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[GoblinCookie]

Toady did say he was planning on doing cavern embarks at some point. It was in the lsat Future of the Fortress reply, actually.

It's much more likely to happen when we get to the deep dwarf trade from the edge of the underground layers (probably with the firstish embark scenario release).  We're certainly planning to have a cavern start scenario, though it is very hard to say now what will be in the first batch since there are so many options.

That does look to be a ways out, though. Slavery does sound like it'd be a vital and necessary mechanic of that kind of thing, though.

I suppose that gives me some time to finish off the tileset I've been working on. I really have very little skill at this pixel art stuff.

Your drow tileset looks pretty fine to me, though I was more looking for something along the lines of Gemset for when I finally get round to graphics (aka a long time in the future).  Basically I intend to take the existing graphics for the existing creatures and then make my own, I do not however intend to ever use graphics for inanimate objects, I like the gemset look along the lines of this image where the background is ASCII but the creatures are graphics. 

well, drow don't necessarily only carve into the rocks, they also wander the underground and even wage war on surface civilizations, so settling them to the caves and the underground would sound fair enough.
but creating the society with all its matriarchy and slavery will be a hard to solve necessity.

Creating the society is only a problem due to the lack of slavery, once that is in the society problem is fixed for good; drow matriarchy is a doddle to represent since all I have to do is add an all female priestess caste and restrict the key positions to it.  The cavern embark thing is an absolute must however, while the drow do sometimes wage war on surface civilizations they do so in order to capture fresh slaves for their own underground society not because they actually wish to establish themselves as a surface power.  If drow did decide to become a surface power they would not build dwarf fortresses but would probably build what would in DF terms be considered towns. 

Drow do not carve the rocks much though, in DF terms they pretty much wall off cavern section and then wall off more cavern sections as they expand.  That is why we need an underground embark in order to justify making them playable, because it would not be an accurate reflection of society society to have them cross the surface world in a wagon order to then carve themselves a city out of a mountain, even if I could give them a 40-70% slave population.  They essentially have to start in a caverns and then wall themselves them off to create themselves a safe home. 

[Pvt. Pirate]

all i know about the drow is pretty much from D&D PC games:
-Baldur'sGate I+II
-Icewinddale I+II
-Neverwinter Nights

walling off caverns or cavern sections is true, but they then build houses inside those giant caverns, instead of carving them into the cavern walls.

in all of their society males are worth less than females. you'll barely ever see a drow male as a militia captain or any other high rank at all.
daughters kill their mother to gain her position/title.
i don't know hw well that will go with the (current) DF mechanics.

[Rekov]

in all of their society males are worth less than females. you'll barely ever see a drow male as a militia captain or any other high rank at all.
daughters kill their mother to gain her position/title.
i don't know hw well that will go with the (current) DF mechanics.

Not necessarily. They are undoubtedly matriarchal, and they have firmly defined gender roles. There are a few traditional male positions of influence.

Wizards are almost exclusively male, as it is considered beneath a female to practice arcane magic. Drow women go into the priesthood instead.

Also, the house weapon master is traditionally male.

[Pvt. Pirate]

*i bow before your mighty knowledge*
does this mean you have to create a male exclusive caste for arcanes and those specific roles and other female exclusive castes for the other roles?
making them babysnatchers could be a way of achieving slavery when creating a worker-caste for all non-drow.

[GoblinCookie]

*i bow before your mighty knowledge*
does this mean you have to create a male exclusive caste for arcanes and those specific roles and other female exclusive castes for the other roles?
making them babysnatchers could be a way of achieving slavery when creating a worker-caste for all non-drow.

Arcanes are not in DF terms a position, more an occupation; how Toady One will actually implement it remains to be seen.  Since magic has yet to be implemented as a field of study what I would do is add in a male caste of wizards and a female caste of priestesses, giving them magical powers through inherant interaction tokens; then I would restrict the top civilian positions to priestesses and make the military positions open to drow of any caste. 

Babysnatcher will not work for two reasons, the first of these is that babysnatcher does not function properly in non-dark fortress sites because there needs to be a dark fortress dungeon in order to actually put the children in, otherwise they show up as being in the site but will not actually be placed.  The second is that the stolen population always ends up in the capital which means that all the other sites will not have any slaves if we use babysnatcher.  Since drow will have pro-slavery ethics they will end up with slaves in the course of world-gen but there are presently no slave populations in general, only slave historical characters, meaning that slavery is entirely marginal; probably Toady One will fix this problem at some point probably when he establishes hopefully raw defined classes as part of the starting scenarios release. 

The biggest problem with playable is that in the sense that the mechanics are implemented in a dwarf-centric manner; it all hinges on how flexible the prisoner mechanics and status is going to be.  On another angle, if Toady One adds in hereditery castes then slaves would do nicely as such a caste, as I can add in a slave caste that is disqualified from all positions in all society that believe in slavery (not just drow).

[Pvt. Pirate]

i almost wrote "heretic" i mean hereditary family names, noble positions and maybe even visual treats would be the key to a lot of such problems. with every (sentient) being standing somewhere in a tree of where they derived from, one could even manage them getting artifact weapons and armor etc from their parents after their demise FUN.

[GoblinCookie]

i almost wrote "heretic" i mean hereditary family names, noble positions and maybe even visual treats would be the key to a lot of such problems. with every (sentient) being standing somewhere in a tree of where they derived from, one could even manage them getting artifact weapons and armor etc from their parents after their demise FUN.

Time to pour a bit of cold water on this stuff.  Pretty much every character in the game is related to pretty much every other character, within a site for certain and even at a civilization level as characters move around.  This is a function of the small initial size of the population, the rapid increase in that population and the small amount of time that in most cases passes between Year 0 and the end of world generation, pretty much everybody is royalty basically.

If I was to add drow then whole site would be the holdings of a single holding with everybody other than the slaves which would ideally be numerous would be members of the great house.  There would be a special sorcerer caste for males (cannot do wizards yet) and a priestess caste for males, both of them having inherant interactions to ape magical powers.  The top positions in the government would be restricted to the priestess caste but would also be hereditery, so the matron mother position will go to one of random priestess daughters she manages to produce (castes are non-hereditery) if not then to a random other priestess in the same site. 

Drow society is actually pretty simple, there are only really three groups, the priestesses who are in charge, the slaves who are there to do the menial work (this includes being tortured for amusement ) and then there is everybody else, male sorcerers/wizards are in the everybody else category as far as status is concerned.  One issue I can think of is the need to exclude members of the priestess caste from having slave status if her parents are slaves, it does not really make sense to have enslaved priestesses about the place, though one could end up with a drow of slave background becoming a priestess. 

[GoblinCookie]

I have released a new version of this mod solely to integrate the latest file changes for 0.43.02.  I have not so far developed this mod, thanks to the distracting power of Siege of Dragonspear and Baldur's Gate in general but I hope to get 2.2A out by the Monday after next, if not this Monday.  As already mentioned, the key focus of the next development is to integrate the latest version of Direforged into the mod, which includes the skyhak race; the present integrated version is now rather outdated.

[GoblinCookie]

I have brought out 2.2A when I hoped I would, integrating the latest Direforged content.  The major part of the work was going through the files to standardize the predator skills, the situation had become inconsistent because I was afraid that animal people would inherit those unarmed skills from their base creature, turns out the simple solution is simply to have the animal people creature variations automatically remove all unarmed skills; apparently this works. 

Next up is to integrate and update Deboche's D&D content pack content fully; the next stage after that is to finally polish off the gnomes and a few other creatures before I get down to business with dwarves.

[GoblinCookie]

Finally got around to making a bug fixing subrelease for this mod.  I fixed a number of reactions in the wanderer file to be better and more consistant as well as fixing toads and giant toads so that male creatures are not referred to as female creatures.

[GoblinCookie]

Updated mod to 0.43.04, however I was unable to locate the paper slurry material that Toady One fixed, I am guessing that it is hardcoded and does not appear in raws.

[GoblinCookie]

I am glad to have finally finished this update, it took me far, far longer than I had expected .  What this update does mainly is integrate most the creatures from D&D content pack that did not make it and fixed up a few more entities for the more advanced of them.  The next update is a more relaxed affair, I intend to polish up the various existing entities, particularly the gnomes before getting on with the addition of D&D dwarves to the game.

[GoblinCookie]

As ever a bug or two manages to find it's way through preliminary testing, in this case it was that I had mistakenly given the githzerai entity the githyanki creature rather than the githzerai one.

[tiff]

Found a bug: Something in the dnd_humanoid file causes the game to crash upon attempting to play. I can gen a world just fine but it just won't play. Sometimes it doesn't crash though?

I narrowed it down to removing the dnd_humanoid file preventing crashes.

Error log is just full of "Impoverished Word Selector"

[GoblinCookie]

Found a bug: Something in the dnd_humanoid file causes the game to crash upon attempting to play. I can gen a world just fine but it just won't play. Sometimes it doesn't crash though?

I narrowed it down to removing the dnd_humanoid file preventing crashes.

Error log is just full of "Impoverished Word Selector"

Thanks, I will look through that file to see what is up.  This is the bug that causes things to crash when loading the raw files, specifically when it is loading creatures?  I have experienced that bug, thought it was a function of having added in more creatures in the latest release than the game was meant to handle, glad to know it is not.