Defile Altars

[Silk]

The wrath of the Crawl gods is one of the fine challenges Crawl has to offer - but IMO there are few situation where it makes sense to risk it. In order to get the angry deities a bit more involved, why not offer the player a chance to provoke them, i.e. by going to one of their altars and corrupting it (or sanctifying it, for the evil gods). Of course the reward would need to be sufficiently high to make this worthwhile. Either by offering a large amount of XP - or by a lot of piety for the current god (in cases where the altar of a polar opposite is tampered).

Would this be implementable and in line with Crawl philosophy?

[One-Eyed Jack]

I think some of the proposed demigod changes involve stuff like this.

[sardonica]

This is a cool idea.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Unless it was scrapped, a plan overhaul to Lugonu involved corrupting Altars. But that first required an overhaul to gods' wrath.

[Silk]

Für Demigods and Lugonu it makes a lot of sense. If this is already being implemented, I would in addition suggest for Yred/Kiku/Makhleb vs. the Good Gods to be able to sabotage their altars. At least the good gods could benefit a lot from engaging in the battle against evil early on.

[Jabberwocky]

Followers of Trog being able to defile alters of Sif Muna and Vehumet would make sense.

[IronJelly]

I don't know...

With the exception of Lugonu (and MAYBE Jiyva), the Gods are supposed to have some sort of understanding with one another that this breaks. I'm sure I read that somewhere. It's only a few steps from something like this to "Trog should smite spellcasters for going near his altar" or the like. As a mechanic, it's interesting, but it would turn altars into piety bombs, and would make people even less likely to ever switch Gods. There's not a shortage of piety anyway.

I think as a specialized ability for Lugonu worshippers and/or Demigods it would work, but the other species/background combos aren't in the dungeon to play divine politics. Oh, and Beogh could allow his orc followers to defile other altars as well.

[roctavian]

I was thinking about something like this recently, and before I got distracted by games-which-are-not-Crawl, I started to draft up a wiki proposal for a Vaults-depth portal vault called the "Inimical Temple." The general idea is a god wrath level, wherein you'd suffer some random wrath and fight various priests/high priests/god-appropriate monsters. The problem is, some god wraths wouldn't be interesting and many of them are too similar.

I figured a lot of them could be combined -- Zin, Ely and TSO could share one wrath portal vault, Trog and Oka another, Yred and Kiku, and probably Makhleb and Vehumet. I don't think every god necessarily has to be represented, though we'd want to make sure and include interesting stuff like Fedhas wrath.

Anyone else have thoughts on these lines?

[Pteriforever]

Unless it was scrapped, a plan overhaul to Lugonu involved corrupting Altars. But that first required an overhaul to gods' wrath.

If they did that, I'd play AKs just so I could smash Trog altars.