Slade, adamantine, and the spoiler in general will be procgen. Replaced by generated materials. Or in some worlds, the spoiler would be totally different or would not exist at all. Hell, maybe some worlds would be based on giant floating islands floating in the void and digging too deep would simply cause your miner to fall into the void and die. That sort of thing.
This matches what I understand as well. The current backstory of DF implies that the primary structure is more or less flat layers, but with a moving sun; I sometimes think of it as sort of a region on a magical variant of an
Alderson Disk or some similar construct. "Slade" is reasonably analogous to "scrith", a fantastically durable "basement" material that allows building various megastructures or fantastic architecture without all the limitations of traditional matter.
But that is only one myth, and in the future we will have many! The special material one finds while digging deep might well be a mystically buoyant super-pumice, formed from the mixed spray and debris when the Orb of Order crashed into the Sea of Chaos. Life exists on the floating chunks of pumice that have accumulated enough ordered matter to hold together against the Sea, and the demons of chaos try to work their way up through naturally formed tubes, or the mines of the greedy. This is an example of a world structure that gives vaguely similar effects (demons from below, associated with an element, special material in between, surface is more mundane in small areas but weirder at larger scales, etc.); but with interestingly different game implications (more Law vs. Chaos than Good vs. Evil; the tricky lower layers are based on seawater (possibly with associated syndromes due to the chaos) rather than magma, etc.). Yet it should not require an enormous number of new systems; most of what I described above could be handled by existing code or fairly straightforward extensions of such.
A "cosmic egg" myth has already been used as the example in one of the talks IIRC, where presumably fragments of the shell would be important. Or, what if you think you're on a fairly normal world, but digging deep you hit a layer of something described as "Megachelonian Scute"? Is it turtles all the way down? And what sort of creatures might infect a world-turtle's blood... "The Megasalmonella strikes Urist in the upper body with its flagella!"
Of course, one also considers what can be done to vary even within the current structure. An unusual characteristic of the traditional DF setting is that magma is very easy to get down to; is the DF world the creation of an impatient deity or pantheon, who didn't want to wait billions of years for the world to cool and spawn life, so built a layer of slade over the molten planet to hurry it all along? Is DF actually a post-apocalyptic setting, where the gods mostly lost the material plane where the majority of their worshipers lived, and had to hastily build a redoubt of slade covered with a thin layer of rock and organics so that the free races could survive and breed more worshipers? These very different interpretations could result in almost identical mechanics, at least until scientists, clerics, and adventurers start poking things to see how they work. And it illustrates that even with a set of "real" exotic mechanics, differing myths could spring up among different cultures and races as to *why* the world is the way it is.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3134502 times)