ToME WikiCosmicGerbil I remember playing on an Angband varient called XBand a while ago, and in this game, you could collect the souls of slain monsters and store them into jewelry. So I had an idea of a soul-stealer class. It would work something like this:
The soul stealer would have a power to allow him to drain the souls of his victems just before he killed them. This power would be tied into his level, so at first he would begin by stealing the souls of weak monsters, such as Yeeks, and as he increased in level, he would be able to steal better souls.
The souls would be used by imprisoning them inside weapons, and depending on the type of creature killed, this would affect the weapons' powers. For example, a weapon with a Troll's soul inside would give the player extra strength and maybe sustained strength as well; where a weapon with a Novice Mages' soul inside would give extra spell power.
Undead creatures would be immune to soul stealing, and so probably would be uniques. Stealing Morgoth's soul, for example, does not seem like it should be allowed. Also probably you would not be able to steal animals' souls (except for dragons).
I don't really know how you would code powers for this class, but when I have time, I will be experimenting, to see what I can come up with. If I do any useful scripting, I'll post it up.
What does anyone else think of this new class idea?
TheFalcon: Sounds like a good idea to me. 
CosmicGerbil Thanks 
CosmicGerbil I haven't forgotten this idea; I've just been really busy lately. I am hopefully going to experiment with it over the Easter holidays.
Remuz: Just a few words. This idea sounds great to me. But I don't see why I couldn't steal animal creatures soul. In many mythologies, animals *do* have a soul. I'd like to be able to use a tiger's soul to gain speed and/or dexterity, or a bear's one to gain strength and/or constitution. As for unique souls, I understand your point, but it's not really consistent with summoning or possession, for example. It seems to me that any monster that can be summoned has a soul (think of true totems for unique monsters). It agree that balance can be difficult in these conditions, not to render any soul but unique ones useless.
CosmicGerbil I get what you mean. I just thought most people would not be interested in stealing animals' souls, but as you are interested, I will add animals to the list. I'm not sure how to handle uniques...maybe it could just be extra difficult to steal a unique monster's soul.
Remuz: That's kind of you. But, if that's too much pain, please don't bother. I was merely pointing out that choosing to include or not soul to monsters and uniques was a trade-off between consistency and balance. For uniques, that's not easy. You could make it is so that enchanting your equipment with a soul's unique lasts only for a while, and is not permanent (the big bad guys never truly die :p). That would allow for powerful souls, without breaking balance. Just an idea.
Orvin: Here is a different approach to soul stealing. For the soul-stealer, spells are cast using souls, not mana. Each soul would be worth a certain number of "soul points" in one or several schools of magic. Casting a spell uses a certain number of soul points from the relevant school(s) (perhaps, equal to the usual amount of mana, or, perhaps, some multiplier of this, for balance). On the one hand, soul-stealers could have an unlimited amount of "soul points" with which to cast spells -- very different from normal spell-users. On the other hand, they would not be able to regain soul points by resting, potions, etc., but only by killing. If you properly adjust the amount of soul points gained per soul, you might achieve balanced gameplay because of this balance.
CosmicGerbil Remuz, don't worry it's not a pain at all I've wanted to do the soul stealer class for months now and now it's Easter holidays, I have some spare time. I agree, for uniques, maybe their souls "escape" after a while...the more powerful the unique, the quicker their soul escapes from the weapon.
Orvin, that sounds a really cool idea, but I'm not sure whether I could code it, at least not in T2 
I think it would be possible in T3, however. I am having to save my alignment plans for T3, as they can't be coded into T2 either.
Maybe I could have two types of soul stealer...a warrior type who imbues captured souls into weapons and a wizard type who uses the power of the souls as "mana". Now I just need some good names for them...perhaps a soulcrafter for the warrior type?
CosmicGerbil OK, first I need to decide on what powers your weapon will recieve, depending on what monster you kill. I would really like lots of ideas and feedback here So any ideas, please post them up.
Orvin: Another way you could work the weapon-based soul-stealer would be as follows: If you imbue the soul of a unique into a weapon, that weapon becomes sentient, but with a maximum level depending on the level of the unique. Any souls you later imbue to that weapon affect its chances of gaining particular realms. So, red dragon souls might increase the chances of getting fire realm.
CosmicGerbil That sounds cool. After all it makes sense that the weapon should be sentinent if it has the soul of a (once) living creature trapped inside it. I'm not sure I can code which sentinent realm the weapon gains though, I'm sure Fury looked at something similar a little while back. I'll try to find that old post and see what it says.
I also thought that soulcrafter should be the wizard class and the warrior class should just be called soulwarrior.
CosmicGerbil I have been thinking about the weapons and I had an idea. Rather than allow any weapon to contain a soul, maybe there should be special "soul weapons", such as a soulsword, soulaxe, soulmace ect. What does everybody else think?
KhymChanur: The 3.0.0 sentient object system could easily be modified to allow individual objects to give probability weights to the different realms, and/or give the object a function which will decide which realm to acquire.
CosmicGerbil That sounds cool I don't think you can choose which realms a sentinent weapon gets in T2.
ReenenLaurie: I like the idea, I hate the name. Soul-Stealer sounds so omnipotent. I think Spiriteer, or something like that is more a class name than "soul-stealer".
Orvin: I agree about the name, but I like Spiriteer even less. There is a great difference between spirits and souls.
CosmicGerbil Soul-stealer is meant to sound evil, because this is an evil class 
However if I am going to split the class into "warrior type" and "wizard type" then I could use the name Spiriteer as the main class type and have soulcrafter (wizard) and soul warrior (warrior) as meta class types.
CosmicGerbil OK I have posted a poll on the forum for a suitable name. Click this link to visit it and vote http://forum.t-o-m-e.net/viewtopic.php?p=53267#53267
I am wondering which races should be able to play as a Spiriteer? So far I think: humans, half-elves, orcs, yeeks and mindflayers. Anyone got any thoughts/ideas on this?
MCKelly: Just posted a load of suggestions in the forum topic that CosmicGerbil opened up above. I encourage you to take a look and comment. Thanks!
CosmicGerbil Excellent, thanks
Sorgath Out of curiosity, how were you planning on working out what to do with an item for what soul. You've said that Trolls would probably give strength and Novice Mages Spell Power etc... but how will you code this? Because i've been looking through r_info.txt and in my opinion any filter you make would have to be rather complex and would have to test a whole bunch of things to decide what flags a weapon should get. Don't get me wrong, It wouln't be difficult, it would just be rather long and tedious and with 1000+ monsters would probably be rather difficult to balance.
CosmicGerbil Lol, at the moment I'm not really sure Some monsters will have an overlap though. For example, most rats and mice would give poison resistance. Blue and brown yeeks would both give acid resistance. So this would cut down on the numbers of different flags required for different weapons. However it will still need a lot of work doing on it.