1.When are we going to actually see festivals during gameplay?
Patience
. About festival content, toady's already given a reply about festivals in the last FotF which would help you out.
1)You mentioned gambling problems. What are dwarves actually gambling on? Can they gamble on the outcomes of WG festivities/tournaments? Or is it just abstract board/card games for now?
1) He he he, unspecified. Given what we have, it's most likely those festival competitions, yeah. I may add some flavor specifics yet, if I get a chance to revisit before release.
Celebrations, gambling, random generated food and the like were all kind of queued for the tavern arc (another unresolved arc), as when it happens post the steam arc or beyond which importantly has to happen for financial reasons and after-calibration of making the steam ver stable.
2.Sorry if this is too much of a suggestion, but it's kind of a bummer how colosseums and skulls on pedestals do nothing but give your people trauma (especially when playing a modded race like goblins). Are there any plans to change that in the near future, maybe taking certain traits like cruelty into account?
It is a suggestion, but i do sympathise with you on this, i can't even memorialized the inorganic severed arm of a forgotten beast which really should have been a mighty trophy given the lives that were lost trying to claim it without dwarves feeling quite squeamish. But the relief is that in the current DF version dwarves can become much more nulled, so having a bit of fear with the odd morbid decoration around the fortress can help you prepare them for the very very scary things like mounds of bodies without breaking their minds by throwing them in at the deep end.
That's my way of looking at it anyway, toughening up your goblins to it with terror 101 would be recommended for any other grisly work they do.
3.Are we going to see Adventure mode ai improvements before the big wait? It's pretty silly how I can murder innocent villagers one by one and all they do is cry and spit on me.
Even if Toady recognizes it is silly (like monster hunters) im not sure he's actually spoken about topics like that recently, the reputation system is a bit of a fudge in when it works and doesnt like people running up to you and calling your a murderer for killing a giant they asked you to in a quest, but if there's a change to behaviour it'll probably happen as a rework. That's probably leaping to around the time of the Law arc after the army & big wait ((magic arc and map-rewrite)) so that entities are capable of understanding shifting entity politics and other subjects, so very very far away.
45.Dungeon Masters don't do much right now. What exactly are they planned to do once the villain update is over?
They have the intrigue tokens and handle animals, i dont know what the latter animal handling might do in the future (in the 2d past, dungeon masters were the only people responsible for taming exotics) and as up to of recently they're your spymasters.
A interesting thing to do is set your spymaster up as a tavern-keeper and they'll probe people while they're all inebriated and loose lipped about what they're really up to (which seems a exploit but only the alcohol is responsible for any misgiving here). I do remember some discussions that they might in the future of the villian arc being revisted and loose ends tied up, be the figureheads who enable instigating the fortresses own plots and counter intelligence using screen we can see but not interact with yet.
6.Are we going to see more flexible magic system? IE systems that let you create your own spells?
Really one for Toady, we only have pre-set and prepared secrets/interactions etc we can use because the game loads this information up at the time, post-gen in game procedural magic forms would be probably not as game intended.
EI - You cast a cloud levitation spell but you've mixed in to make the cloud out of flames, since you're a xth level wizard this turns you into a living sun and you burn everything to a crisp within render distance as you float on by. Its really morrowind fortify intelligence potion to infinity level shenanigans, and out of what we do know about proposed magic arc concepts is that magic will have a consequence most of the time, and extremely powerful magic as a result would probably severely dehabilitate/kill the caster or significantly change something else, like a big disturbance in the magic-force that causes a disaster.