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[NullForceOmega]

Angelious, I think it would be advantageous for you to familiarize yourself with this thread http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=94140.0, or if you are already familiar with it, re-read it.  This is Bay 12, we do not go quietly into the night, me fight, repulse, hunt, hound, capture and tame it to our bidding.  As TAG said, losing is fun, but winning is satisfying.

[DG]

i believe the challenge and difficulty of the game are its biggest reasons of success........as nowadays i dont find much of a challenge in surviving outside of evil biomes.

DF isn't a difficult game once you've learned how to play, as you've discovered. It's actually quite easy. It's successful¹ despite being difficult to learn, not because of it.

¹ And it's success is debatable.

[angelious]

i believe the challenge and difficulty of the game are its biggest reasons of success........as nowadays i dont find much of a challenge in surviving outside of evil biomes.

DF isn't a difficult game once you've learned how to play, as you've discovered. It's actually quite easy. It's successful¹ despite being difficult to learn, not because of it.

¹ And it's success is debatable.

every game becomes easy once you learn it. that point is rather moot in itself.


null. thats just about the point of video games. you overcome the challenge to achieve something.and more often than not. a fort where everything is going well is a boring fort.

[DG]

Well, the usual game related maxim goes something like "it should be easy to pick up but difficult to master". DF turns that on its head mostly because of the UI. Sorry for the derail.

[Calidovi]

So is the OP trying to promote the addition of Lovecraftian-looking monsters or monsters that create the psychological effects that Lovecraft's works do?

[angelious]

So is the OP trying to promote the addition of Lovecraftian-looking monsters or monsters that create the psychological effects that Lovecraft's works do?

op was trying to get word to word lovecraftian monsters with the effects and looks.

most people just tried to mellow it out to either just having the effect or the looks. and rest of the people took it too literally

[Calidovi]

So is the OP trying to promote the addition of Lovecraftian-looking monsters or monsters that create the psychological effects that Lovecraft's works do?

op was trying to get word to word lovecraftian monsters with the effects and looks.

most people just tried to mellow it out to either just having the effect or the looks. and rest of the people took it too literally

And the commenters are just explaining that either:
a. FB physically mimic Lovecraft's creations enough
b. Fear of the unknown is not a working fear in DF players

Right?

[Evil One]

So is the OP trying to promote the addition of Lovecraftian-looking monsters or monsters that create the psychological effects that Lovecraft's works do?

op was trying to get word to word lovecraftian monsters with the effects and looks.

most people just tried to mellow it out to either just having the effect or the looks. and rest of the people took it too literally

And the commenters are just explaining that either:
a. FB physically mimic Lovecraft's creations enough
b. Fear of the unknown is not a working fear in DF players

Right?

In DF 'Unknown' just means something !!Fun!!, that we haven't weaponized yet.

[angelious]

So is the OP trying to promote the addition of Lovecraftian-looking monsters or monsters that create the psychological effects that Lovecraft's works do?

op was trying to get word to word lovecraftian monsters with the effects and looks.

most people just tried to mellow it out to either just having the effect or the looks. and rest of the people took it too literally

And the commenters are just explaining that either:
a. FB physically mimic Lovecraft's creations enough
b. Fear of the unknown is not a working fear in DF players

Right?

fear of the unknown doesnt work in gaming. and while i agree with some people that the fb are mostly pretty tame. making them more lovecraftian is near impossible

[Evil One]

Every time I see this thread, all I can think of is a bunch of Elves slowly moving in to attack a Dwarf Fortress that has offended them and suddenly having strange deadly tentacled creatures rain down on them that have been launched by the fortresses drawbridge catapult.

[Neonivek]

I actually like the idea of the suggestion but I feel it is kind of vague in the end.

Forgotten Beasts are "alien looking" enough (except not enough IMO) but that isn't exactly Lovecraftian so to speak.

[quekwoambojish]

I don't think we need lovecraftian monsters as much as we need our in game deities to be fleshed out.

I am really hoping godly interactions will lay on the mystery and pain, in the same way this topic seems to be suggesting.

But there's a good point many of you bring up, and that's players conquering gods etc ruining that element of mystery.

What's the solution to that? Make every ounce of mystery you uncover piss off the gods even more, making the game nigh unplayable in difficulty. Like if you kill a cultist or chop up some sacred powerful relic, have an angry God smash you into dust. Some will say, "ohh, well you're taking away the reason why people like DF just by killing them outright like that"...pff NO! I'd love to piss off a god only to have his flaming foot stomp 30z tiles into my fortress. And y'know what I'll do the next time I play? The exact same thing.

I'll keep doing it until I feel like visiting some big gods angry footprints in adventure mode...Then I'll probably try taking one of the sacred relics to be all powerful and whatnot in adventure mode, only to have that god make magma pour out of my eyes unless I become his angry fiery sex slave.

[Arcvasti]

It seems to me that the biggest thing about DF which makes me feel helpless is when my dwarves do stuff and I can't do anything about it. Despite everything I have at my disposal, that Forgotten Beast is still shredding my dwarves left and right. There's a loyalty cascade or a tantrum spiral going and my dwarves WON'T LISTEN TO ME. I think you might be able to capture some of the Lovecraftian atmosphere by making the player feel powerless IN SPITE of what they can do rather then powerless because they can do nothing. In Masterwork, at some point, there was a cult of the Carp God that could get going in your fortress. You'd start receiving strange messages about your dwarves discovering mutilated corpses in the refuse pile and ritual circles being drawn in blood in random places. And then one of your workers would suddenly and apparently randomly turn into a horrid fishy abomination and go on a rampage until it was finally brought down. THAT is how you can do Lovecraft stuff in DF. The thing which made the Cult of the Carp God so effective is that its bundled with so much other stuff. The average player playing Masterwork has no idea that the Cult of the Carp God is even IN the mod because its so bloated with features. So it comes as a disturbing surprise when normal dwarves start doing creepy things and turning into monstrous fishmen. A dedicated Lovecraft mod wouldn't quite be able to capture that, because the entire porpoise of the mod is to do that kind of stuff and anyone who downloaded it would be expecting it. IMHO, the best way to use a Lovecraft mod would be to use it in a succession fort WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE ELSE.

Although you could totally just add in Lovecraft stuff too. Some of his stuff was sorta sci-fi and you could do some interesting stuff with the Elder Ones and the Great Race having ancient ruins buried in the caverns from a gameplay point of view. Stealth shoggoths, for one. I know there's SOME way to modify death messages, possibly via DFhack, so you might be able to have it work something like this:

1: Opens up caverns to get water on glacier and trawl for ancient artifacts
2: Stealth shoggoths enter the fort without anyone knowing
3: Dwarves start getting their heads sucked off
4: Shenanigans ensue

Stealthing creatures are another one of those things beyond the player's reach. You literally have no in-game clue what the hell's going on with them. Once again using Masterwork as an example, I spent maybe a year in one fort with a stealthing necromancer reanimating legions of the dead. Eventually, I managed to kill him by using magma to initiate a fiery holocaust on the surface, torching a scattered group of migrants in the process. But, for that year, I was extremely paranoid, afraid the necromancer would get into my fort via my well or something and start reanimating all the corpses in my refuse stockpile while still being invisible and unkillable.

[Bendigeidfran]

I think given the whole randomly generated Forgotten Beasts element of the game, adding things set in stone like a bunch of directly Lovecraftian "Boss" style monsters isn't really necessary. However an expansion on the effects of things on a Dwarfs mental state would be cool, as would be allowing Forgotten Beasts and the like the ability to influence the world more directly when they arrive, corrupting the earth, spreading eldritch engravings detailing the dark prophecies of their coming and the destruction of Dwarfkind, and all that noise. That kinda loses something when it comes from a giant vomit snail but you get the general idea.

[illiousintahl]

Eh, forgotten beasts for the most part aren't there yet. Most are "just a little off" rather than lovecraftian monstrosities, eldritch abominations, cosmic horrors, Eldrazi, or [insert choices here].

"A penguin brute, who happens to lack a mouth, has a tail, and "it knows and intones the names of all it encounters"."


how is this not lovecraftian to you lot?


also how many here has ACTUALLY even read any of lovecrafts works instead of just knowing he did fancy monsters and most likely inspired tentacle porn?

well I listen to a lot of libervox recordings of his stuff and most of it I find more Innuendo like than descriptive (i'm sure theres a better word for it, i just can't think of it atm).. except for the brain cylinders, they we're actively described.
Oh and a lot of the other stuff was on flow works by other authors that tried to take the GOO and make them part of some elementalist cosmology for some reason (which is why we have Ithaqua the space void god being a cold entity).
I didn't feel that really was necessary for the works to progress in that direction and imposed order artificially to the lovecraftian thought that 'mankind is merely an island of sanity in an ocean of madness' line of thought.
That being said the penguin that chants things it shouldn't know with a mouth it doesn't have definitely is lovecraftian. As much as a Lovecraftian GOO would be if any of them we're ever described by a prima facie account (based off of how nyarlothoteps race is described in one of the stories [the one where the guy dreams he's a three tentacle legged monstrosity that's basically an alien librarian]).