Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 718
Joined: Monday, 14th February 2011, 05:35
ZOMBIE HANDS (serious proposal)
While spell school themes aren't entirely strict, they serve as rough guidelines that can give those schools identity. Necromancy traditionally incorporates three themes in crawl: self-sacrifice in exchange for power, aggressive debilitation, and undead allies. Currently, the balance seems heavily skewed towards undead allies; in my opinion this is the least interesting of the three and can make necromancy just seem like Summoning #2. The following spell proposal attempts to shift the balance more towards aggressive debilitation.
Zombie Hands - L7 earth/necromancy
Uses targeting identical to fire storm to immediately constrict all monsters in an area (constriction power scaling with spellpower).
"Decaying hands burst forth from the ground and attempt to drag all life back into the earth."
Thoughts:
* This spell should be fun - it should feel good when you first memorize it and when you cast it. It should be strong enough to wipe out weaker monsters and to do significant damage to moderately strong monsters no matter what.
* Monsters will not attempt to escape the constriction if they are not moving, so the player can choose between using this spell to temporarily immobilize monsters/deal some damage or to stand and 'tank' the monsters while the zombie hands kill them.
* This spell should affect monsters only, so zombie hands can be cast centered on the player if desired.
* I don't care if this spell affects flying monsters or not, that decision is mainly flavor.
* Zombie hands should possibly fail without costing a turn if you attempt to cast it while it's already active ("The earth is already roiling with zombie hands!") Otherwise it would succeed and reapply the original constriction, but is this even good to do?
Why is this spell two schools? Spells are generally dual school for a few different reasons: flavor, gating the spell, or to create interesting build choices for certain characters. Zombie hands seems to fulfill those three criteria.