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[amistospindraca]

I realize there are already a few really well-done mods that implement spells (e.g. Roses' seems really well-done). I'm generally a fan. Sometimes, though, I want to stick to a world in which magical elements (especially abilities) derive impact from wide variety, but sparse occurrence. (I think of A Song of Ice and Fire).

I was looking back at this old comment by Toady and I thought maybe we could revisit the idea of procedurally-generated "magical" abilities. Has this already been done, or at least tried?

[amistospindraca]

 In particular, I was thinking of abilities tied to the worship of (or interaction with) a pariticular deity. Ability names could be generated from symbols associated with a deity & religious sphere, and syndromes could be given to match. The ability names would take the form of <symbol>-<cast_type>. E.g. if the sphere is "Nature" then the mod might select the symbol "frog" and the cast_type might be "morphy" (or some similar suffix); the effect in this example is of course that the target is turned into a frog. Some other potential cast-types: "breath" perhaps does some amount of damage depending on the symbol, and adds some effect (chilling/heating body parts that are hit, or adding poison or infection, or perhaps just creating a horrible odor without doing much damage at all); "gaze" causes some related mental effect ("Urist McTarget interrupts gather plants: too insane." + report: "Urist McTarget begins raving about frogs, frogs everywhere").

There are obviously a lot of questions to be answered about the design of the system (e.g. symbol choice/exclusion: I'm not sure "diversion game-breath" would really "work"). But first I wondered if anyone else is interested, since I doubt I could get it into working and playable form on my own without help from the community.

[Putnam]

I put a bunch of sphere-based spells into Fantastic, but procedurally generating them is a fascinating idea.