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[pikachu17]

it looks like a combination of a chicken and a t-rex

[Random_Dragon]

it looks like a combination of a chicken and a t-rex

The dreaded Gallus Rex. Beware its deliciousness!

[NW_Kohaku]

When looking over the game thus far, the nature of eras has led me to conclude that part of what the game implies, deliberately or not, is a notion of, for lack of better terminology, entropic decay. The world starts at a Mythic Age, and as the creatures of magic die off, it becomes a Legendary, then Heroic Age.  If all the magic creatures, including dwarves, start dying off, it becomes a Twilight, Fairy Tale, or "Civilized" (fully mundane) Age.

This, as a whole, is reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, and many other similar mythic stories, including the Narnia series, where the Golden Age fades, the myth dies, and the magic goes away into a more mundane world.

I also notice this in play as an adventurer, where one event I remember well was traveling from hamlet to hamlet, finding completely same-y individuals from the population pool.  Even killing them would make no difference, they'd just come back thanks to a bug. Then, I came across a vampire who had set himself up as mayor.  He was obvious because he flashed and had legendary skills and hundreds of items and thousands of stories.  I could have killed him, but I realized that this vampire was literally the one thing of note in this chunk of the world, and if I killed him, I'd be destroying one of the only halfway interesting things around, like blowing up a landmark.  It made me sad to think of it, so I left the vampire be.

With the coming mythic changes, will there be ways in which myths can "decay"?  That is, portals to different dimensions shut down forever, schools of magic forever lost, or once mythic and legendary things turning mundane when their "magic energy source" is cut off.  (Such as a city on a floating island turning into a mere plateau, or the edge of a discworld turning into merely a chain of really stormy areas of sea on a globe with undiscovered continents.)

For that matter, you mentioned concepts like myths from different creatures/cultures that oppose, and some of which may or may not be true. If there are conflicting myths, will it be possible for us as players to affect whether they are true or not? (To dip into the more Elder Scrolls style mythic, where reality is partly subjective, belief or disbelief can grant or strip away divinity.) If I lead a crusade to wipe out believers of a contradictory myth, can I make that myth untrue, and take away its magical power? Can we, in play, make new myths, or shape existing ones in other ways?

[Putnam]

Hello!
I didn't want to take your time with this but I can't hold it any longer. As I keep checking the homepage everyday, it becomes more and more disturbing but I can't explain it why... maybe its smile?... At first I didn't mind it but now I just can't ignore it. It's watching me with it's shiny red eye! Like it is scanning my soul... I don't know what is it but I MUST know it: what is that yellow thingy with the pointing finger on the old donations menu?

Cautionsaurus, of course.

(here's the origin)

[GoblinCookie]

When looking over the game thus far, the nature of eras has led me to conclude that part of what the game implies, deliberately or not, is a notion of, for lack of better terminology, entropic decay. The world starts at a Mythic Age, and as the creatures of magic die off, it becomes a Legendary, then Heroic Age.  If all the magic creatures, including dwarves, start dying off, it becomes a Twilight, Fairy Tale, or "Civilized" (fully mundane) Age.

This, as a whole, is reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, and many other similar mythic stories, including the Narnia series, where the Golden Age fades, the myth dies, and the magic goes away into a more mundane world.

It is also quite possible for things to go 'backwards' and in fact they tend to do so many times.  Hence there is no really any clear progression implied by the game really at all, especially nowadays that megabeasts can reproduce.

[Knight Otu]

Reading one of the sample myths from the myth generator in the PC Gamer interview, I'm really impressed by how much sense it makes, how internally consistent the details are. [snip]

I'm sorta curious as to what explanations there would be for the birth of every modded race I have in my worlds.

Also I noticed, the number 2 is selected on the image itself, so is it just one page of the entire mythology? Are the other pages about demons and various megabeasts and such?

From the few GDC screenshots floating out there on twitter, the page number is most likely a control for the sidebar that lists the elements of the myths, while the current topic gets a scrollbar. Page 1 would list, among others, the various Primordial elements of those myths. From what I gather, in the prototype program, the dwarven/human/etc topic pages would be accessed by clicking on that element. It would make sense if the other elements have similar pages, though, even if we haven't seen any of them.

[NW_Kohaku]

It is also quite possible for things to go 'backwards' and in fact they tend to do so many times.  Hence there is no really any clear progression implied by the game really at all, especially nowadays that megabeasts can reproduce.

It is possible for declining populations to recover, yes, but it starts at the most magical end of the spectrum, and can only "tread water" or decline from there, whereas the other ages exist only because of decline.  Going "backwards" means partially recovering from a decline, which requires decline in the first place.

There's a saying among the environmentalist crowd: "Our victories are temporary, but our losses are permanent." A tiny number of reproducing dragons can only stave off extinction, but are always threatened.  Once a species goes extinct, it is extinct forever. Unlike real life, there isn't even adaptation and divergence of species to eventually have vacated niches refilled by newcomers.  A species extinct decrements the diversity the planet can ever have again. At the same time, the game's residents gleefully entice you to think of all the megabeasts as a "to kill" list.

By contrast, a game like Civilization starts you out in the "Stone Age" end of the tech ages, and has a giant set of branches of different technological eras it expects and even demands you to go through, even if the game might end before you finish the tree.  It expects a buildup, and progression is clear along the linear path of ages.  By contrast, DF has a largely linear progression of entropic decay, even if it's possible for the needle to wobble on the boundary between one age and another.

[Egan_BW]

You've mentioned a "fantasy rating" for worldgen. Do you think that will be in for the first release with myths, or is that for later?

[Max™]

I thought that would be like a slider between a mostly flat map with few peaks to a rippled corrugated mess of peaks and valleys for elevation, and a slider between mostly mundane with few exceptions to a writhing coruscating mass of beasts and warlocks for fantasy.

[NW_Kohaku]

I thought that would be like a slider between a mostly flat map with few peaks to a rippled corrugated mess of peaks and valleys for elevation, and a slider between mostly mundane with few exceptions to a writhing coruscating mass of beasts and warlocks for fantasy.

I suspect it will just be a difference between only having what's in the raws, and what's going to be generated by the new myth system.  The game can't figure out what's "mundane" except by what it's told in the raws, and there's no real binding to physical reality when people mod things. 

That is, it might be like settings for how many totally procedurally-constructed titans exist in the worldgen settings, (as opposed to how you can always get raw-generated dragons,) a setting for how many procedural things are shoved into the game.

Toady wrote that you might generate a world without even being guaranteed dwarves or humans or anything, and all the critters are rando-land.  While such a thing might be interesting for those seeking a novel experience, it would also make it very difficult for newer players, especially, to make heads or tails of anything, since the rules of the game are changing every time you play.

To address Egan_BW's question, I don't speak for Toady, or have direct quotes to back this up, but every time something procedural like night creatures have been added, there was a worldgen option to turn them off, if only because they would wreck the themes of mods if you had night hags in a Fallout mod.  The procedural content is currently hard-coded, rather than raw-guided, so there's no other option to prevent theme mod havoc.

[NJW2000]

Weird.
Edited, Thanks\/

[Shonai_Dweller]

I probably haven't looked hard enough but

Didn't you mention a "fantasy rating" or slider for worldgen, determining how "true" the myths would be? As well as the possibility to generate a world without dwarves but entirely different procedural races instead? Will these two options be controlled by the same slider/value/etc, or different ones?

Pretty sure someone'll be able to answer this, but I'm not entirely sure.

This thread less than 24 hours ago. Link from top of Toady's devblog. It's the first paragraph on mythgen.

[Random_Dragon]

Toady wrote that you might generate a world without even being guaranteed dwarves or humans or anything, and all the critters are rando-land.  While such a thing might be interesting for those seeking a novel experience, it would also make it very difficult for newer players, especially, to make heads or tails of anything, since the rules of the game are changing every time you play.

Imagine if the bugfuck-insanely-named musical instruments, only they can kill you. This is the only major downside I see, wherein the name gives no reliable clue as to what you're looking at.

How will the myth generation affect the naming methods of these new generated features? Will they at least have names that give a vague hint as to what to expect (like how demons and night trolls are labeled), or will it use random language-based monikers? Because I can see that being an infinitely worse idea than that feature's current use with musical instruments. I don't mind not having any clue what an instrument is just from the name, because an instrument can't eat my face. -_-

[NW_Kohaku]

Imagine if the bugfuck-insanely-named musical instruments, only they can kill you. This is the only major downside I see, wherein the name gives no reliable clue as to what you're looking at.

Yes, this is, generally, the downside of procedurally-generated items.  You need far more interface hints as to what something is and what it is used for.

Take the plants that were, before the recent real plants were introduced, for example; Everyone knows what an oak tree is or what a cabbage is without the game describing it for you.  We only could figure out a "feather tree" was something that literally had feathers (and, of all things, eggs as fruit,) when Toady put it in the raws, or that a quarry bush was a literal bush with stone-gray plant leaves and nuts that look like rocks when they were put in the raws. 

The Titans/Forgotten Beasts and were-whatevers are described in enough detail to generally get a sense of what it's supposed to be, however, and I presume that will be the model for how other creatures will have procedural descriptions.

[Random_Dragon]

Take the plants that were, before the recent real plants were introduced, for example; Everyone knows what an oak tree is or what a cabbage is without the game describing it for you.  We only could figure out a "feather tree" was something that literally had feathers (and, of all things, eggs as fruit,) when Toady put it in the raws, or that a quarry bush was a literal bush with stone-gray plant leaves and nuts that look like rocks when they were put in the raws. 

That's not even as extreme an example as what I was talking about. If anything, I'm fine with feather trees, quarry bushes, shadow monsters, hellish brutes etc. They may be cryptic, but they're evocative.

I'm talking about os and cońu and other things where the name is utterly meaningless unless you have a solid memory of the in-game languages.

If the added elements are named the same way existing generated beasts are, it would be acceptable. You could at least parse the name and at least have a vague idea of what to expect. The problem is if they're named the same way the instruments are, which would be moronic. ;w;