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[monk12]

Oh-ho! Now I see why Toady was working on sewers- I thought it was just a whim of his to throw it in with regular city gen code.

I wonder if added undead types will start moving us towards an explanation for them in the first place.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

Why not? I don't mean sissy modern sparkly vampires, but medieval shambling fanged, clawed, horse-frightening light-fearing OCD stakeable creatures. Maybe with partially randomised vampire traits.

undead night creatures with potential random traits, being bloodsucking one of them are okay in my book, but not vampires. they're not that medieval, actually.

i have problems with other things in game, too, i think trolls, ogres and giants should be random names given to a class of randomly generated enormous antropophagous humanoid megabeasts, and ghouls, revenants and wights should also be just possible names for randomly generated undead night creatures, with vampirism as one possible trait

i dislike the idea of a vampire as a defined creature with specified weaknesses and traits, as that often wasn't the case with folkloric monsters. and also, while many creatures were described as being of vampiric nature, the word "vampire" is very recent, and probably just meant "undead" or "witch\ogre" in it's original incarnation

[Jeoshua]

I'm pretty sure Vampires won't be going in.  We already have night creatures, which fufill any "reproduces through infection, stalks the night, gains power from their condition" type of creature you would need, from vamps to werewolves.

It would be nice if Night Creatures didn't take over the world so easilly, or formed actual societies of their own somehow... but yeah right now they're just beasts.

[Mel_Vixen]

Weakness against a material can be achieved by stuffing the Weres, Phantoms, zombeefs and vamps into distinct (additional and/or nested) poison groups. The poison framework will work for deseases too i can asure you.

[G-Flex]

i dislike the idea of a vampire as a defined creature with specified weaknesses and traits, as that often wasn't the case with folkloric monsters. and also, while many creatures were described as being of vampiric nature, the word "vampire" is very recent, and probably just meant "undead" or "witch\ogre" in it's original incarnation

Yeah, one thing I've noticed about medieval legends is that they are not consistent with this sort of faux-scientific taxonomy we use today. There weren't as much well-defined "vampires", "werewolves", "goblins" and so forth; the concepts were wishy-washy, varied a lot depending on region and decade, and so on. Things weren't so set in stone.

[NW_Kohaku]

Why not? I don't mean sissy modern sparkly vampires, but medieval shambling fanged, clawed, horse-frightening light-fearing OCD stakeable creatures. Maybe with partially randomised vampire traits.

[NOCTURNAL]
[LIKES_COUNTING]
[PREY:ALL:COMMON_DOMESTIC]
[SPECIFIC_WEAKNESS:SEED_MAT:MUSTARD]
[ALTFORM:MIST:BAT:RAT:SPIDER:WOLF]
[SYNDROME:TUBERCULOSIS]

I would certainly look forward to stocking up on beans just to be able to throw them on the floor as a distraction for a vampire.

That, or killing them in Fortress Mode with flowing water.

i dislike the idea of a vampire as a defined creature with specified weaknesses and traits, as that often wasn't the case with folkloric monsters. and also, while many creatures were described as being of vampiric nature, the word "vampire" is very recent, and probably just meant "undead" or "witch\ogre" in it's original incarnation

Yeah, one thing I've noticed about medieval legends is that they are not consistent with this sort of faux-scientific taxonomy we use today. There weren't as much well-defined "vampires", "werewolves", "goblins" and so forth; the concepts were wishy-washy, varied a lot depending on region and decade, and so on. Things weren't so set in stone.

As opposed to modern-day versions of vampires, where you have to declare the "rules of vampires" right after the first one gets screentime because every single author uses different rules?

[Mel_Vixen]

IIrc the Witch and to lesser extend the werewolf (as a form of witchcraft by usage of wolffurs and belts etc.) were fairly well described in the Malleus Maleficarum and influenced good parts of europe.

Vampires as such as well as many wer- creatures (and dragons) exist in many cultures but were very diverse even before the advent of modern media and taximony. The modern ideas are more like prototypes respective generalisations thus we label everything that drains "life" from another being as "vampire" or "vampiric".


What i am exited about is that if toady works on the undead again they may work in a proper way soon. Thus skelletons etc. may loose theyr "hp".

[Untelligent]

Yeah, night creatures already cover vampires n' things pretty well. Lessee, what kinds of undead and undead-like things wouldn't fall under zombies, skeletons, and night creatures... ghosts, perhaps? Ghosts don't exist outside of fortress mode yet. Dev page implies that skeletons and zombies are going to be merged into one general "walking dead" thing at some point, with varying stages of rot. Ooh, I bet we'll finally get human zombies and other undead ex-sapients to remurder.

'course simply adding more abilities and features to night creatures coudl be what they meant by "more undead types."

[G-Flex]

IIrc the Witch and to lesser extend the werewolf (as a form of witchcraft by usage of wolffurs and belts etc.) were fairly well described in the Malleus Maleficarum and influenced good parts of europe.

Vampires as such as well as many wer- creatures (and dragons) exist in many cultures but were very diverse even before the advent of modern media and taximony.

That's... kind of my point. These legends were more diverse and loosely-defined than they are in modern fantasy.

There were books like the one you described, but I'm speaking more of traditional oral history and that sort of thing.

[NW_Kohaku]

If you have night creatures or procedural undead with procedural weaknesses, though... how do you know what those weaknesses are?

An integral part of those creatures in folklore are their weaknesses, and stories of vampires go hand-in-hand with the stories of what they are weak against. 

So how does the player get access to the information on a whatever creatures' weaknesses?  Do adventurers hear about them in taverns from strange old men with one giant bug eye huddled over in the corners of taverns?

What about fortresses, if these things lurk in caverns or something?  Do they just append the description of the creature with "beware its venomous breath, but strike it down with breath mints!"?

[darkflagrance]

If you have night creatures or procedural undead with procedural weaknesses, though... how do you know what those weaknesses are?

An integral part of those creatures in folklore are their weaknesses, and stories of vampires go hand-in-hand with the stories of what they are weak against. 

So how does the player get access to the information on a whatever creatures' weaknesses?  Do adventurers hear about them in taverns from strange old men with one giant bug eye huddled over in the corners of taverns?

What about fortresses, if these things lurk in caverns or something?  Do they just append the description of the creature with "beware its venomous breath, but strike it down with breath mints!"?

Vulnerabilities would come in two forms: a syndrome that afflicts the creature upon exposure to that substance, such as necrosis, or repulsion, where a creature avoids tiles that contain that substance.

Creatures could have a vulnerabilities page or sub-description that determines whether they are weak to/repelled by water, certain types of metal/minerals, or organic substances. They would be hidden to the player until he encountered them by chance or by testing.

The player could then treat weapons with crushed organic fluids. To discover a weakness, the player would have to observe the creature struck by an appropriate object or either trapped or repelled by that object.

Skilled observers or scholars might also learn this by observation. Taverns could improve the player's knowledge of monster weaknesses.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

in fortress mode, this could be included in the creature's description and the big warning that shows up when a forgotten beast arrives. in adventure mode, if you're close to it's lair, every person would either greet you or say farewell with a message like this "beware of Urist the Headless Ghoul, stranger, for he hunts in this lands." or "always carry a (pig tail stalk\microcline ring\groundhog left eye*) to ward off Urist McUrist's Wandering Carcass, stranger"

_{*you can acquire these at the local temple\general store... no guarantees that it actually works and isn't just local superstition}

[monk12]

I'd like to see weaknesses and such be procedurally generated, but unique to monster type. So all the hags are weak to oak wood, and the trolls hate honey, or whatever. Of course, right now I think that each individual night creature is unique compared to all the rest, so unless we get one super-successful night creature that takes enough mates and sires enough children to perpetuate itself (a la Dracula), then we have to deal with the odd fact that the peasants somehow know how to defeat the night creature, but are unable to do it themselves.

If monster types do end up being the way Toady goes (or the successful single night creature posited above), then you have the justification that some folk hero has killed one before, and therefore everyone knows the story. This leads to the situation where all the villagers just know that if you carry holly berries around on your person the local monster won't bother you- unfriendly little towns may withhold this information in order to dispose of unwelcome foreigners who wouldn't know the custom. This could lead to the quasi-symbiotic situation where the villagers are afforded some measure of protection from bandits and the like because the outsiders do not know how to defeat the monster, and since this is beneficial to the villagers they never tell outsiders how to defeat it, which helps the monster kill new victims.

[Untelligent]

Long as we're talking about it might as well green this one, tried to pull a Footkerchief but couldn't find a whole lot of information on night creature weaknesses and dealing with them from the talks and toady posts aside from a bit about getting help from religious groups on the dev page.

How will night creature creature weaknesses, important ways to deal with specific monsters, making sure they're permanently dead, etc. be dealt with? Especially for night creatures way out in savage lands where nobody's heard of them and information-gathering might not be possible?

[Dante]

What i am exited about is that if toady works on the undead again they may work in a proper way soon. Thus skelletons etc. may loose theyr "hp".

Oh yes, I forgot about this. Working out the 'how to kill a skeleton without just giving it fixed hp' problem would be ace, pretty much #1 on my list of undead improvements. Every skeleton I hit as an adventurer evaporates at the moment, and it's almost as bad in fortress mode.