Monday, 26th March 2018, 15:56 by Alphaeus
Hmm...
What if instead of just summon forest, Fedhas was more of a Druid-esque god?
For example, you gain nature-based abilities as you level up. Summoning/awakening a forest is only one of those.
* -- Nature's Spawn (Passive): Can walk and attack through plants and trees like open squares. All plants are friendly.
** -- Green Thumb (Passive): plants spawn around you (LOS) passively as you walk; number, frequency, and plant durability scales with piety. Grants no direct benefit, but does serve as a kind of passive defense, since you can walk/attack through them but other creatures can't. Even at max piety, though, the plants are only so durable and cannot spawn on an occupied square. By lategame a melee creature would still waste a couple turns to get through them. Of note -- these plants are permanent, or at least have a long duration.
*** -- Summon Forest (Action): you summon trees, water, and mists/fog around you. Scales with piety.
------ Nature's Scion (Passive): as Nature's Own, except the following -- you gain a swim speed/no penalty from water, rSteam, Poison Immunity. Additionally, you can see through any mists/fog/clouds, though creatures cannot see you.
**** -- Lesser Druid (Action): can gain plant-based boosts, i.e. the confusing attack from the shroom form, or an acid attack from oklob, etc.
***** -- Awaken Forest (Action): you can awaken the forests that you summon, like the spell. In this case, though, it works more like Trog's Berskeking ability, in that it has to potential to be extended every time you kill an enemy.
****** -- Greater Druid (Action): as Lesser Druid, except the boosts last longer/are more power; additionally, you can the ability to blink to any plant in LOS (at an HP cost like the Blink mutation).
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The concept of the OP is to get Fedhas to be actually useful while still thematic, so I'm posting this here to try to flesh out the idea beyond a single spell of questionable usefulness. Fedhas would now be a tactical god. Shutting down enemy movement and attacks with plants would be surprisingly powerful as a defensive mechanism, and Summon Forest and Nature's Own/Scion work to be a great defense option as well to create choke points, fog-on-demand, and water/deep water. The Lesser/Greater Druid and Awaken Forest come along as your primary offensive mechanisms, rather powerful overall but using Summon Forest/Awaken Forest would have high costs (hunger, presumably, since Fedhas already prohibits the only races that are immune to hunger). Lastly, Greater Druid's ability to blink, paired with your generation of plants, would provide a superb escape option -- the costs (the blinking would cost piety as well as HP) would prevent abuse since I'd want it to be set that 3 uses or so would drop you below six stars.
Also of note is that most abilities are passive, and Summon/Awaken Forest would be based off of MP and Hunger rather than piety (Awaken Forest would have a berserk-like cooldown, though). This would encourage using them regularly, but the MP costs should be sufficiently high than you cannot spam them. *Maybe* apply draining here.
Lesser/Greater Druid -- the only other action/duration abilities -- would have piety costs to prevent abuse.
Thoughts?