To be fair, the magic feature description essentially says that nothing is set in stone yet:
quote:
Core15, MAGIC. There are no specific decisions nailed down yet, although we've thought about it a lot. It's probably best to go for a very general system here, as in the first Armok attempt. Then the world generator and entities can decide what they want to use from what's available. Early efforts might be to make dwarven artifacts more interesting and to increase the power and variability of enemy leaders, rather than focusing on traditional spell-casting adventurers.
I wonder, though, maybe we should have a sticky in this forum with the most frequently-mentioned requests? On the other hand, it doesn't really hurt to have people mentioning them over and over, and gives Toady an idea of what people are thinking about. Plus they might actually have some good ideas worked into what they're saying, even if it the basic idea has been said before or is already in the plan.
...to actually respond to the suggestion, I'm not sure dedicated 'caster' dwarves would be a good idea. If there's going to be a 'traditional' magic-using dwarf, I think I'd expect it to be a single noble... one magically-inclined dwarf per fortress would be more than enough. And I'd expect him to focus more on negating enemy magic, exorcizing ghosts, and that sort of thing than on freezing blasts or fireballs... somehow that just seems more 'dwarven.' Maybe he could do some close-range magical tricks if the fortress is in dire need, but it wouldn't be his main purpose and you wouldn't be able to order him to do it... it's not his real job; defending your fortress is for grunts. Turning magic into purely a form of high-powered artillery takes most of the, well, 'magic' out of it... and if dwarves want to light enemies on fire, I expect they'd just make some form of incendiary device to throw with their catapults instead anyway.
Of course, other dwarves might still make magical artifacts, engrave items with runes, brew magical-seeming potions, and so forth.
Hmm, magic, magic... your magic-dabbler noble could use magic in the form of complicated, time-consuming rituals. In order to use a ritual, you'd have to aquire a text for it somehow, or maybe have him research it... you'd need materials for it, as well as perhaps some dwarves to support him in it (a choir, for instance.) You could do a yearly ritual to help your fortress resist enemy spells and keep out ghosts or something like that. Bad things would probably happen if you missed it.
Of course your magic noble would demand things for lots of odd rituals that have little or no real effect, too. And not doing them would slow or stop his research and make his other spells lose their effectiveness. In fact, he could demand things for regular rituals that would be necessary to keep the effectivness of his wards up.
[ September 01, 2006: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Topic: Magery aka spellcaster dwarves and/or healers (Read 763 times)