Rainseeker: Cool. Digging down to the centre of the Earth and releasing these hordes, does that affect your civilization at all?
Toady: It's going to be interesting to see, right, because people are thinking now, a little bit, and they're starting to move around the world a little of their own accord, which they just haven't been allowed to do for all the years the game has been out. The way the digging too deep currently works with, like, it releasing 50 or 100 demons into the fortress, I mean I'd imagine that's just going to be a nightmare for the whole world, so we're either going to have to put a little bit of a damper on that, or we're going to have to just let the world have its nightmare, because you invited it.
Rainseeker: One demon rules a civilization a lot of times, are those the same demons?
Toady: Yeah, and having that many of them is crazy.
Rainseeker: 100 of them, they would go off and ...
Toady: Take over the world.
Ollieh: (musical interlude)
Rainseeker: What will they do currently, as the game stands?
Toady: As the game stands I think what they'll do is come out at night and patrol the premises of your fortress. We haven't told the dragons how to go from town to town and destroy things, so they won't have that willpower behind them, but they do know how to go round and just, kind of, poke around, like the night trolls do.
Rainseeker: So if you retire your fortress after they escape that's what they're going to do?
Toady: Yes. It would just be a very dangerous part of the world to go to. The whole idea of reclaiming it or something like that would be met with the same fate as Balin's poor party in Moria. You know, dead.
Rainseeker: So that could be some serious questing? If that ever happened your NPCs would have to talk about that, I assume?
Toady: We'll have to think about something, because 100 demons is too many for anybody, especially if the demons are the way they are now. If we downgrade them a bit then it'd be more feasible, or if we make them kill each other until one's left, or something. We'll do something about it, though, and then we'll have something land in the sweet spot of being fun and challenging, hopefully, instead of just being stupid one way or the other.
Rainseeker: Have them wander off, for instance, and start looking for goblin civilizations to enslave.
Toady: Yeah, I guess they could just parcel them up; if there's a big goblin civilization being run by one demon then there could be a balkanization of the area and they could start grumbling and fighting with each other. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out, because once they get just a little more of a push, either in the dragon direction or in the ... I mean, I'm not even sure what a free-roaming demon is supposed to be doing, if it's just supposed to run around and take over civilizations, or try to ... I mean, there could be demons lining up to impersonate the gods of the human civilizations like they do. 'Just queue up. You look the most like our god of death, so you get to take over the civilization,' and the rest of them are welcome to try back in 100 years, or whatever. It's going to get strange once we put all the world gen stuff in, like the god impersonations and stuff. It's just going to be very strange.
Rainseeker: An option is to have them stay at the dwarven site and establish a larger apocalyptic staging ground for ...
Toady: Yeah. The hole is still there. It's something that we're having to come to terms with, with our current demons and goblins as well. In the currently released version, in world gen the demon 'escapes from the underworld'. That has certain implications, right, about existing holes and stuff. So we're messing around with that, trying to come up with some different solutions that meter the flow, so having the demon in control of a portal, for instance. In a lot of Threetoe's stories the goblins are from the underworld, so I think we're going to relate that to it, to make it have more of a goblinesque feel for the current portal that the demon's controlling, so it doesn't just pour through with demons. We already have these giant spires down in the underworld that were filled with demons, but perhaps they'll be filled with goblins, they're, kind of, bastions from the demons or something like that. We're just playing around with different stuff, we'll see what happens.
Rainseeker: You could have, like, the old impermanent portal that opens up once every hundred years, lets critters through and then closes again, and you have that problem on the world every hundred years or so.
Toady: Yeah. We need to find a solution that recover from the depredations of the player. It's, like, if you manage to call of them they need to come back. Of course it can just wing it and open another one, or something, if it really needs to, or you can have the peace that you've fought for and get bored to death and get to your mundane quests, right? You'd be moving pastries around until the next portal opens.