High Dwarves: the race nobody asked for


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Spider Stomper

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Joined: Friday, 17th April 2015, 16:22

Post Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 07:11

High Dwarves: the race nobody asked for

Ages ago, a small nation of restless dwarves created a system of self-sustaining, magically floating landmasses, and flew away from the world at large, unseen for centuries. Their aerial strongholds turned out to be less than perfectly self-sustaining, and they crashed back into the earth recently. Due to their separation from the earth's magical field, they have lost the capacity to hold mana, and instead must rely on magical rods to cast spells.

High Dwarves are a race with no MP and no spell slots, and are thus incapable of memorizing any spells. To compensate, they have the ability to convert wands into rods: automatically-recharging evocables that hold spells.

-A rod can contain one spell, and costs one wand to make. The properties of the wand do not affect the rod it creates: only the spell chosen to base it off of. A book with the desired spell is required to make a rod.
-Rods do not have to be wielded to be used, and recharge over time.
-Rod spells determine fail rate, spellpower, and hunger cost in the same way as normal spells, except they use Evocations instead of Spellcasting.
-Zapping rods ignores armor penalties (probably too absurd)
-The number of charges a rod has depends on the spell in question. More wands can be sacrificed to increase the capacity of a rod.
-Holding two rods with the same spell is impossible; their magical polarities repel each other (no lugging 50 rods of firestorm around).
-To prevent using the floor for more inventory space, dropping a rod blanks its charges (they aren't designed for contact with the earth).

-Trog forbids the creation and use of rods.
-All backgrounds except Berserker start with a wand of nothing. Magic backgrounds begin with two wands of nothing and one rod already primed with their level 1 spell.
-Evocables that normally cost MP cause skill draining.
-Invocations have their MP costs waived. The bigger, more dangerously spammable ones (drain life, slouch, etc.) cause exhaustion instead.


Aptitudes are mostly Dwarfy with some 1 AM changes:

-1 Exp
+0 HP
-- MP

-1 Fighting
-1 Short Blades
+0 Long Blades
+1 Axes
+0 Maces & Flails
-1 Polearms
-1 Staves
-1 Unarmed Combat
-3 Bows
+1 Crossbows
-1 Throwing
+1 Slings (spoiler this entire block is just deep dwarf apts lol)

-1 Armor
-1 Dodging
+1 Shields

-- Spellcasting
+1 Conjurations
+0 Hexes
-1 Charms
+0 Summonings
-2 Necromancy (instead of burying their dead they just dropped them down onto the surface, so aspiring necromancers struggled to get material to practice with)
+1 Translocations
-1 Transmutations
-1 Fire Magic
-1 Ice Magic
+3 Air Magic
-3 Earth Magic
-2 Poison Magic

+1 Evocations (they should be better in this than deep dwarf probably but +3 in a hybrid spellcasting+evo skill seems like overkill)
+1 Invocations
+1 Stealth

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dracos369, nago, Sar

Crypt Cleanser

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Joined: Saturday, 5th December 2015, 06:56

Post Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 08:05

Re: High Dwarves: the race nobody asked for

OP, why not to make a Pakellas rework instead of this whole mess?

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Sar

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Joined: Friday, 6th July 2012, 12:48

Post Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 08:21

Re: High Dwarves: the race nobody asked for

Because "High Dwarves" is a funny name.

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Cimanyd, dracos369, Elitist, nago

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Joined: Friday, 25th November 2011, 07:36

Post Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 21:05

Re: High Dwarves: the race nobody asked for

It seems a bit too complex, and I can't help but think you are pulling a fast one on yourself by trying to design a race which can't use magic, and then coming up with an entirely new system to let them cast any magic they want. Either they can't use magic, or they can, but don't come up with an entirely secondary method to use all the spells in the game without mana.

If you want to preserve the spirit of the race and remove 90% of the rules, how about this: They recharge wands over time as they gain experience. Similar to the elemental evokers, clearing a floor or two of monsters will eventually add some charges to a wand in inventory, selected based on whatever has the lowest % of charges currently. So over time, if you hold a reasonable amount of wands, they'll stay fully charged. We could possibly allow them to craft a wand at level 21 if you wanted them to get some special wand which is stronger (wand of firestorm!).

Wand recharging + craft a wand at some point manages to do mostly similar things, without all the complexity. It's also a lot less powerful - I feel the original proposal is going to end up with multiple level 6-9 spell wands and get overpowered pretty quick, but that would depend on the details. It would be interesting to be able to make a low exp "compact" melee character, but get to pick a high level spell you could cast easily. Freezing cloud is really strong on melee characters, for example.

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Abyss Ambulator

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Joined: Friday, 18th April 2014, 01:41

Post Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 23:45

Re: High Dwarves: the race nobody asked for

No magic, but you can make rods? Sounds pretty powerful, you don't even need to pick a god for the game to prevent you from making poor skilling choices!
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