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[Fortunatos]

It occurs to me that it's also possible Toady will add new things like more power-generators, mechanical items, stun traps, water heaters, dwarf-built golems...

...And then not bog them down with magic/tech infrastructures or rationalizations.  In the same way we don't bother with making strings for crossbows, handles for weapons, bellows for forges, or worry about restrooms.

So looking at it from the perspective of existing, practical features, a lot of spell and steampunk suggestions sound backwards. We should be looking for items that have a use in the game (like melting ice) and ways to create them in a straight-forward manner, not coming up with wild explanations for stuff that should be behind-the-scenes or not even addressed in the first place.

But again that's coming from somebody who thinks of magic as 'behind-the-scenes' and whose vision of DF doesn't include a sorcerer in every fortress and zeppelins carrying settlers across the world, so plenty of players are going to argue that a steampunk style and D&D wizardry should in fact be the main features of the game.

[TurnpikeLad]

quote:Originally posted by JT:
<STRONG>"You know what happened in the Halls of Moria.  You know that, driven by their greed, the dwarves assembled too much, built too powerful, and unleashed the awesome fury of a thousand artificial suns..." --Saruman

Well, he said something else... ;-)</STRONG>

Saruman actually did use explosives in the Lord of the Rings at Helm's Deep.  Also Gandalf had fireworks.

I think right now the technology level of Dwarf Fortress is really primitive, though, more primitive than in Lord of the Rings.  Remember, in LotR, when the hobbits came back to the Shire after defeating Sauron, Saruman had turned it into a little industrialized enclave, somewhere near 17th-18th century technology.

No, it seems like the dwarves in DF have only achieved a sort of Beowulf-like technology level, like that in parts of Northern Europe contemporaneous to but distant from the Roman Empire.  Except they can forge gigantic amounts of steel and build large clockwork assemblies.  These are both prototypically dwarven innovations, though, so I think they fit.  Gunpowder could be added on - it wouldn't break the game in itself, or create "large empty areas of canvas" like electricity and steam power, but I think it would slightly change the flavor of Toady's dwarves.  

Really I could go either way on this.