I've read quite a bit more of the raws now, so here's the most complete feedback/thoughts I'll probably have on this!
There are a few reasons I find the descriptions weird, uncanny, and even a bit creepy.
That's pretty blunt. To be honest, it doesn't sound like you'll like Revised. I'm not sure what to tell you.
They use gendered nouns for virtually everything, while normal people refer to animals (and most non-human creatures) as "it" unless deliberately going for an affectionate tone or if the distinction is somehow relevant. Pretty much all even remotely humanoid creatures are referred to as men and women, when it would be more natural to refer them to as creatures or monsters like the vanilla descriptions do (who looks at a sasquatch and thinks "oh, that's a hairy man"?).
The vanilla descriptions already do.
She may not be referred to as a woman but it's pretty clearly labelled female. All of this just comes down to how you interpret these creatures. To me, the definition of "man" and "woman" is already pretty stretched in a fantasy setting. Why are kobold females women and adder females not? I'm not sure we'll see eye to eye on this, I'm just trying to illustrate why I referred to them that way. A big part of my reasoning was that many of these creatures can join your fortress. And they can talk! If your dwarves are able to talk to a humanoid and have already noticed she's female, I don't really follow why it wouldn't be considered "woman" (although this doesn't apply to your specific example). I've also noted many times in the thread that the descriptions aren't done: the sasquatches are a prime example of that. The whole creature_standard file still needs work.
Pretty much all humanoid creatures get two genders and most of them bear children, but I don't think this is necessary or even sensible for mythical creatures like satyrs or harpies, who are canonically exclusively male and female in their originating mythologies and probably don't subscribe to mundane rules of biology, or even for DF-original fantastical creatures like nightwings (because they're fantasy monsters and it makes just as much sense in-universe for them to be born out of the souls of dead goblins or something as it does for them to reproduce biologically).
I don't like immortal creatures aside from automatons. I've stated so already. But in any case, satyresses
already exist and I'm far from the first person working in modern fantasy to have male harpies. To be blunt: I don't care about being faithful to Greek mythology (or whatever), and I don't really understand why anybody can be expected to. This is a game with fantasy tropes in it. If we had to stick to the original mythologies then hardly anybody would be writing fantasy. I'm still a little bewildered why this is a sticking point: it's not as if Toady's game is perfectly in line with Norse mythology, even if you look only at the elements drawn from it.
To be honest, one of my secret projects was a mythology addon in which I'd try to come up with my own, Greek or Roman mythology inspired lore. Bring in wises and sages for good regions, expand on the harpies and such. I have a side folder with some work on it, but this conversation has convinced me that it's a terrible idea.
Then there's the constant, incessant reminders that things are indeed naked with their naughty bits hanging out.
So yeah, pretty much the weird sex nudism gendery anthropomorphisation stuff is what I don't like about the descriptions. Seriously puts me off.
Look, I've already started to tone it down. I'm sorry it makes you uncomfortable. I just tried to point out what I felt was already obvious (that this is a game with tons of naked animal people). I've spent a long time trying to come up with interesting things to say about these creatures, and in a relatively recent fit of inspiration I thought I'd be a little cheeky and start mentioning it. I evidently went overboard.
Then there are some other niggles. Tons of creatures that represent specific species get renamed into more generic animals, such as sperm whales becoming just whales, great white sharks becoming just sharks, and black mambas becoming just mambas. I don't think there's any reason to change this when the descriptions match those specific species. Also, a handful of other creatures, such as blue jays, get renamed to remove spaces in their names, even though their proper names contain a space, but other creatures, such as large rats, don't.
I've explained my reasoning here several times in this thread already, but sperm whales became whales because there's no other whale in DF. I'm thinking of this from an in-universe consistency type thing (in part). We call sperm whales by that name because we want to differentiate them from other whales. But Urist has no other whale to compare it to. But the bigger issue is leather: the long names are ridiculous looking, and I greatly prefer having shorter creature names for less clutter. I had the same logic for black mambas and peregrine falcons. Great white sharks became white sharks, not just sharks, and their wiki page mentions that as an acceptable alternative. And I have a personal preference for hyphenating nouns or removing the spaces where possible: when I'm playing with a fixed width font, I find helps makes item names easier to parse.
Lots and lots of creatures also gain CURIOUSBEAST tags. Many of them gain a very generous selection of them, often getting all three. While I haven't done extensive playtesting, CURIOUSBEAST creatures are among the most annoying things a fort can encounter, particularly in the beginning, so I suspect adding this many can make certain kinds of embarks much more annoying. Pretty much every single primate seemed to gain all three tokens, which is a bit odd because not even the premier annoying primate in DF, the rhesus macaque, is attracted to booze.
I can revert this if it's too bad: it didn't seem too annoying in my playtesting, and I enjoyed the additional challenge. These changes were contributed by Warlord255.
The new leather types are pretty nice, but I don't think "feather" makes any sense. Feathers are generally used without being attached to the skin. I suspect this might be because they don't stay attached to the skin very well after the tanning process, but I don't know.
I can revert feather. I was experimenting with World of Warcraft again and admiring a pair of feathery leather pants I picked up somewhere. That's where I got the inspiration from. I'll wait a bit before deciding about this one: I kind of like it. It's worth noting that because small creatures don't yield leather in Revised, almost all of the animals you'd get this from don't exist in real life, so the properties of their feathers are a little suspect.
Also, many creatures that have coarse, short hair are tagged as being furry in their description (ie. [TLCM_NOUN:fur:SINGULAR]), but in common use the words used for the hair of these animals (eg. cows, horses) is just hair, and their skin (with the hair attached) is called hide. This is a bit nitpicky, though!
I've always disliked 'hair' here, though. I genuinely, literally don't remember the last time somebody referred to my cat's fur as "hair" (when he's still wearing it, not when it's detached). It always made reading animal descriptions feel off to me. This change was from Essential DF, and should probably be mentioned in the description.
Amidst all this criticism I must say I really dig the overwhelming majority of the actual gameplay changes though. It's the reason I'm here. In fact, I like them so much that faced with the choice of giving them up because I didn't like the descriptions, renames and other minor changes, I instead chose to spend the past five hours cobbling together a homebrew version of the mod that only has the gameplay changes without any changes to the creature names or descriptions.
EDIT: Oh yeah, forgot about the expanded dictionary. I'd rather not have my dwarves write poems about labias and rape, so I got rid of that too.
Might be worth noting that Revised started out as a continuation of the Modest mod and I renamed it to Revised for the exact reason that I didn't want people to think it was just a collection of gameplay improvements and bugfixes, but it doesn't seem to have worked. I'm genuinely not sure Revised will be for you. I'm toning down the references to nudity but I've worked damn hard on my descriptions and I'm pretty proud of them, even though they're not finished.
Author
Topic: Dwarf Fortress Revised (v3.1.1 for v0.47.04) (Read 156086 times)