I like the bit with the Wild Hunt, that's a nice mythological Easter Egg that I don't see nearly as much as I'd like. Should that be the only faerie lord appearance, or can there be a few others like say, Baba Yaga and Oberon?
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The thing about Oberon and Co is that they don't have generic names. ...
How about the Headless Horseman? Before the more popular tale of Sleepy Hollow he was known as Gan Ceann, a powerful Unseelie that wielded his own moldy head as a flail. In most stories he functioned as a sort of psychopomp, visiting the homes of those next to die- though there was some confusion as to whether he was the cause of death or if he just liked visiting old and sick people.
This could work. I'll have to think of a way to fit him in, but I'll give it a shot.
They should be a mostly above the ground race, but they should still be able to dig soil and stone. Just give make is to that the longer they spend underground, the more unhealthy they get. A ticker that goes up fairly quickly when they're underground, and goes down fairly slowly when they're above ground. The higher the ticker is, the more sick/insane/dead the elf becomes.
While this is possible, the bug that keeps intelligent creatures from using interactions out of combat would get in the way. If it gets fixed, I'll weight if it's worth it or not.
And Elf as a surface-only race will not be able to reach the fun stuff. Maybe add some workshop that can dig a shaft to invite the clowns?
They can dig. And just because they can't use adamantine doesn't mean they can't still dig it and face what lies below.
Maybe elvish gems are not made from polished rocks, but rather complex combinations of natural materials and magic. Input recipe, output gem.
Some random ideas:
Amber might fit the nature theme of elves, since they are solid tree resin. Make them grow from workshop or something else.
Amber is actually in vanilla DF, along with coral and pearls. They never appear because there is no source of them. If you check the idea dump above, you'll see I already am going to do amber "gems".
Maybe give them some kind of tattoo magic? They can 'armor' themselves by applying magical tattoos. I don't even begin to understand if that's possible, or how difficult it would be to implement though.
Tatoos seems more like a kobold thing. At the very least, it used to be such in old!masterwork.
Can they live in those big trees?
I'm afraid it is just not possible unless the player gets somewhat creative (build constructions around trees themselves). Nothing I can do on my side.
Remake the mages from Ye Olde Masterwork.
I'd rather go with a more passive magic thing, with certain exceptions (wild hunt, for one)
Because I won't be using create-unit. Instead, it'll be transform-unit instead, and I've seen it crash a few times in very specific situations.
It seems you have your mind set already.
But why create unit is that wrong here? From what I see, small chance to create a single friendly beast man or accidentally summoning a pack of hostile ones doesn't sound that bad.
It's not exactly in the wrong. I'll use it for quite a bit of stuff, it's just that I think transforming animals into animalmen is more interesting than just spawning them.
Also:
And as I said before, corpses of intelligent creatures cannot be used for anything, ever, period, even itemcorpses. This is a bug, but one only ToadyOne can fix.
After they are raised by necromancy and killed they become usable. I just got over 1k bones from harvesting de-re-animated succubi corpses from tower siege.
So there is a workaround for usage of corpses, even tho it is ugly one.
I imagine it may be because reanimated corpses are not considered intelligent.