LordEstraven: I've always wondered where essences come from. And I came up with this idea, kind of inspired by the corpse-juicing thing in that old thread about ego oils: maybe they come from corpses! Not in large quantities of course... But, for example, you might be able to (read: might, not will!) extract, say, an essence of cold from the corpse of a blue worm mass? And maybe a fire vortex should have a slight chance of dropping an essence of fire, rather than a corpse.

Of course, that leads to other interesting ideas. Perhaps high alchemy + necromancy skills would give you the ability to suck essences from a live monster, inflicting damage to it. Being vexed by an elemental? Drain it and make a rod! The monster should have a chance of resisting though.

And maybe very high levels of geomancy and alchemy would let you extract essences from terrain types. That would have to have a high chance of failing.

But I'm starting to like this idea, of making ToME an alchemical world, with essences that make up just about everything. Perhaps it would possible to do in a module. It certainly doesn't seem all that Tolkienish, but then, ToME is not pure Tolkien.

JohnGilmore I like it. Especially the combination with necromancy (my other favorite skill, I've just implemented necromancy for tome3. Haven't really finished it yet, but I'm thinking that it's time to turn it in anyway.) There would be a great deal of footwork to do with modifying the monster lists, even after the initial programatic (as opposed to data) work was done.

Let me see if I've got this straight:

1. Monsters gain a (optional) essence flag, defining which essences might (rarely) be:

2. Terrain also gains the same flag, allowing:

I also really like the idea about corpse juicing for ego oils (only fill 500 or so turns, but for that 500 turns, adds an ego to your lantern...)

Then again, I just really like corpse juicing... Potion ingredients? (wait - that's essences... maybe in addition to?) What else should dragon's blood (or troll's blood) be useful for? A thieves blood probably isn't useful.

Necromancy could be modified to require blood as a activater for most of the spells! That would be cool! "I'm running low on blood - time to head back to town and slaughter a few innocent townspeople!"

What kind of blood, though? Obviously it's not much fun if the blood of an innocent will get you everything you could desire. There's got to be some effect that what kind of blood it is has on the spell...

LordEstraven: Necromancy requiring blood? One life for another... Now that would be interesting. Definitely make it a much more "evil" sort of magic. I like that idea... And perhaps using the Word of Death would require blood *from the monster you target*. Not only would that make sense, it would mean that you couldn't wimp out in the fight with Morgoth, since you'd need his blood to kill him that way... And it would add "realism", since that way Word of Death couldn't be used against undead.

Maybe certain Schools spells should need essences of some sort, as well? Or maybe that should be optional... Maybe you could add an essence of fire to your Fireflash to make it cost less mana.

On the other hand, maybe Alchemy should be changed to eliminate essences entirely.

JohnGilmore: I like the word of death thing. Maybe a modified genocide? Kill all Hrus on the level, for no HP cost, but first you need to get a chunk of Hru. My point being that "word of death" is a powerful spell with some serious limitations to balance it out. With such an exotic requirement (which takes inventory space) you could remove some (or most) of the limitations.

For instance, I've never has it work on a unique. With this limitation, you couldn't even try to cast it on a unique. Truely evil.

Reduce the hp cost to something managable, make it a targeted ball spell, and have a blast as long as you've got the blood!

Hmm. Ideally, there would be a way of flagging corpses killed by necromancy (in any form) as "tainted" so that thier blood couldn't be used later. Then make a powerful blood required to effect powerful monsters with it?

LordEstraven: Actually, I'm thinking that it would deal *massive* damage to any single monster, including uniques, but you'd need some of its blood (i.e. you'd have to wound it in melee first) and there'd be a chance of the monster resisting that would depend upon a) its level relative to yours and b) its remaining HP. So for a level 50 char, it would take out a Hru without too much trouble, but a GWoP would have to be weakened a lot first, Morgoth probably wouldn't be worth it... And it wouldn't work at all on the Witch-King of Angmar, since he's undead.

(Perhaps this spell shouldn't be "Word of Death", but "Ravage Soul", like in the old Pernband necromantic realm?)

BTW, Word of Death does indeed work on Uniques - I've used it on Morgoth, Tiki, and Melkor (in Wizard Mode of course). Morgoth goes down in one hit; Tiki takes two and Melkor three, since GF_DEATH is limited to 32535 points of damage.

(I think the reason for that is that numbers over 32767 will flip and become negative, a la Pascal. I've observed that with pvals in debug mode anyway.)

IdeaArchive/Other/Expanding Alchemy (last edited 2006-01-17 23:05:36 by 208)