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[Soadreqm]

Most importantly, can we mod in a contagious zombie disease that turns its victims into shambling, rotting monsters that crave the flesh of the living? And if we can, can we make the viral zombies fight the magical zombies?

And liches are a weird case. It looks to me they were mostly invented by the dreaded role-playing games. There were occasionally people who placed their soul inside an object to escape death, but they weren't called liches, and they usually werent skeletal wizards who for some reason can still regenerate their skeleton. So, will our liches be like Sauron, Voldemort, Marquis de Carabas or the standard DnD monster, what will they be called, and can the player become one in adventure mode? Are their bodies still alive and can they die? Just how do you make a soul jar, just how do you destroy a soul jar, and what happens if you bind your soul into, say, a building, a sword or a lungfish?

[Neonivek]

Reminder: This is as far as Dwarf Fortress and the Raws are concerned

The difference between a curse and a disease if I am to speculate is in their effects. Diseases damage you while Curses change your being (Which can in effect damage you)

Respectfully Id suspect the way to catch Diseases and Curses probably wouldn't be too different from one another and can in fact be the same method.

So the difference between a Disease and Curse is likely very mechanical then contextual.

[Mel_Vixen]

hmmm not even that maybe. A "curse" could create a desease and desease can alter your being to some extend without magic f.e. by affecting your behavior like syphillis does or altering the "genetical code" like many Proviruses.

[Granite26]

Guys, this "no I am right" discussion even about a fantastical concept such as undead is really silly. It's okay to state your interpretation of it and speculate about what will be in DF, but obviously undead means different things to different people in different contexts, be it D&D or myths or Tolkien or whatever. Obviously, there is no "correct" definition of undead (or ghost or golem or whatever). And even if there was, DF migh just come up with it's own, anyway - or, more likely, ultimately leave it to the raws what undead entails, because I seem to remember that Toady didn't have a strong opinion about either possible interpretations (maybe it's even going to change from world to world).

Yeah, I'm less interested in story and more game effect.  (Much the same way that dogs and wolves are no more similar than cats and fuzzy wamblers)

As far as I'm concerned, Curses and Diseases don't really need a difference at all.  They can use the same bits of code and the same modifiers.  At worst, they'd need a (curse) or (disease) tag to allow magically effects to target them differently

[praguepride]

What? No love?

Praguepride the reason why Golems tend to be mindless robots is because well... Dungeons and dragons and videogames. (It also helps that they steriotyped non-golems into golemness... For example the Durihan)

Original Golems were hardly mindless (though they were servants so to speak) and could think for themselves.

Hence why I said that at their best they were true resurrections, dead people brought to life (not un-life).

the concept of a lich has always been a mage triumphing over death with their arcane magicks

There is SOMETHING wrong about this sentence... Ohh I think I know... the "Arcane magicks" Since
A) Arcane refers to "Secret knowledge"
and
B) Magick is Pen and Paper RPG spelling. (or you spelled it incorrectly)

I don't really have a point here... other then you need to be careful when dealing with knowledge affected by videogames in determining if it is "status quo"

From my limited wikipedia search, it appears that the term "lich" was created for fantasy setting novels and capitalized by fantasy RPG's. That spelling was there on purpose, same with arcane because that's basically the original usage of the "lich".

[LegacyCWAL]

I don't know whether to feel proud or horrified: one silly comment and I managed to spawn what, eight pages of discussion at a pace vastly higher than the thread's usual posting rate?

Even 4th edition seems to be taking it's "monster" cue from White Wolf's 'Exalted'.

Can we please not start an arguement about 4e's flaws and/or merits?  I see enough of that shit on other forums, and would rather not have this one infected as well.

[hermes]

a)  just to add to the list of things that make people "undead", in a more historical and anthropological setting, Jimson weed has been attributed to making people behave like "zombies" - both in the event from which it gets its name, and in some occult practices from Haiti IIRC (doping criminals up and burying them alive??)

b)  I love the idea of a hospital and dwarves staggering back after battle.  How about faithful wardogs dragging back their crippled masters?

[Appelgren]

I think dogs should be able to wear little barrels of brandy around their neck to bring to wounded or trapped dwarves. I'm not sure if search and rescue St. Bernhard dogs ever had them in real life but it seems very dwarven.

[Pruvan]

I think dogs should be able to wear little barrels of brandy around their neck to bring to wounded or trapped dwarves. I'm not sure if search and rescue St. Bernhard dogs ever had them in real life but it seems very dwarven.

I second this, it would be brilliantly fitting for dwarves. And yes, they did have little barrels in real life. But I think they were accompanied by humans nonetheless, to help them give the victim some warming booze. I don't exactly see dogs as bartenders, let alone perfect aimers ("No Barkster! That's not his mouth!").

[Tormy]

I've got a better idea.  Can you guys stop inflating the development threads with all this argument over exact definitions of things that Toady is making up himself anyway? 

Yeah, please.  Arguing passionately over whether obsidian scalpels should count as a +132 Blade of Healification or just a +131 helps nobody even when it's done in the right place.

+1, I think that you lads should discuss this in some other topic. This topic is all about the dev. items of the next release.

I think dogs should be able to wear little barrels of brandy around their neck to bring to wounded or trapped dwarves. I'm not sure if search and rescue St. Bernhard dogs ever had them in real life but it seems very dwarven.

I don't know..it sounds silly to be honest. 

[corvvs]

the concept of a lich has always been a mage triumphing over death with their arcane magicks

There is SOMETHING wrong about this sentence... Ohh I think I know... the "Arcane magicks" Since
A) Arcane refers to "Secret knowledge"
and
B) Magick is Pen and Paper RPG spelling. (or you spelled it incorrectly)

I don't really have a point here... other then you need to be careful when dealing with knowledge affected by videogames in determining if it is "status quo"

Actually his spelling may be more accurate than you think.

At least, I believe Aleister Crowley predated Gary Gygax (c.f. the book Magick in Theory and Practice - actually an excerpt from "Magick, Book 4" that his publisher decided would make a good volume on its own, IIRC).

And while it is true that arcane means "hidden," I don't think a Wikipedia search is likely to find methods of trapping one's soul in a gem (within a bird within an egg within a duck within a fox within a chest...) so if it existed, I'd say it was fairly well hidden knowledge.

[Mel_Vixen]

It was a needle which was in a egg which was in duck which was in a Bunny which was in a ironchest buryed under a oak on the island Buyan for the "Koschtschei".

By the way i did go by a deffinition in the german wikipedia which bases on some old alchemical and magi-theorethic books like the works of "Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim" a sholar and by some people and oppinions "magican" (he was also said to be a nekromant).

Arcording to him and some other sources Nekromantics consist of two parts:
Scyomantic - e- and in-voking Ghosts and spirits.
Nekyomantic - creating undead from corpses.

The difference between both is that Scyomantic evokes soul without body and Nekyomantic on the other hand the body without soul.

By the way most of that comes from around 14 and 1500 and has some interresting still existing textsources like the "De Occulta Philosophia" or the "Das Buch der verbotenen Künste" (The book of forbiden arts).

[Solifuge]

I am actually very interested to see how magic, enchantments, curses, diseases, etc. are going to be handled:

There could be preset curses/diseases that could be used by different entities or civilizations. An Elven Druid could punish an excessive Dwarven Logging Industry by cursing a mountain range, so that the trees uprooted themselves and stormed the Fortress. Perhaps a god of the hunt could take notice of a legendary hunter, who has killed and butchered inordinate amounts of cougars, and grant them the form of a powerful, but Hostile, Cougarman, so they could sit back and either watch the carnage, or make the hunter become the hunted.

Alternatively, I could see procedurally-generated material for curses/diseases too. It'd be neat to gen one world with a malevolent Wizard named Nilus Verminplague, who had the power to instantly transmute any pools of water near him into massive swarms of Flies and Blood Gnats, and then gen another world where the Wizard Mendok the Thunderous lives among Humans, battling against their foes by hurling orbs of sonic force that would blow anything they struck into scattered chunks.

Random diseases with randomized symptoms would be pretty cool too. One disease may cause periodic organ damage, sleeplessness, and loss of hair cosmetic layers, while another may change skin layers into insect chitin, or blood into liquid fire. If not successfully treated in a hospital, they could also have effects that would grow more severe over time, such as causing berserk spurts culminating in a rampage, or limbs turning into silver one by one until they become a Silver Statue of themselves.

Heck, give it enough span, and diseases that turned the infected into a valuable metal, or an unstoppable berserker, may even be infected purposefully by less-scrupulous players.

[Alfador]

Step One: Allow the existence of prosthetic.
Step Two: Fashion a set of prosthetic genitalia that would shame a moose. Make sure it menaces with spikes of everything.
Step Three:
Step Four: Profit!

Alternately...

Step One: Allow the existence of prosthetic.
Step Two: Fashion a set of prosthetic genitalia that would shame a moose. Make sure it menaces with spikes of everything.
Step Three: Shame a moose.
Step Four: Hey, look everybody. You shamed a moose.

Wouldn't that BE a menacing spike?

[Sowelu]

the concept of a lich has always been a mage triumphing over death with their arcane magicks

There is SOMETHING wrong about this sentence... Ohh I think I know... the "Arcane magicks" Since
A) Arcane refers to "Secret knowledge"
and
B) Magick is Pen and Paper RPG spelling. (or you spelled it incorrectly)

I don't really have a point here... other then you need to be careful when dealing with knowledge affected by videogames in determining if it is "status quo"

Actually his spelling may be more accurate than you think.

Yeah, I was gonna say...I've never, ever seen that spelling in any tabletop RPG, but I have seen it in a lot of substandard neopagan faffle books.  (And apparently in some quite old ones, too.)  In some groups it's even the commonly accepted term because "magic" is used to mean "stagecraft".  But mostly it annoys.