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[Jamuk]

If there is a dwarven heaven, I don't want it to be cuddly.  It should be as warped as everything else in the game. 


A heaven would be the realm of a diety, who goes to the trouble to have souls of their believers who died  preserved so that they don't just fade away into nothingness and are brought back up to serve them.  Instead of angels, you have the diety's most trusted souls, who are given the power to help run their heaven.  If a soul in heaven does something the diety doesn't allow, one of the empowered souls could open up a hole to send them out of the realm.

Dieties could even have agreements, on how to deal with souls.  If a soul causes problems in one diety's realm, they could send them to to the realm of a diety of torture and rape to suffer for all of eternity.  In this way, they could have disagreements which could influence the thoughts of believers and cause wars.  And souls that commit crimes against a diety's followers and do not have a diety of their own to protect them could be chained to the mortal realm where they would be forced to stay as ghosts haunting an area.

[Aquillion]

I guess I came down too hard on the deities coming into being post world gen. However, gods being created by dwarves worshiping, or dwarves worshiping to gain an exploitable buff I'm VERY against. Stuff like that is cliche fantasy, something Toady is trying very hard to avoid.

That's not true.  Toady One has said that is goal is to make Dwarf Fortress a cliche fantasy generator, rather than one specific fantasy cliche.

Tropes are important to dwarf fortress.  Armok 1 didn't use them -- it was mostly just randomly-generated creatures.  And it didn't work, because people had no way to relate to those creatures -- you can have some randomly-generated monsters, sure, but you also need to have elephants and cats, so people will understand the implications of what they're looking at.  The concept of a "Dwarf Fortress" itself is all about using fantasy tropes to make something that will be immediately recognizable to players despite being all ASCII with very little text.

Clap Your Hands if you Believe dieties are another common trope in fantasy.  I do think they have a place in the game, though not necessarily in every generated world.

I think it's a huge mistake to focus on this idea of "originality" that some people fall in love with.  They want Dwarf Fortress to be this unique and special world with its own distinct rules you see nowhere else.  That sounds great at first, but when you think about it, it's actually the opposite of what Dwarf Fortress is about.  Making it into a unique world that ignores all tropes in favor of its own special conventions means that you are tying yourself to specific conventions -- it means that you're no longer making a fantasy world generator; you're making one specific fantasy world.

And that's not the goal of Dwarf Fortress.  It's not supposed to be one sparkling unique fantasy world; it's supposed to be a generator capable of producing limitless fantasy worlds.  Doing that requires looking at the tropes that make up cliche fantasy, dissecting them to understand them, and then implementing them into world generation so they can all show up, in one way or another, in some of the worlds Dwarf Fortress generates.

[Neonivek]

Domains of the dead and godly realms arn't always connected.

While Hades ruled over the underworld, Greek Heaven and Greek Hell were somewhat seperate. Hades didn't live in either of them.

Buldr only had domain in the underworld after he died.

[RandomNumberGenerator]

If there is a dwarven heaven, I don't want it to be cuddly.  It should be as warped as everything else in the game. 


A heaven would be the realm of a diety, who goes to the trouble to have souls of their believers who died  preserved so that they don't just fade away into nothingness and are brought back up to serve them.  Instead of angels, you have the diety's most trusted souls, who are given the power to help run their heaven.  If a soul in heaven does something the diety doesn't allow, one of the empowered souls could open up a hole to send them out of the realm.

Dieties could even have agreements, on how to deal with souls.  If a soul causes problems in one diety's realm, they could send them to to the realm of a diety of torture and rape to suffer for all of eternity.  In this way, they could have disagreements which could influence the thoughts of believers and cause wars.  And souls that commit crimes against a diety's followers and do not have a diety of their own to protect them could be chained to the mortal realm where they would be forced to stay as ghosts haunting an area.

In Fall From Heaven 2(Mod for Civ IV) the lore has it so that there are gods that have their own "Vaults", which function the same way as your heavens that you're talking about. In the vault of the God of Law for example, everything is orderly and symmetrical. The vault of the God of Water is like a vast ocean. We could have something like that, based off of the spheres(HFS works like that currently, though only three HFSspheres are in DF currently.)