DFTalk 24 transcript, WIP revision #3

Dwarf Fortress Talk #24

SFX [0:00]

Capntastic: Welcome to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. Here I have: Rainseeker!

Rainseeker: What!? I'm back!? After a five year haitus!? What? Hey guys. I've missed you!

Toady One: It's amazing. It's amazing to have the whole team back together.

Capntastic: And Tarn Adams, AKA Toady.

Toady One: Hey-o. It's Toady One, here with another episode, and all kinds of co-hosts and stuff. Amazing.

Rainseeker: Let's talk about what's happened to us, individually, in the past five years, if you guys don't mind.

Capntastic: Can we skip the last six months or so?

Rainseeker: Yeah, if you want, because everyone probably know what you guys have been up to. My wife and I started a gluten-free bakery, and we've been running that up here in northern California. It's called Measures of Joy, and you can find us on Facebook. We may have been doing it while we were still doing the podcast?

Toady One: I think so, I think so.

Rainseeker: But we're firmly established by now.

Toady One: That's awesome.

Capntastic: I know you're getting some really excellent opportunities in terms of gift baskets for some celebrity event?

Rainseeker: Oh yeah, we went to the Emmies. That was fun. I got to meet the guy from Leave It to Beaver. And I got to meet the guy from Scrubs. The janitor on Scrubs.

Capntastic: Oh! That's the good one to me.

Rainseeker: Yeah, it was fun to meet him. I also got to meet... I don't know if you guys ever watched 30 Rock, but there was a guy on their writing staff. Well, acting on their writing staff, because it was a fake show. A show about a fake show. I was so excited to meet him because that was my favorite show at the time. But anyway, our business is moving forward and I've been doing some screenwriting over the years, too. Nothing's published, but that's been my creative hobby. How about you guys?

Capntastic: Got a job at a machine shop. Not much else. Currently laid off.

Rainseeker: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

Capntastic: Yeah, it's a mess all over. I'm doing alright, all things considered.

Rainseeker: That's good. Oh, my son got married.

Capntastic: Fantastic!

Rainseeker: Yeah, he got married last year. How about you, Tarn? What are the big life experiences you've experienced?

Toady One: Still in the same apartment. Still dwarfin'. We traveled around for some events, which is fun. We went to Korea and Switzerland for some events, which was pretty amazing. But mostly, of course, just going to San Francisco or whatever, for the Roguelike Celebration and GDC and a bit of traveling. Just a lot of work, though. And of course, the whole Steam thing, which is probably the biggest thing that's happened in the last five years.

Rainseeker: Yay, Steam!

Capntastic: Globally, one of the biggest things that's happened in the last five years.

Rainseeker: It kind of looks like you're finally taking my persistant suggestion of having a better user interface. That looks amazing.

Toady One: It's about time. Something happened there, for sure. Can you send images over our little Discord chat?

Capntastic: Yeah, drag and drop.

Toady One: You can use drag and drop?

Rainseeker: Yes.

Toady One: Oh, 'add a comment.' I'll just add that comment.

Capntastic: There should be a game called drag 'n' drop. [dragon drop?] There is, for sure.

Toady One: I sent a little image over Discord chat. We've been testing out screens.

Rainseeker: Would you look at that?

Toady One: This is a little prototype embark screen that hasn't had any artist attention.

Rainseeker: Clearly, but that's fine.

Toady One: So those are all my terrible color schemes and stuff.

Rainseeker: [laughter] It really is very bad.

Toady One: It's kind of earthy. Earth tones. It's like Elf Fortress.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Capntastic: I do like the little ornamentations in the corners.

Toady One: Those were the parts that were actually drawn by the artists. Just that, and of course, the items that you see there. But the very stop-sign-looking plus and minus look, that's all me. But, if you remember how the game works, you used to have to type 'n' for new item, and it would take you to a whole different screen with the typing filter and the categories and so forth. Here it is, all in one place. You can see your items on the left. You can see the typing filter and categories on the right. You can see a scroll bar with a little dwarf face on it.

Rainseeker: Oh, there it is!

Toady One: The ones on the right also get scroll bars. The middle one gets a scroll bar because, of course, there's more categories than that when you aren't filtering. There's always going to be a lot of stuff, which is going to be one of our main obstacles when we're going through all of the screens and things. I had typed 'bronze' into the typing filter and there's still pages of items.

Rainseeker: Yeah, there's bismuth bronze. All that fun stuff.

Capntastic: I'm curious... It's a me thought. I'm curious if bismuth bronze tastes like Pepto-Bismal.

Toady One: [laughter]

Capntastic: I have to filter myself.

Toady One: They could grind it into powder and put it in your breakfast cereal.

Rainseeker: There you go.

Toady One: And you see, for instance, the willow wheelbarrow on the left. We haven't done materials for wheelbarrows, so that is a distinctly not-willow wheelbarrow down there.

Capntastic: Oh, look at that.

Toady One: But yeah, it's a nice stepladder.

Rainseeker: [laughter]. Wow, that's cool. So what is a stepladder for? That's the first time I've seen that.

Toady One: Were you around for the 3D trees?

Rainseeker: Yes. Yes, I saw that.

Toady One: Some point after that, we started growing fruit on trees. You can take a stepladder over and climb and pick the fruit from the trees.

Capntastic: It's cute.

Rainseeker: That is cute.

Toady One: One of the leading causes, perhaps, of dwarves being stuck in trees.

Rainseeker: What? [laughter] Please explain!

Toady One: [laughter] So if the stepladder is removed or if the dwarf is otherwise chased up a tree or something, they'll just be up there. They have some code to help them get down now, which is useful, but you can also just chop the tree down.

Rainseeker: So what you're telling me is that someone could be climbing a tree, minding his own business, picking an apple, and Urick [Urist?] could come by and be like, 'Oh! A stepladder that's just sitting there. I better put it away!' and puts it away, and that's how they get stuck?

Toady One: I don't know. I don't if they get swiped, or if they cancel the job, or what the main vector is. This is something that should probably be investigated a little bit more.

Capntastic: I've seen the opposite, where there's just stepladders out in the trees, or where the trees are. Not up in the trees. That would be wild.

Toady One: Well, why would a dwarf ever clean up after themselves?

Rainseeker: [laughter] Right!

Toady One: I posted another one. This is a little sparser, this screen, but this is the animals tab.

Rainseeker: Are we able to post these for the people that are listening?

Toady One: I'm going to tease them currently, while we think about the plan for this. We could put them up on the dev log though. Or hide them on the top page.

Capntastic: I think the teasing's already begun.

Rainseeker: Yes!

Toady One: We're into the teasing right now. This is fun.

Rainseeker: Yeah, teeheeheehee!

Toady One: In this screen, I've responsibly bought four of each type of cavy. So that's a total of sixteen cavies.

Rainseeker: Mommas, and poppas, and the babies.

Toady One: All them babies.

Rainseeker: The whole family.

Toady One: You can see, on the right, the variety of hen and chick and rooster pictures. And the variety of goat and pig pictures. You can see a water buffalo calf. Lots of little animals and things. Another scroll bar. More pluses and minuses. You'll note that the total number of points you have to spend is not displayed yet, anywhere on the screen, so that's something that needs to be done in the list of many things that need to be done. But I think it's pretty cool! It's different than it was before, for sure.

Rainseeker: Yeah, it's coming along, buddy! Good job. Out of curiousity, where are we with Adventure Mode?

Toady One: I've got Adventure Mode showing up on the screen, which is a huge first step. People wandering around and looking like either people, or the debug creature. The thing is, we haven't finished the layering on, say, the human. Because the dwarves, currently, are built from twelve layers. Including, like, here's your left arm, here's your right arm, here's your face, here's your beard, here's your shadow underneath you, and so forth. So there's just a little bit of extra art that needs to be done. And we're hoping, to some extent, to get the animal people up and running that way as well. Although, of course, since there are 200 animal people, it's not something that we can do perfectly for every single body type.

Rainseeker: The snail men may look kind of odd, I would imagine.

Toady One: Snail men definitely look odd, and, I think, slug people are different from snail people because slug people don't have legs and snail people do.

Rainseeker: Oh!

Capntastic: Interesting.

Toady One: It just seemed appropriate. I don't know why. It's kind of a turtle thing, or something. Because a slug is kind of like a snake, morphologically, like it's long. [laughter]

Rainseeker: That's true.

Capntastic: Hmmm.

Toady One: A snake person can't have legs, right? There's some definite rule there. And so a slug person doesn't have legs, because...

Rainseeker: Well, we're talking Jabba the Hutt, here, right?

Toady One: Yeah! So if Jabba the Hutt had a shell, would he grow legs?

Rainseeker: That's a good question. I don't know. I think, possibly.

Toady One: We were probably a little torn on this.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Capntastic: Sounds like you just came up with a Star Wars spinoff film.

Toady One: Yeah, we could use some more of those. They probably have five or six in the pipeline, right?

Rainseeker: I want my Star Wars crew to be all from the snail planet. Just the snails with legs.

Toady One: [laughter]

Rainseeker: That's what we want. Lucas, you've heard it here.

Capntastic: He's probably listening.

Rainseeker: He probably is, yeah. And he has those algorithms.

Toady One: [laughter] Does he have algorithms?

Rainseeker: Yeah, yeah yeah.

SFX [12:57]

Rainseeker: Speaking of algorithms, have you seen the game, and this is kind of a detour, but have you seen the game AI Dungeon?

Capntastic: Oh, yes.

Toady One: Have you seen the new GPT-3? The dragon model, or whatever they're calling it?

Capntastic: That's the one that's going to end the world, isn't it?

Rainseeker: I don't know what that even is. GPT-3?

Toady One: I may be getting some details mixed up, but the original AI Dungeon was based on the GPT-2 model, which came out - I don't know when, because time no longer has any meaning - but it was last year or the year before. I don't really remember, but it was the one that made the first big splash by OpenAI, or whatever the organization's called. They just released, on a limited basis, the GPT-3 model, which makes them way more coherent. So it's even scarier. There are some screenshots around on the net now of various GPT-3 stuff.

Rainseeker: Cool.

Toady One: It's pretty cool.

Rainseeker: I just had an adventure this morning, because I've been exploring it, where I was a noble and I found a candy house, going through tunnels, and then I found the wizard who made it. I asked the wizard why he made a candy house, and he said, 'Because I like candy!"

Toady One: [laughter]

Rainseeker: That was a fun AI moment, I think.

Toady One: [laughter] I mean, it's a legitimate reason, especially if you're going to move from house to house as you consume them. Unless he likes to look at candy, I mean, the candy stores look pretty cool.

Rainseeker: That's true. Maybe he just likes to look at it. I don't remember - do we have candy witch houses in your generated world?

Toady One: Do we have candy at all? We have syrup. We have the dwarven syrup, as I recall.

Rainseeker: We need some Hansel and Gretel kind of stories to come out. That'd be kind of fun.

Toady One: I guess they would be made out of minced syrup roasts and minced syrup muffins.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Capntastic: You'd have to figure out which ones made the best windows.

Rainseeker: Exactly.

Capntastic: And construction materials. If you could make a block out of syrup roasts.

Rainseeker: [laughter] There you go.

Toady One: You make a block out of frozen syrup and then cut blocks out of it. We aren't quite there yet. It's one of those things we're considering for the map rewrite, is getting different sorts of materials and items. Being able to build different map features with them, like walls and ramps, that kind of thing. Of course, the go-to examples are always more like, you're wandering through a giant plain of skulls and there's skull hills and stuff like that, and you can pick up individual ones and slide down them, and that kind of thing, but why not candy, right?

Rainseeker: Yeah.

Toady One: We're going to have the nonviolence setting, right? So you turn it off, you don't have skull hills anymore, unless they're candy skulls.

Rainseeker: That's true. [laughter]

Toady One: And then you can eat them. And because it's nonviolent, you never get sick. No more vomiting.

Rainseeker: [laughter] 'No more vomiting.'

Toady One: Eat as much candy as you want.

Rainseeker: That's right. Candy fortress.

Toady One: No cavities. No cavities in a nonviolent setting. Certainly, if someone turns the nonviolent slider off, they don't want tooth pain, they don't want drills. They just want to eat.

Capntastic: Is this for real? There's really going to be -

Toady One: At some point I'm just talking nonsense, of course, but the violence slider is definitely part of the plans.

Capntastic: Oh, interesting. I hadn't even considered that.

Toady One: Well, let's talk, we can recap. At some point Dwarf Fortress Talk is just a series of recapitulations.

Capntastic: [laughter]

Toady One: I don't even remember what we talked about in the myth and magic episode, way back when. Over 400 years ago.

Capntastic: Yeah, yeah.

Toady One: The current idea was when you generate your setting, you'd have a series of sliders that let you - and we don't know what the final form of these is. We're just spitballing what these sliders might be. One of them is, how typical is your fantasy world on a scale from 'there aren't even any dwarves, it's just different humans running around' over to the more typical setting where you have dwarves and also some more canonical animal people. Kind of like an Elder Scrolls type setting, or any of the typical fantasy setting where you pick a couple animal people to show off, and then you have the dwarves and elves and that kind of thing. Then you move the slider over a little bit more and you've got all kinds of strange five-eyed things. Still have some dwarves but maybe the dwarves have innate magic powers and other oddities to them. Then you move the slider all the way over and it removes all the raw object content completely, and leaves you in a complete soup. It'd be like one of those fantasy novels that uses too many made up words.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Toady One: You're just trying to figure out...

Rainseeker: ...What the heck everything means?

Toady One: ...Like, what is going on here? I think it would be pretty cool to try. I don't know if it would be fun to do this regularly, but you'd try and do a setting like that and you find yourself sinking into it, and you're like, 'Oh, OK. Now I kind of understand what's going on.' Maybe it'd be cool. That's one of the sliders. That's the fantasy amount slider. Another slider is this grim-dark versus -

Rainseeker: Again, none of these are currently implemented?

Toady One: Oh, no. Oh, no no no no.

Rainseeker: Oh, ok.

Toady One: But, since we last spoke, we have a much clearer view of when this is going to happen.

Rainseeker: Ok, cool.

Toady One: We've got the Steam release coming, and then we have some things to make up some time. The release we did before the Steam release - which is out, we did it at the beginning of the year - was the villains release, which we sort of aborted because we had to get the Steam stuff started due to deadlines and so forth. The villains release, we're going to go back and finish some of that stuff up. Right now, for instance, there's artifact heists in the fortress that can be hatched.

Rainseeker: Who?

Toady One: There's insiders, and you can interrogate your own dwarves to figure out who flipped on you and so forth.

Rainseeker: Will a dwarf flip on you if they're unhappy with you, or could it be for any reason?

Toady One: It has a lot of personality facet things, but there's also grudges. Do they share a religious similarity with the person flipping them? The person flipping them has the burden of deciding what angle they're going to use. They use their intrigue skill to do it. It's still a little too easy to flip people, I think, is the verdict right now. People should be less flippable. But, the general principle is what we're going with. We used the mouse - what is it called? The mice? The mice method? Miceing people? Muh-muh-muh... I'm blanking on...

Rainseeker: Mummies?

Toady One: Is it money? The 'C' is compromising people. Blackmailing them. The 'E' is ego. The 'I' is ideology, I think. It's basicly counterintelligence stuff, where you're like, 'which people are vulnerable?' It's mice. [m.i.c.e.?] There's different acronyms people use to remember the different reasons. We went through that as an initial form of inspiration, and then came up with the seven or eight ways you can be flipped.

Rainseeker: Interesting.

Toady One: But, we aborted right when we were working on that stuff, so it's just not done. We'll fix that up, and then do some army stuff, do some Adventure Mode medical stuff that we'd been missing for a long time, like being able to put a splint on yourself and make one and not lose your games quite so easily. Although, yes, it's still a hard life out there.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Toady One: Then, the idea is, to disappear into something we've called the big wait, because we know it's going to take some time. Yet another big wait, and if we're lucky, the big wait won't be as long as the previous biggest wait, which was 26 months, right?

Rainseeker: [whistles]

Toady One: We did have a release that lasted that long.

Rainseeker: Which one was that?

Toady One: Was that the activating the world release? Was that 2012? I totally don't remember these things that are in the distant past, anymore, without looking up the notes and cross-referencing. But, the myth and magic release... The main thing we've shown off on that was this talk I gave with Tanya at Kitfox, the publisher, back in 2016, I think. I was showing our procedural myth system that comes up with a mythological story with various deities and forces and planes and stuff. It's meant to build a coherent and consistant magic system for each world that you generate, or each universe, so that things make more sense. So it isn't just generating another fireball spell, or whatever.

Capntastic: Real quick, aren't celestial bodies generated, still?

Toady One: Generated in the current version?

Capntastic: Yeah.

Toady One: The current version has the moon and a sun.

Capntastic: Is it always just one moon?

Toady One: Yeah. It's really boring. It's just for werewolves, right?

Capntastic: Ok. Functional.

Rainseeker: [laughs]

Toady One: And it also does the lighting in Adventure Mode. If it's foggy and the moon's out, you can see a little bit more than if it were really foggy and there is no moon. I imagine that's going to be a nightmare when we start generating the bodies. Then we'll need to figure out, like, how much light would there actually be when there's two moons but the sun is over here. I don't want to think too much about that, especially if the sun is also a chariot, or something. You never know -

Rainseeker: [laughs] This one is a giant fan in the sky. It just kind of spins there.

Toady One: That's why it's always windy on a sunny day.

Rainseeker: Exactly. [laughs]

Toady One: It's out of control. We don't really know what's going to happen. That's one of the things that's fun about this release.

Rainseeker: That brings me to another question. When I disappeared five or six years ago, you were in the position where you were basicly going to do this until you die.

Toady One: [laughs]

Rainseeker: Are you still there? Is this something you want to do the rest of your life or do you want to have a final release sometime?

Toady One: I think I'm still in the same boat I was in before. Certainly, the stuff we just talked about takes me forward another five years or something. Six years? Who knows? It's going to take a while to get that stuff done, and then I'll be 48 years old, 49 years old, you know? I'll have been working on this thing for 23 years, and that's a long time. At this point, it seems like the default option is to say, 'well, yeah, that's what I'm doing.' We'll be approaching retirement age at some point, whatever that means in the future. Who knows? If we end up focusing on a side project ten years from now that gets a little bit of traction, then we might spend some time on that. You never know what's going to materialize. But, I'm pretty excited about the magic release, obviously. I keep bringing conversations back there, and now, we have a much better plan of what that's going to look like. So, you know...

Rainseeker: Can you give me a scenario of how magic might manifest itself in the world and what that might look like to a player?

Toady One: Where do you want to start? Do you want to start in a traditional ocean setup? Or we can have a chaos full of monsters? Or we can have a -

Capntastic: Chaos.

Toady One: Ok, we've got a chaos full of monsters. That's the starting setup, a chaos full of monsters. Then you have some kind of... Well, you know what? You know what we're going to do? This is what we're going to do. Instead of hearing me just be kind of stupid about it, what we'll do is fire up the myth generator.

SFX [26:51]

Toady One: Ok. So I've found the myth generator after digging through some folders and so forth, so let's just see what one of these magic systems might look like. Alright, Dwarf Fortress creation myth generator. 'Left click to begin.' Ha! Alright, so I click. Now, this time, it looks like we've got the void, which is a primordial void. So we ended up with this sort of emptiness, but it has two great beings inside of it: Legadia and Fathis, and also Thetion, the raven. [laughs]

Rainseeker: Oh, three. There's a raven, also.

Capntastic: Who's a good bird? It's a good bird.

Rainseeker: The raven's the troublemaker, clearly. Right?

Toady One: Yeah. Well, we'll see. We'll see, because the game does not care right now.

Rainseeker: [laughs]

Toady One: Alright, so we got a big ol' list here. Now, the initial list - and it goes on for a few pages - is the chronological list of events in the universe. In this prototype, you can click on a thing to focus on it, and then that gives you a more reasonable story of what happened. For instance, in the chronological list, it says 'In the beginning, there was a vast emptiness in which the great Legadia and the great Fathis were coupled.' So they're just sitting there, coupled - however you want to interpret that - and 'Fathis forged the Spindle of Phopenom to guide fate.' And then, 'Fathis lost a limb, forming the ocean. Fathis forged the Phudom Glass, that all might be seen.'

Rainseeker: Hey, I want to hear about the limb loss. Is there more?

Toady One: Yeah, so let's read about the ocean, right? I clicked on ocean, and now this is the entire creation myth as it relates to the ocean. 'In the beginning, there was a vast emptiness, in which Legadia and Fathis were coupled. Fathis lost a limb, forming the ocean. Fathis disturbed the ocean, forming the Sephitia demons. Libius, of the Phokethas demons' - it didn't even say where the Phokethas demons came from. We skipped that part - 'created the great Rukon using the ocean in the volcano of Kyssidus.' So there's some kind of underwater volcano that this thing came out of when these other demons did their thing. I have no idea where a Phokethas demon came from. Here it is! When Legadia and Fathis got uncoupled, then Fathis 'breathed into being' these other demons.

Rainseeker: Oh. That's a bad breakup.

Toady One: Yeah. [laughs]

Rainseeker: [laughs] That's pretty good.

Toady One: So where are the dwarves in all this? It's not a bad question. There are the dwarves. So the dwarves have their version of the creation myth. 'We've got a vast -' Everyone agrees on the vast emptiness, and the coupling, and the losing of the limb, the uncoupling. Now, 'the ocean was disturbed and formed the Sephetia demons', which the dwarves care about. That means that the dwarves, in the future of this story, are going to care about the Sephitia demons. Now, Fathis lost another limb. Fathis is like a limb-shedding type of deity, right?

Rainseeker: [laughs]

Toady One: Constantly forming stuff, constantly making oceans and - so another limb, gone! And we got the sun.

Rainseeker: Oh! Ok.

Capntastic: Finally.

Toady One: Then Fathis... 'shed hair, and formed the great Thobius.' And then Thobius just died! Now, that's sad, but Thobius died, and so: His hair is shed, forms this deity, and then the deity dies.

Rainseeker: But what is the deity of? I mean, are there more details of him, or is that...?

Toady One: See, the thing of this - there are some hidden details, right now, about that kind of thing, which we may touch upon later, but part of the idea is that the story is giving them what they are of, too. So Fathis is obviously going to be a deity of the sun and the ocean, having formed those things, right, out of limbs? Now, Thobius - since this is the dwarf-centric tale, there might be more detail on Thobius if we click on Thobius, but now Thobius was just a kind of interim character, becuase Thobius dies immediately after being grown out of this hair, and their blood forms a new plane of existance called the Different Place. [laughs]

Rainseeker: [laughs] 'Different Place.'

Toady One: So this place is different fromt he void, and the ocean, and the sun. The ocean and the sun are obviously over in the main world, becuase it's referring to our sun and our ocean. But then there's this Different Place that was formed. So the other deity that was coupled is Legadia, right - and we haven't been talking about Legadia much - but Legadia disturbed the sun and formed some kind of energy force called the Evil Test.

Rainseeker: Ok. [laughs]

Toady One: So the Evil Test has been formed. Now, the dwarves care about these things, so hopefully they'll come up in the tale. Ah, yes, here we have Kobikytai of the Sephitia demons disturbed the Evil Test to form the dwarves in the Different Place. So it all comes together. We have these demons, we have this Evil Test thing that came from the sun, and then we have the Different Place, which came from the shed hair and this blood. So that's how dwarves concieve of themselves in this universe. They're formed from this kind of sun-thing. Now the name 'Evil Test' has some implicit evilness to it. 'Sephitia demons' has a bit of evilness to it. So dwarves have kind of a dark creation story in this. [laughs]

Rainseeker: They kind of do. Maybe you should avoid dwarves in that world, you know?

Capntastic: Yeah.

Toady One: And then the dwarves 'emerged from the Different Place.' Because in this story, it has to explain why dwarves are in the regular world. And so it just says 'they emerged.' How nice of them. And then they 'rebelled against Legadia.' Rebelled against Legadia and 'destroyed the Phudom Glass,' the thing that 'all might be seen.' They destroyed it, and 'Legadia pronounced the curse of death to punish the rebellion of the dwarves.' So dwarves were initially immortal, but because they destroyed the Phudom Glass and their rebellion, they were cursed with death. So it gives you a little story about the dwarves. Now that we have the story of the dwarves it gives us a kind of rundown of dwarfdom. So dwarves 'age and eventually die, and they can perish from accidents, violence, and disease,' but they have immortal souls, and their souls are 'microcosms of the universe,' and enlightenment can be attained through self-reflection. The soul travels to the different place after the body dies, and their fates are completely determined. In the video game, it doesn't matter so much whether there's free will or predestination, right, becuase you just click buttons and things happen. But this probably has to do with the Spindle of Phopenom guiding fate and so forth. Now, this is were it comes up with a magic system, and the magic system relates to the Evil Test, which is where the dwarves were made from. So 'many dwarves can interact with the Evil Test after difficult research. So the spell system it's come up with is a research-based spell system. Now, if they screw up and mis-cast, if there's a lapse in skill, absolutely all vegitation dies near the user of spell. [laughs] So that's very sad for them.

Rainseeker: Oh, wow.

Toady One: 'The user can bruise flesh at the cost of a healthy amount of their own flesh.' I'm not sure why you'd do that. It doesn't do any balancing. I threw this thing together, right, so if you want to, like, give up your finger, you can put a bruise on somebody. And you have to use words and hand motions while meditating upon the Evil Test. You can also burn flesh for the same price using a word. Now, this is another one where you wonder why you'd do this. The user can control the physical movement of a creature at the cost of their entire body. So if you're willing to give it up and become a ghost, you can turn someone into a puppet. I can imagine there might be some vindictive reason you might do this. You can cause pain if you're willing to sacrifice just a little bit of your own flesh. That's more of a standard kind of cost. You can cause someone pain, you can cause someone's mind to go into overload. You see these are not good things, right? This Evil Test is not good. [laughs] You can move your soul into a body at the cost of a healthy amount of flesh. Now this raises questions, right? If you gave up your whole body to turn someone else into a puppet, right, and then your soul is just kind of floating there, but then it says you can give up a healthy amount of flesh to move into a body, now is that like of your body that's laying on the ground that you already paid the cost with?

Capntastic: Well, I mean, if you have access to other flesh...

Toady One: Yes. And that's true, it hasn't actually specified that the user's flesh is their own, so this could be a sacrifice-based system. So, yeah, very cheerful. Very cheerful.

Rainseeker: Wow. So are there situations where magic would be more like Care Bear magic?

Toady One: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah! You roll up a different world, you get a different set. And there are about 200 effects in the list right now and a lot of them are very cheerful.

Rainseeker: That's cute.

Toady One: And then the notes here say that the Evil Test source is the sun and the source of the sun is Fathis, and that the Sephitia demons that created the dwarves, their source is the ocean and their creator is Fathis. So that's where it was drawing their powers from. The Evil Test is why there is evil powers, but there's also some burning in there, and so forth, and that probably came from the sun. You should think of that like a sun-based or sun-related power. And then when it's rolling up the cultures and other things surrounding this, it will be thinking of these things. That's the idea, to make a consistant system.

Rainseeker: Nice. And how do you, in the game, map out a player - maybe if they're doing Adventure Mode - engage with that magic system, and get magic powers, and stuff?

Toady One: In that case - like at the top, it said that you can interact with the Evil Test after difficult research. That would point towards more of a character class type thing, or a background, or you'd be like a wizard's apprentice type thing, where you're learning. Kind of the more traditional way. In Adventure Mode right now, you can press 'plus, plus, plus,' and now I'm a proficient swordsdwarf, or whatever, right? So in this case, there'd be a new skill in the list and you'd be like 'plus, plus, plus,' and you're like, 'I'm now a proficient Evil Tester.' [laughs] Or something.

Capntastic: Oh, I'm sure they'd have their own names.

Rainseeker: 'The procter has arrived!'

Toady One: [laughs] Yeah, one of the important things of the magic release is procedural skills. Which we already have because of music, actually. You have knowledge of the different dances and things that people are doing in the taverns, and so forth. We got into this procedural knowledge setup. The skills themselves, I don't think, got proceduralization yet. You can be a percussionist, or whatever, but that's not procedural, that's just one of the four groupings we have. But the knowledge system, which links into the skill system, is procedural for music. So we'd just kind of be building off of that, but also having actual procedural skills as well.

Rainseeker: Right. So, theoretically, you could have a magic system where it's completely overpowered and you could cause flowers to sprout from everyone's eyeballs and then win.

Toady One: Yeah, well, there's no winning because the other people that can do that can do that too, right? I think the idea about balance, in this case, we have to be careful with, because a fantasy universe is inherently unbalanced by its fantasy elements. And that's the whole point, right? So I think it'd be cool to have a system like that, and then it's just like, these are very scary people who can do very scary things, but is it like guns in America where you do have some eyeball things and a lot of people not doing the eyeball thing because everyone has the eyeball thing, or it leads to that kind of thing, and that's kind of a difficult part for us. What mechanics will we have supporting this? At least some because we're not giong to do a perfect job, obviously. That's never our M.O., but the idea is which things can we pick, in terms of supporting mechanics, to make the world seem like it's respecting these magic systems and respecting the outcomes of these magic systems. A thing I often consider is teleportation, right? What if everyone, just because the were born, whatever, has the ability to teleport at will? The changes in how society would work are basically unfathomable, I think. There's so much that you really have to sit down and think about it, and you think of a lot of stuff, and you aren't even scratching the surface, right, about how everything works. Everything. And so the game isn't going to be able to do all of that, but the game will be able to do some things, like just simple examples, like armies no longer have any travel costs. They just appear where they want to appear, right? That makes the game work a certain way. Now, of course, everyone in the town, including the refugees group that it creates, can also teleport to where they want to go. This would lead to a lot of empty conquests, and then can we make the game recognize that locations have less meaning now? That's a thing that comes out of teleportation. The whole notion of locations is... But the harder part is what kind of peace comes out of this. We don't want everything to be chaos. Would a kind of peace come out of this? Who knows where we'll end up, but as long as we get something, then it'll seem kind of cool.

Capntastic: Yeah.

Rainseeker: Yeah.

Toady One: Elves don't seem too much better in this universe, in terms of whether or not they're violent, their magic is violent, and so forth, because, in fact, the elves all have innate magic powers that they learn like walking. So, everybody knows how to do this. But the magical powers also rely on something called the Violent Elixir. It's a material used by the elven magic users, and you make it by adding a great deal of unique bile to several quality herbs, leaving it there for a day, and doing it in a rainstorm.

Rainseeker: [laughs]

Capntastic: Just like walking.

Rainseeker: [laughs] That's how I learned to walk.

Toady One: But once they have this nasty, bile-smelling elixir, everyone, apparently, will know how to make lightning bolts, and freeze flesh, and hurl bolts of ice. So, good for them, and let's blame Fathis again.

Capntastic: Please, people listening. Humble Bay 12ers. Draw fan art of any of this. Please. Show us Fathis. Show us the Evil Test emerging from the sun. We need it.

Rainseeker: Hey, what generated the elves in this world, by the way?

Toady One: Oh, let's see. Let's see about that. They also came from the Different Place. Fathis formed them directly in the Different Place from Fathis's sweat.

Rainseeker: Got it. They're filthy elves.

Toady One: I really get the feeling that Fathis did get the tag - and it exists in the generator - of an excretor. [laughs] The limbs, the hair, the sweat. Fathis is prolific.

Capntastic: That would be the Violent Elixir.

Toady One: Whereas it looks like the kobolds were simply a manifestation of the Evil Test. It just kind of made kobolds. And we don't have any humans yet. How long - humans took a long time. There were, it looks like, many different named demons, and several new deities, even some named cities, hidden cities, destroyed cities. All the dwarves and elves doing their thing. And then the humans suddenly came around. Oh yeah, the humans have a much longer story here. There was the sun and the Evil Test and all that stuff, but then one of the Sephetia demons - so the land was made by disturbing the sun. That's where we got land from. One of the Sephetia demons disturbed the sun, formed the land, but then mated with it, and made the Vidate beings.

Rainseeker: It's like, 'I have an art project. I'm gonna have sex with it.' [laughs]

Toady One: Yeah! And now we've got Vidate beings. Now, 'beings' is a much more neutral term from 'Sephetia demons.' We have these beings - Oh! Then, suddenly, Raven swoops in, lays an egg. Good job, Raven. And then the Evil Test mingled with the beings, creating a new plane called the Highlands. And then a god named Finnukora hatched from the egg and spun a web into the humans. So these humans were spun from this web in the Highlands from this raven... hatched an egg...

Rainseeker: I told you this raven would be trouble. [laughs]

Toady One: Yep. Made these humans. Oh, and - good job humans - the humans emerged from the Highlands and destroyed the Spindle of Phopenom, which was guiding fate.

Rainseeker: Wait. So they helpted the dwarves, then?

Capntastic: 2020[?].

Toady One: Yeah, freed them from that, and the humans had another curse pronounced upon them. Now humans have free will, but their fates are subject to the workings of the destroyed Spindle of Phopenom. [laughs] So, it's good for everybody there.

Rainseeker: I don't even know what that means. [laughs]

Capntastic: It's like Morrowind. You have the tools of fate, or whatever.

Rainseeker: There you go.

Toady One: It even has a description of the Sephetia demons. 'These beings are very large, serene humanoids with several long tentacles.' And they're immortal and have many innate powers.

Rainseeker: When they're called a demon, are they inherently evil?

Toady One: I think that it puts a flag on them that says they're more evil. They're serene but they've got tentacles, and they're called demons.

Rainseeker: They're peaceful until they kill you.

Toady One: Whereas the Vidate beings are nature spirits but they can manifest as large, fiery humanoids surrounded by rings of fire.

Rainseeker: They seem a little more demonic, but okay. [laughs]

Toady One: Yeah, well, maybe it's a volcano thing or something. Like a volcano's not inherently evil, they're just chaotic and dangerous. What other demons? We had Phokethas demons - 'small, reddish humanoids with feathered wings.' Happy little critters.

Rainseeker: So, now, are these things you would encounter in your adventures? Like, if you wander around?

Toady One: Yeah, exactly. The same way you can encounter those demons from the underworld now and the titans, minotaurs, and all that kind of stuff. The idea is that these would be part of the cosmology but also part of the world.

Rainseeker: Are they inherently aggroed against the player?

Toady One: Oh, not at all. I mean, I'm sure a Vidate being is a much nicer critter... Of course, I've forgotten some of the details already, because the details are deeply silly. But... why did we care about Vidate? Why did it even mention - Oh! Because 'they were mingled with the Evil Test to create the Highlands' - So the Vidate beings are very attached to these Highlands areas. They would be kind of like angels, in a sense, to the humans, who came from the Highlands. It's sort of like an Eden. It doesn't mention it as an Eden expulsion, but because of the destruction of the Spindle, and the curse that was placed on the humans afterword, it is very similar, right? I think of a Vidate being that way. Now, it calls them nature spirits, so they're somewhat more linked to nature than the angel concept. But, yeah, that's the thing. So, night creatures came from animal people. And Zezikon did that. Good job, Zezikon.

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