0.8 will feature a new god, called Ashenzari. The goals when designing the god were twofold:

  • Provide (some) divinations, as the spell school got axed in 0.7.
  • An introverted/laidback god: many deities ask for a lot attention by the player, e.g. praying, sacrificing, training Invocations. There was demand for a god who is not like that.

The current incarnation meets both goals. Here is a list of properties:

  • Piety is gained by exploration. Piety gain is considerably faster if you wear some cursed items. (Remove Curse scrolls can be turned into Curse Foo scrolls. There are now also Curse Jewellery scrolls.) Piety drops over time.
  • All abilities but two are passive and focus on detection. You will map your surroundings, see presence of nearby items and monsters, and identify items.
  • One active ability is scrying: this turns all walls into glass to look though, but only for you! So you can have a look into some vault before deciding whether it is worth or reasonable to storm it.
  • The other active ability is about reskilling. You can sacrifice one skill in order to boost another. The interface for this should be very straightforward, thanks to a completely reworked skills screen. Needless to say, neither ability can be abused (e.g. you cannot smite through scryed walls, and you won’t produce virtual xp by reskilling cross-trained skills.)

What is the theme of such a god? The question is not at all rhetorical, there have been many complaints in advance about the concept.

  • Ashenzari seems very unflexible when it comes to the actual world. Presumably the deity is cursed in some way as well. Hence, followers can demonstrate dedication by donning cursed garb and gear.
  • On the other hand, the god is one of knowledge. Pious followers can tap some of this power so as to see more than their neighbours will.
  • The pinnacle of outward torpor yet inward flexibility is reskilling. While Ashenzari cannot change items or threaten monsters for you, there is help to change your way of life to accomodate to new situations.

What does it boil down to in actual play? I am happy to have won a SpAs of Ashenzari. Here are my impressions:

  • There is a curse mini-game. Scrolls of Remove Curse and Curse Foo are valuable, throughout the game. I found this interesting in all of my testing games. An unfortunate Demonspawn happened to have only two rings early on, Hunger and Sustenance; so I cursed both.
  • My winning Spriggan used only cursed jewellery. This was enough to get all the piety I needed — an indication that the piety boosts are too good at the moment.
  • Whatever you curse, it will make you more inflexible. This is also interesting in practise.
  • Seeing the presence of monsters is often very useful, when stabbing, fleeing, etc.
  • You will use the two active abilities not very often but Scrying can be of high tactical value. It is not very expensive, too. Reskilling gives great strategical flexibility. If you are a caster, you don’t need to sweat about choosing schools to specialise. It would be possible to turn all your skills into Fighting and Spellcasting (something that was mentioned as an argument against the mechanic). I believe that this is a shortcut to kill off your character.

So the god is perfect then? Of course not. I think the current state is playable and (naturally) diverse enough, but there are rough edges:

  • In order to gain the curses bonus for piety gain, you want more than half of your potential armour items cursed. Or at least two jewellery pieces. Or your weapon. In any case, there is no benefit for cursing more than that. But there should be. One solution would be to give a little piety boost for cursedness as now, and a higher boost for full cursedness (armour and jewellery only).
  • Item and monster detection only tells you that something’s there. While there is Scrying, it would be much better to give slightly better feedback, e.g. to announce monsters in three levels (puny, approximately in depth, OOD) and to distinguish between plain and rare items.

As ever, you can play Ashenzari on CDO and, as usual, feedback is welcome. We are finetuning the god, so don’t expect your “This is a dumb god” to have a far-reaching effect.