You can view previous play-testing posts here (you might need to scroll to get past the copy of this post)! Tune in tomorrow for the “great big list” of changes.

We thought we’d take a bit of time out of our busy lives to reflect on the religious aspects of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: if you’ve played a recent version of trunk, you may have noticed two new temple Gods1, and if you’ve ventured into the Pits of Slime, you may have a third new God!

These three new Gods are Fedhas Madash, the Plant God; Cheibriados, the Slow God; and Jiyva, the Slime God. This article is going to give a quick run down of each of them, their flavours, their gifts, and the abilities they grant. Please keep in mind that these Gods are still being developed, and that the abilities listed in this post may not be in their final form.

1 A “temple God” is defined as one that is found specifically in the Ecumenical Temple (or in overflow altars, as discussed in last week’s post). Non-temple Gods include Lugonu and Beogh, as well as the newly-introduced Jiyva.

Fedhas Madash

We’ll start by looking at Fedhas Madash, God of plant and fungal life. The most noticeable, and indeed the first, gift gained is that all plant life in the dungeon (including Oklob plants, hooray!) turn neutral, and you gain the ability to walk and fire through all neutral and allied plants.

Fedhas likes it when you speed up decomposition (more on this shortly), and dislikes it when you (or your allies) destroy plants, when allied (though not neutral) plants die, or if you use Necromancy (including Necromantic spells, abilities, wands and weapons). Most of Fedhas’s abilities are linked to plant growth and natural life, and some require fruit to use properly.

Something you may have noticed in recent builds of trunk (and new since our last stable release) is that corpses have a tendency to grow fungi while decomposing. These toadstools are short-lived, and will die after a few turns. These toadstools are also linked in to Fedhas’s first ability, Decomposition.

This ability allows you to speed up this natural process, causing all corpses in line of sight to instantly decompose. This sped-up process also has the effect of generating a large number of neutral toadstools, which can provide interesting (albeit fragile) cover for escaping large mobs of monsters.

Here’s a quick run-down of the rest of Fedhas’s abilities and gifts:

  • Evolution allows you to “upgrade” a plant (using a smite-based targeting interface). You can upgrade toadstools and fungi into wandering mushrooms, and plants and bushes into Oklob plants. Evolving a neutral plant will cause it to become friendly.
  • Sunlight allows you to call sunlight over an area of the dungeon; monsters touched by this will be easier to hit, while deep water will evaporate to shallow water, and shallow water will evaporate to floor. Plants have a chance of growing when water is evaporated.
  • Growth uses fruit to grow a ring of friendly plants around the player. The hit-points of the plants will be increased dependent on your Invocations skill.
  • Reproduction creates friendly giant spores from corpses in line of sight.
  • Rain creates shallow water around you, or deepens shallow water to deep water. At high invocations skill, it can also create rain clouds, which have a similar effect over a longer duration of time.

The ability to shoot through plants, and the ability to grow “cover”, marks Fedhas as the premier god for all users of ranged combat (including spells as well as missiles). Fedhas has three types of retribution:

  1. Corpses in line of sight will produce hostiles spores, which will then attack you.
  2. The elements will be invoked against you, the equivalent of an ice, earth, fire and air miscast.
  3. Hostile plants (biased towards oklobs) will grow around you; this effect will only happen when abandoning Fedhas, never when simply under penance.

All previously neutral or allied plants will also turn hostile upon abandonment or excommunication.

Cheibriados the Contemplative

Cheibriados is the God of the Slow and Contemplative. Cheibriados likes it when you move slowly, kill monsters that are fast, eat when you are already full, and dislikes it when you hasten yourself or others, or use items that make you unnaturally quick. The first ability that you gain when joining the worship of Cheibriados is the ability to give your armour the “ponderous” brand.

The “ponderous” ego is quite rare, and usually only found on body armour. Cheibriados’s “Make Ponderous” ability can apply this ego to any piece of armour, however, and grants a +2 movement delay. You can use “Make Ponderous” to fine-tune your speed against that of monsters, which is useful for some of Cheibriados’s other abilities.

Cheibriados will support the wearing of ponderous armour. This grants a resistance and +1 to your stats for each of the first three items that you wear; the resistances are, respectively, life protection, cold resistance, and fire resistance; he will support one item for each of the piety stars that you have.

Here’s a quick run-down of the rest of Cheibriados’s abilities:

  • Your metabolism is slowed considerably (similar to that of the first level of the slow metabolism mutation).
  • Bend Time allows you to slow down monsters that are adjacent to you.
  • Slouch causes damage to monsters in sight that are faster than you; it may cause extra damage to monsters in sight who are hasted or otherwise magically moving fast.
  • Step From Time removes you completely from the “flow” of time. Monsters will move about and forget you, plants will grow and die, corpses will rot and decay, until you are returned to the normal flow of time.

Cheibriados’s wrath consists of:

  • Putting you to sleep for a period of time. This is unresistible.
  • Slows and exhausts you (similar to post-berserk exhaustion). This is also unresistible.

Jiyva the Shapeless

Jiyva is the most different of our new Gods, the ancient and chaotic god of all Slimes. The first thing that you’ll notice upon converting is the gift of a new jelly (a “fellow slime”). The second is that your method of gaining piety is similar to that of Nemelex Xobeh’s, in that you sacrifice items to Jiyva, but the method by which you do this is very, very different.

Instead of directly sacrificing items, you can summon jellies or lead them over items for them to eat. All slimes (eyeballs on the G glyph, and slimes on the J glyph) will eat items, regardless of their previous item-eating state. Similarly to Xom, Jiyva will randomly mutate you; Jiyva will also shuffle your stats randomly.

Praying will temporary halt the progress of nearby slimes, preventing them from moving and also from eating items.

Jiyva’s other abilities are:

  • Request a jelly, allows you to summon a hungry follower.
  • Slimify coats your weapon in slime, allowing you to use this to turn some foes into slimes.
  • Remove a bad mutation at will, at a cost to both MP and piety.
  • While at “royal jelly” status (maximum piety), hits that take 25% or more of your maximum HP will generate neutral, high-end jellies, similar to the effect of the unique royal jelly.

Upon abandonment, all friendly and neutral slimes will turn hostile, and some of the following may occur:

  • Gives you a random, bad mutation.
  • Slimifies a hostile monster nearby.
  • Floods you with mutagenic radiation, and has a chance of transforming you into a bat, a spider, or a statue, and locking you in that transformation until it ends.
  • Summons hostile eyeballs of all types.

And that’s it for gods! Tune in tomorrow for this week’s blow-by-blow write-up, and a short piece of glyphs!