the days before I read all the spoilers I could find to figure out how to stop dying on the first half-dozen levels, I remember first encountering an early Angel in the dungeon behind some glass, and it smiting me to near-death before I ran away. Exciting! It was the same sort of excitement as the first time I saw a demon. It made me think, "uh oh, I bet there is a place where these guys are basically pouring out of the walls." And there is for demons; abyss, hell, pan. Not the same for the holy.

Has there been any thought to gateways to a good-aligned realm? Perhaps as the ultimate challenge for unholy and undead characters? Maybe where the characters of good-aligned gods have things turn neutral a la Slime? Where torment is as mean an attack as you can imagine?

This must have come up at some discussion already, but a forum search didn't turn it up, so I figured I'd toss it out there!

[Galefury]

Recently more holy monsters were added, but afaik these are only in ZotDef for now. I saw someone suggest a divine bureaucracy area, possibly in some pan or abyss related thread. That wouldn't exactly be heaven though, the idea was to have rapidly changing conducts. There was no discussion about it either.

I think it could be a pretty cool area, and I thought about it for a while. I think something Pan-like would work, but with every level being governed by 2-3 gods (who not necessarily like each other). All other gods have no power there, including your char's god. Of course the gods who do have power in that area would have more power than in the dungeon. Their conducts might be more strict, and any violation could lead to short but violent wrath (times out quickly once you go back to the dungeon but really screws you while you are on that level, and could be dodged by going through a portal to an area where this god holds no power). The portals to new areas could each keep one governing god the same (and announce this in their description), so players would have some control over what conducts they want to follow. Of course these chains could be randomly broken.

The branch could be a random or chosen alternative to Pan. Runes could be introduced via themed shrine levels with big rune vaults, guarded by minions and champions of single gods or whole coalitions, which you would have to defeat (or dodge) obeying the gods conducts. Each shrine could have its own named rune (bloody, holy, mighty, black, white, green, ...), and randomly four/five of these are generated. Random divine champions or avatars could be introduced as a parallel to panlords, and they could sometimes guard a divine rune.

[KoboldLord]

I think the most up-to-date stuff is here:

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... nster:holy

Rather than a take-off of pop culture Cotton Candy Heaven, were a hypothetical holy branch ever instituted I would think it would be better to emulate the Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy version of the idea. Which is to say, Heaven is the place where the laws of the universe are set down and ordered, and The Law does not care about you. Zin may be both benevolent and nominally in charge, but the continued operation of the very laws of reality itself is far more important than the fate of any worshipper, even one on a vital mission to retrieve the Orb of Zot.

The dominant race in this Celestial Bureaucracy should be, as you might expect, the humble troll. Far more intelligent than the popcorn trolls infesting the Dungeon of Mount Zot, these trolls move paperwork from stack to stack in the appropriate forum, ensuring that every document is signed and every signature is notarized. Misbehavior in these hallowed halls is harshly punished, whether or not the broken rule actually makes sense.

[Jk]

I dig these thoughts. Totally agreed about it not being a "heavenly" heaven, but something more like a holy branch / divine branch. Maybe something like a holy vestibule, and one level for TSO, one for Zin, and one for Elyvilon, each with a theme corresponding to their fluff.

[seth]

It's hard to imagine any Demonspawn or Undead lasting long when surrounded by Angels and Daevas with holy wrath weapons. I would be down with a "Sanctuary" portal, but I like the mystique Angels and Daevas have when you typically only see them wandering around the Abyss, slaughtering demons and other evil things.

[KoboldLord]

The biggest problem with TSO-Heaven is the fact that one of the perks she grants to worshippers is to pacify angelic beings. It's a serious problem for some characters to randomly trivialize an entire branch just because they chose the right deity back at the Temple. That's a huge chunk of gameplay those characters miss out on, and the free loot makes the gameplay in the rest of the game much less interesting. Slime and Jiyva have such a relationship, I'll grant, but that's a little bit more manageable because a Jiyva-worshipper will have missed out on a huge amount of loot to get to that point, so the free loot is really just replacing some of what was lost. I don't think the Jiyva experience would successfully generalize to 'all good gods'.

[XuaXua]

I've hit the holy angel ziggurat level and I gotta say, way too many undefensible smite attacks. I can't possibly imagine an entire level or two like that.

[MrMisterMonkey]

I take it you haven't been to hellpan, land of irresistible hellfire and torment.

The new holies mean there's more than just smiting, too.