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[Grek]

The Pantheon for those spheres:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Name: The Arilnul
Spheres: Coasts, Victory, Minerals, Weather, Birth, Fate
Description: In a cavern off of the Sea of the Iron Bones lurks the Arilnul, the Titanic spider from beyond this world. Though its body takes a form vaugely like a man, its chitinous hide of unnatural material, razor-barbed spines and thirteen glowing eyes betray it as something not made for this world. Some say that the monster drifted onto shore one night on a broken ship of unearthly metal. Some say a crew of ghosts sailed up from the Underworld to release the beast upon the world. Some say it was once a brave sailor, cursed by the Gods for some unspeakable crime. None know the horrible truth...
Powers: It is said that the Arilnul has command over the weather in the Sea of the Iron Bones, and that it is the monster that causes all that dare enter those cursed waters to grow steely knobs of some impossibly hard of metal on their bones. There is a cult that prays to this unspeakable entity, claiming it can grant victory in battle, good weather and a terrible "blessing" upon children baptized in the waters of the Sea
Region Name: The Sea of the Iron Bones
Region: A shoreside village along a haunted inland sea. There are many costal caves in the area. The people here eat the deformed fish that are dredged up from the tainted waters. It is said that the waters were not always cursed as they are now.
Relations: Father of the Titans

Name: Abli the Jolly
Spheres: Deformity, Misery, Day, Animals, Poetry, Travelers
Description: This Titan takes the form of a brutally crippled giant with skin of molten gold that glows with the harsh light of the sun. When journeying through his forest, travelers must be careful not to slay any animal, great or small, lest Abli take offense. If a traveler should violate this rule, Abli will come and stalk them through the forest, reciting poetry of such great sorrow that grown men will burst into tears. None who are caught by the Titan have ever been seen again.
Powers: Abli's poetry is so fine that when  slew the Sun from the sky, Abli's verses wooed her so that she married him on the spot, with the resserection of the Sun for half the hours of the day as his dowery.
Region Name: the Forest of Light
Region: This land in the far, far west, where the sun sets every night. It is filled with giant animals and fruits of every kind. None of the animals fear man or beast and the predators that live there will venture out of the forest when they hunt to avoid Abli's wrath.
Relations: Husband of Ikashijal, Father of the Sun

Name: Ikashijal the Bitter Queen of the Night
Spheres: Healing, War, Lies, Night, Fire, Forgiveness
Description: Ikashijal is the Queen of the Night, the Titanic being who, with lies and subtle trickery, rallied the stars of the heavens against the might of the Sun, and stole his fire from the sky. All the animals of the world weept, making the Titan Abli come to their aid. His poetry softened the heart of the Bitter Queen of the Night and convinced her to marry him and to give birth to a new Sun at each dawn.
Powers: She is a mighty healer, so powerful that she can restore the dead to life. Her form is shrouded in mystery.
Region Name: the Darkest Jungle
Region: A jungle of the deepest, darkest darkess and animals of all shapes and sizes. It lies in the far, far east.
Relations:


Name: The Sun
Spheres: Order, Hunting, Jealousy, Family, Dicipline, Food
Description: The Sun, the one in the sky. He is jealous of Icgilistra's trysts with Cademsporro. Each day, he goes forth from his mother's womb fully formed to hunt the traitor Cademsporro and restore order to the Celestial kingdom. Each day, he is betrayed and slain by Cademsporro.
Powers: He's the Sun.
Relations: Child of Ikashijal and Abli, Lover of Icgilistra, Father of who knows how many little gods by Icgilistra


Name: Cademsporro
Spheres: Rainbows, Chaos, Water, Dusk, Weather, Luck
Description: A star fallen to the Earth in Ikashijal's war on the Sun. Each day, by some great fortune, Cademsporro avoids being slain by the Sun and instead kills him. Their battling causes thunder and bad weather while Sun's blood makes the rainbows after storms.
Powers: Very, very, very lucky. Also, he is a star.
Relations: Lover of Icgilistra, Brother/Killer of the Sun, Father of who knows how many little gods by Icgilistra.

Name: Icgilistra, Lady of Twilight
Spheres: Dusk, Lust, Twilight, Depravity, and Rulership
Description: A star fallen to the Earth in Ikashijal's war on the Sun, Icgilistra is tha object of the Sun's desires. Legendary for being depraved and poly-amourous. During the days, she faithfully loves the Sun, but as the day grows long, she lusts for Cademsporro and betrays the Sun.
Powers: She's a star and the ruling queen of the Celestial kingdom while the Sun is off trying to kill Cademsporro.
Relations: Lover of Cademsporro, Betrayer of the Sun, Mother of who knows how many little gods by who knows how many people/gods/trees.

[Quatch]

-Deformity, Misery, Day, Animals, Poetry, Travelers

Vogons. Definatly. They came in the day, carried bablefish, and the rest falls under poetry.

[Hummingbird]

The Pantheon for those spheres:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Name: The Arilnul
Spheres: Coasts, Victory, Minerals, Weather, Birth, Fate
Description: In a cavern off of the Sea of the Iron Bones lurks the Arilnul, the Titanic spider from beyond this world. Though its body takes a form vaugely like a man, its chitinous hide of unnatural material, razor-barbed spines and thirteen glowing eyes betray it as something not made for this world. Some say that the monster drifted onto shore one night on a broken ship of unearthly metal. Some say a crew of ghosts sailed up from the Underworld to release the beast upon the world. Some say it was once a brave sailor, cursed by the Gods for some unspeakable crime. None know the horrible truth...
Powers: It is said that the Arilnul has command over the weather in the Sea of the Iron Bones, and that it is the monster that causes all that dare enter those cursed waters to grow steely knobs of some impossibly hard of metal on their bones. There is a cult that prays to this unspeakable entity, claiming it can grant victory in battle, good weather and a terrible "blessing" upon children baptized in the waters of the Sea
Region Name: The Sea of the Iron Bones
Region: A shoreside village along a haunted inland sea. There are many costal caves in the area. The people here eat the deformed fish that are dredged up from the tainted waters. It is said that the waters were not always cursed as they are now.
Relations: Father of the Titans

Name: Abli the Jolly
Spheres: Deformity, Misery, Day, Animals, Poetry, Travelers
Description: This Titan takes the form of a brutally crippled giant with skin of molten gold that glows with the harsh light of the sun. When journeying through his forest, travelers must be careful not to slay any animal, great or small, lest Abli take offense. If a traveler should violate this rule, Abli will come and stalk them through the forest, reciting poetry of such great sorrow that grown men will burst into tears. None who are caught by the Titan have ever been seen again.
Powers: Abli's poetry is so fine that when  slew the Sun from the sky, Abli's verses wooed her so that she married him on the spot, with the resserection of the Sun for half the hours of the day as his dowery.
Region Name: the Forest of Light
Region: This land in the far, far west, where the sun sets every night. It is filled with giant animals and fruits of every kind. None of the animals fear man or beast and the predators that live there will venture out of the forest when they hunt to avoid Abli's wrath.
Relations: Husband of Ikashijal, Father of the Sun

Name: Ikashijal the Bitter Queen of the Night
Spheres: Healing, War, Lies, Night, Fire, Forgiveness
Description: Ikashijal is the Queen of the Night, the Titanic being who, with lies and subtle trickery, rallied the stars of the heavens against the might of the Sun, and stole his fire from the sky. All the animals of the world weept, making the Titan Abli come to their aid. His poetry softened the heart of the Bitter Queen of the Night and convinced her to marry him and to give birth to a new Sun at each dawn.
Powers: She is a mighty healer, so powerful that she can restore the dead to life. Her form is shrouded in mystery.
Region Name: the Darkest Jungle
Region: A jungle of the deepest, darkest darkess and animals of all shapes and sizes. It lies in the far, far east.
Relations:


Name: The Sun
Spheres: Order, Hunting, Jealousy, Family, Dicipline, Food
Description: The Sun, the one in the sky. He is jealous of Icgilistra's trysts with Cademsporro. Each day, he goes forth from his mother's womb fully formed to hunt the traitor Cademsporro and restore order to the Celestial kingdom. Each day, he is betrayed and slain by Cademsporro.
Powers: He's the Sun.
Relations: Child of Ikashijal and Abli, Lover of Icgilistra, Father of who knows how many little gods by Icgilistra


Name: Cademsporro
Spheres: Rainbows, Chaos, Water, Dusk, Weather, Luck
Description: A star fallen to the Earth in Ikashijal's war on the Sun. Each day, by some great fortune, Cademsporro avoids being slain by the Sun and instead kills him. Their battling causes thunder and bad weather while Sun's blood makes the rainbows after storms.
Powers: Very, very, very lucky. Also, he is a star.
Relations: Lover of Icgilistra, Brother/Killer of the Sun, Father of who knows how many little gods by Icgilistra.

Name: Icgilistra, Lady of Twilight
Spheres: Dusk, Lust, Twilight, Depravity, and Rulership
Description: A star fallen to the Earth in Ikashijal's war on the Sun, Icgilistra is tha object of the Sun's desires. Legendary for being depraved and poly-amourous. During the days, she faithfully loves the Sun, but as the day grows long, she lusts for Cademsporro and betrays the Sun.
Powers: She's a star and the ruling queen of the Celestial kingdom while the Sun is off trying to kill Cademsporro.
Relations: Lover of Cademsporro, Betrayer of the Sun, Mother of who knows how many little gods by who knows how many people/gods/trees.

Awesome.

[Outcast Orange]

I feel much more relieved after the last dev-update.
Thanks Toady!

[Neonivek]

Anyhow now to generate properly.

-Nightmares, Longevity
-Night, Festivals, Moon, Darkness, Music
-Suicide, Festivals, Dance, Music, Song
-Loyalty, Oaths
-Peace (Huh, apperantly I actually can't go further with this. I should tell Toady perhaps?)
-Courage (Also has no where to go... Odd)

Still doesn't seem right. I don't think the generation is supposed to pick entirely at random. I think it actually picks from a smaller list of greater types or only types with physical manifestations. (Well for the subject I am drawing spheres for)

It basically tells me I am going to have to wait for the next release until I want to do this sort of generation.

Unless Toady is willing to reveal how the Spheres are chosen for certain creatures.

[Dante]

When you think about it, any problems with sphere conflict will almost certainly resolve themselves.
There are a huge number of spheres at the moment. If Toady was going to hard-code a unique feature for each interaction of just two spheres, he'd have to specify n! different things. Which is a LOT.

So, he will presumably either
(a) trim down the number of spheres substantially, or
(b) increase the number of [CANNOT_OCCUR_TOGETHER] (or whatever it is) tags substantially, or
(c) code it so that sphere interactions will randomly create their own effects.

In the hardcoding case, he would be able to prevent clashes entirely.

In the random generation case, you'd simply get the occasional oddity: a Death sphere might cause wildlife to sporadically become Undead, and a Fire sphere might cause infrequent spontaneous combustion, so in conjunction you might have to encounter ever-burning skeletal elk.
Or you might get both seasonal flooding and seasonal wildfires on a map.
These weird things and contradictions aren't necessarily bad. They won't always make sense, but they would provide more variety than scripted sphere interactions.

Alternatively, since randomly generated sphere influences would almost certainly include simple variable tweaks based on associations such as "life span is associated with the sphere Time" or "mineral values are associated with the sphere Wealth", then conflicting spheres would simply cancel out, such as increased/decreased fecundity due to overlap of Fertility and Disease spheres.

[Taal]

I dont know quite how it would work, but I would like to think that each sphere would have a large number of effects, with only a few being active, or perhaps randomly activiated throughout the game. So that even if you did figure out or were told what spheres affected your area, you would only have an idea of what to expect. It would allow for surprises and unexpected events.

[Neonivek]

Contradictory spheres don't have to cancel eachother out (In fact oddly by the design of things... contradictory spheres go together but not as a subsphere.

They just cannot fight eachother in the same areas.

So a Death and Life creature could have a skeletal body but with flowering buds all over it. The creature could also be a Skeletal creature who regenerates body parts very quickly (Being granted sphere appropriate powers and a Sphere appropriate Body)

A Fire and Cold land could be a Plains that is constantly flame with chilling fire and Icy Rivers that burn everything to cinder.

Spheres can also rule over behavior allowing for creatures who are physically composed of one sphere by who act in accordance to another.

The real question is how do some of these odder spheres work.

I could understand a Child Sphere land having creatures who all appear to be children/young, but how does an Order sphere REALLY work? Heck how does a Freedom Sphere work? Doors cannot be locked? Trees with leaves that hover around it? Rivers that float above the ground?

Heck how do you represent some of these spheres physically? What does Marriage look like? What does Music Look like?

[Untelligent]

If I remember correctly, there ARE contradictory spheres that, rather than cancel each other out, simply can't be with each other in the same god (or creature, as the case will soon be).

[CobaltKobold]

Music looks like ...what it needs to, to sound musical. Marriage ...well, it probably looks a lot like Fertility, but with more faith in whate'er arrangements are there. (Seriously, Toady, e'en humans aren't purely monogamous faith-beyond-death m/f like it is in DF)

When you think about it, any problems with sphere conflict will almost certainly resolve themselves.
There are a huge number of spheres at the moment. If Toady was going to hard-code a unique feature for each interaction of just two spheres, he'd have to specify n! different things. Which is a LOT.

So, he will presumably either
(a) trim down the number of spheres substantially, or
(b) increase the number of [CANNOT_OCCUR_TOGETHER] (or whatever it is) tags substantially, or
(c) code it so that sphere interactions will randomly create their own effects.

n*n-1, silly. Only n! if you want all n-sphere sphere interactions. Still.
(d)code it so that sphere interactions resolve less than randomly
 i. considering other spheres' twists to advantage (or specify) one sphere or other-
  ex: life-flowers-death could be either flowers live while all else is spooky-(un?)dead, or flowers are all brown and withered, but growing, in an otherwise verdant land
 ii. randomly deciding equal outcomes
  iib. calico i.e. partwise inactivation- patches of each at (more or less) random, or based on something else

Truly contrary spheres shouldn't really ACTUALLY exclude each other on lands- it could be a place of conflict, like you mention with your fire and cold (though it could also be a straight-up flaming plains, icy rivers). Whatthey're excluding is the middle.

[Neonivek]

If I remember correctly, there ARE contradictory spheres that, rather than cancel each other out, simply can't be with each other in the same god (or creature, as the case will soon be).

How it works is they chose 1-2 spheres. Then they generate friends of those spheres without using Parents or contradictory spheres.

So in theory, assuming the preclude list doesn't interfere with the first two spheres, it can be anything.

[Grek]

I could understand a Child Sphere land having creatures who all appear to be children/young, but how does an Order sphere REALLY work? Heck how does a Freedom Sphere work? Doors cannot be locked? Trees with leaves that hover around it? Rivers that float above the ground?

Heck how do you represent some of these spheres physically? What does Marriage look like? What does Music Look like?

Order land effects:
-Objects form rigid geometric figures
-Events happen daily/yearly with clockwork regularity
-Mechanical objects never break down/stick
-Unnaturally sharp definitions between the edges of forests/rivers/plains/mountains
-Lakes/ponds/clouds are perfect circles
-Flames/candles never flicker
-No changes in weather ever
-Bird eggs have hinged doors to let out the chick
-Cluttered workshops unclutter themselves
-Instant change between day and night.

Freedom land effects:
-Cages spontainously release people
-Knots untie themselves
-Fish escape from nets/hooks
-Cats/starving dwarves are unable to capture vermin
-Boots left outside on cold nights let themselves into the house
-Doors of prisons unlock themselves
-Items in locked chests rattle around trying to get loose
-Wagons try to chase butterflies
-Pixies steal the hammerer's hammer

Marriage creature effects:
-Creatures come in married pairs
-Creature eats only husbands/only wives
-Creature refuses to harm married couples
-Creature desires a mortal wife/husband

Music creature effects:
-Body produces music when moving but is silent when still
-Creature sings when speaking
-Siren songs
-Creature is lured/facinated by music
-Creature can make people spontaniously dance

[KillerClowns]

The spheres don't HAVE to interact.  For instance, taking "Rainbows, Chaos, Water, Dusk, Weather, Luck" as my example, it could simply be each would be chosen to have a different effect on the creatures physiology.  I'm kind of guessing how the engine works, and I'm not feeling especially creative about it, but...

Water: The creature's basic body plan is that of a carp.
Chaos: Tentacles are added to this creature, and it is given the adjective "perpetually shifting."
Weather: The creature is surrounded by a perpetual fog
Rainbows: The creature is given rainbow coloration.
Dusk: The creatures is most active around dusk.
Luck: The creature is granted several minor boosts, but is also made more reckless.

A huge, six-tentacled carp.  It has a perpetually shifting appearance.  It is surrounded by a rainbow-colored fog.  It is most active at dusk.  It is powerful, but reckless.

EDIT: I notice that the example sphere creatures don't have such obvious sphere-to-form effects.  Still, we'll see how it turns out once we get a good look at these fine critters.

[smjjames]

-Creature sings when speaking

Actually, I think its not so much as singing like an opera or musical, but singing like say whales or birds. So their language is musical.

You know, with these spheres encompassing the entire range from purest good to darkest evil (yes concepts do vary, I know that, and DF tends towards the darker side), I'm wondering if some of these titans are actually good guys, until you piss them off too much.

[Neonivek]

It would be interesting is a creature under the sphere of music moves as if he was on some sort of metronome, its movements are predictable but at the same time consistant and unfaltering.

So while it make be easier to dodge it cannot be faltered off this unheard metronome making it much more dangerous.

Though another is a creature whos speed increases and decreases like the tempo in some songs. It could split its attacks into quarter notes giving a barage of less dangerous notes.