Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Magic

44 (19%)

Magitek

38 (16.5%)

Steampunk

65 (28.1%)

WE DON'T NEED NO WEAK CONTRAPTIONS! (Normal)

28 (12.1%)

All of the Above (Moddable)

56 (24.2%)

Total Members Voted: 231

[Jaxicat]

Steampunk can contain elements of magic. 
"Howl's Moving Castle", "The Golden Compass", "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"; are all examples of films or books with both steampunk and magical elements.  If I remember correctly, "Time Bandits" kind of had a steampunk vibe to it and it had dwarves too.

I'm not saying that steampunk has to have magic in it but it definitely can.

 

[vlademir1]

Interesting thread, if kinda broken in several ways.  I'll admit I skipped the last two pages because it was tedious reading basically the same three posts over and over again, so please excuse me if I repeat someone else's ideas/rants.

Veneer first.

Magic is ideally a multifaceted beast.  It comes in various forms, some of which fit different races in DF more than others. 

• Theurgy and alchemy I see as both being universal, everyone has gods and everyone has the tech to play around with plants and animal parts for natural/supernatural potions and such, some of which would inevitably do something.  Everyone should also have some form of divination, though flavor would ideally be different but be somewhat tied to their gods.
  
• Conjuring is not the kind of thing one can easily imagine a dwarf doing, it just doesn't fit their racial character, the same is true of elves or kobolds... leave chanting spells, summoning demons and necromancy where it fits, with humans and to a lesser extent goblins (who don't really respect such as much as hard out combat).
• Runic magic and other enchanting I can easily see a dwarf doing, and  I can also easily see goblins using some form of enchanting.  However elves and kobolds certainly wouldn't, and humans wouldn't easily (though god knows they'd try).  This I see tying in well with moods.
• Elves I see as being able to communicate directly with and understand every living thing around them and while not able to throw out deadly spells or buff their weapons and armor should be able to bring all of nature, bloody in tooth and claw as it is, with them.
• Kobolds I see being of a folk magic sort, using sympathetic magic in rituals.
• Both Elves and Kobolds I see as having a basic attunement to their local spheres, possibly gaining some magical abilities there as well.

On the tech side I could see Dwarves having access to very primitive steam engines that while on par with a waterwheel for power output should need a furnace operator standing there running them and really should eat wood or coal as well as matchlock guns and cannons (possibly everyone should have some limited access here as they're both techlevel appropriate to the historic period DF is supposed to emulate).  I'm talking all late Medieval or early Renaissance era levels here, not much more sophisticated than an aeolipile in terms of a steam engine, matchlock muskets in terms of guns and very basic cannon of the inefficient black powder type, steampunk doesn't fit vanilla DF at all, especially as any *punk genre is by definition dystopian unless a work is just borrowing the veneer and therefore breaking the concept. 

Any mixing should be limited or avoided in vanilla just because it kinda breaks a lot of what really fits flavor wise, we aren't playing Final Fantasy here.

Sidenote:  Much as I love both steampunk and technomancy as concepts neither fits this game in it's native state at all.



On a functional side none of this should be massively powerful, except in a once in a lifetime kind of way (ie casting a big D&D type fireball or instant death spell or summoning a demon to visible form should be as common as making an artifact sword and encompass similar risks).

• Theurgy would be well covered by the shifting spheres idea a couple pages back.
• Alchemy is well covered by NW_Kohaku's ideas, though I do like the possibility of magically sourcing hard/impossible to get materials this way too (ie like some of the various reaction cheats).
• Enchanting and runic magic I'd personally see as working as an adjustment to material effects and the like with possibly some more flashy kinds of stuff possible, but not guaranteed or even highly probable, on masterworks and nearly certain by default on artifacts.
• The sympathetic magic effects would be transferring, buffing or debuffing traits kind of stuff.
• Invocation would be the tough one to pin down, but would most likely be akin to weaker versions of the current firebreath and similar attacks.
• Summoning would be a way for your enemies to bring in some bigger, tougher enemies like a (semi)mega beast, titan or HFS when they're tired of you wiping out their armies.
• Necromancy would be a good reason to clear all those corpses away after battles and give proper burial to your own dead, but really otherwise just spawning skeletal/zombie versions of whatever creatures had corpses lying close to hand and removing the corpse.

[Jaxicat]

It would be interesting if the flavor of the game was tied in more with the age of the world.  For example, The age of Myth might be more Tolkienesque with magic playing a large role and a later age might unlock more technological advances with magic being more of a forgotten art found in artifacts and small pocket regions of the world.

[Eugenitor]

What, are you kidding? Elves have always been the magic users in practically every RPG known to man.

And that's who should get the spells. Dwarves should be able to create enchanted items, but elven sieges should feature lightning-throwing teleporting wizards, for that extra bit of Fun. Of course, if Toady implemented electricity realistically, it'd end up something like this...

Wizard: Got you, tree-killers! Lightning bolt!

Steel-armored (Faraday-caged) marksdwarf: Got YOU. Steel bolt. *ssss-THUNK!*

[Bauglir]

-snip-

[dragonshardz]

Massive TL; DR that I actually read.

I agree with this. You has my vote.

Wizard: Got you, tree-killers! Lightning bolt!

Steel-armored (Faraday-caged) marksdwarf: Got YOU. Steel bolt. *ssss-THUNK!*

You forgot the ZAP!

Out of curiosity, does steel conduct electricity well enough to keep the dwarf from dying from heat?

If it doesn't, perhaps a use for silver armor?

IRL, steel is a pretty good conductor.
But there's no way to know what it'll be like in DF unless and until Toady implements electrical conductivity in DF.

[vlademir1]

Out of curiosity, does steel conduct electricity well enough to keep the dwarf from dying from heat?

If it doesn't, perhaps a use for silver armor?

It'd depend on too many factors. Assuming a normal real world lightning strike strength from a lightning bolt spell even silver would get quite hot, even if it'd also quickly cool off.

Massive TL; DR that I actually read.

I agree with this. You has my vote.

Thanks

[Skid]

I think all Dwarven magic should pretty much stay under the moods system, with dwarves becoming more magical as they become more mentally unstable.  Keep a happy peaceful fortress, and you'll have no problem save for dwarves occsionally rushing off to create some magical artifact.  But once dwarves are pushed to the edge they become more magically attuned.  For example, engage in a losing battle and a dwarf may manage to throw a lone fireball in revenge for the killing of a loved one. 

"Urist McCrazedrevenge channels his fury into an unholy wave of fire."


I'm not against the idea of stuff being summoned, it just needs to take time to do.  You have plenty of time when a dwarf goes moody to station an armed guard outside their workshop.  The same should go for some dwarf who wants to take down the fort with the risen undead or a horde of demons.  Summoning circles aren't easy.  You need ingredients, sacrifices, time to scribble the thing out.  And summoning could extend to things other than monsters.  A thirsty dwarf may want a drink of booze bad enough to drag a barrel out of the very pits of hell.

It'd depend on too many factors. Assuming a normal real world lightning strike strength from a lightning bolt spell even silver would get quite hot, even if it'd also quickly cool off.

The thing is, cooling off fast means that half of the heat is still channelled to the inside of the armor.

[Shrugging Khan]

No magic for me, thank you. DF is already fantasy enough as far as I'm concerned. Magitek is cute, but still no banana. And adding all of it optionally seems like too much in terms of bugginess and balancing issues.

But some wonky dwarven technology, magma-based or otherwise...why not. Needn't be steampunk, but a little higher-tech dwarven machinery wouldn't hurt, methinks.

[NW_Kohaku]

Iron is a decent conductor, although copper is far better.  It was (and in some situations, still is) used as metal wiring in telephone poles.  It loses quite a bit of its energy to heat, however.  While I don't know the exact numbers, I would be very surprised if the carbon in steel doesn't make steel a worse conductor than iron.

Worse, steel combines this marginal electrical conductivity with extremely high thermal conductivity.  Even if there's a path to ground without going through the person, touching steel that is conducting any serious amount of electricity will still burn the person.

As for primitive steam engines, that issue could be solved, at least as far as modding goes, with the expansion of power consumption and generation, as well as some sort of fuel use into the building raws.  Along with moving fortress parts, that's enough for a steam-powered "dwarven mecha".

I'd still like to see a "Dwarven Gearbox", however - a way of miniaturizing a 3-d space so that you can put miniature gears and axles into a single construction that occupies a single tile, but has mutliple functions inside of the gearbox by essentially being a small (let's say 20x20x20 area) of mini-tiles you can place mini-components in.  Such a thing would allow you to build objects that have self-contained sets of mechanical logic operations (instead of having gearworks that use magic pressure plates with infinite range to operate logic operations) in a relatively small space.

If you could mass-produce gearboxes that are exact copies of one another easily, it would even expand what could be accomplished with gear logic by effectively making "reusable code" in a programming sense.

[vlademir1]

Iron is a decent conductor, although copper is far better.  It was (and in some situations, still is) used as metal wiring in telephone poles.  It loses quite a bit of its energy to heat, however.  While I don't know the exact numbers, I would be very surprised if the carbon in steel doesn't make steel a worse conductor than iron.

Worse, steel combines this marginal electrical conductivity with extremely high thermal conductivity.  Even if there's a path to ground without going through the person, touching steel that is conducting any serious amount of electricity will still burn the person.

Steal (5.69 × 10⁶ siemens per metre), from the best net research I could do is only an order of magnitude less conductive than copper (5.69 × 10⁷ siemens per metre)...  I'm trying to see if I can find a formula for heat change in such a system, but it's so far proving elusive.  I know either resistivity or conductivity (they're reciprocals), mass and volume will all be involved but how I'm not sure.

As for primitive steam engines, that issue could be solved, at least as far as modding goes, with the expansion of power consumption and generation, as well as some sort of fuel use into the building raws.  Along with moving fortress parts, that's enough for a steam-powered "dwarven mecha".

I'd still like to see a "Dwarven Gearbox", however - a way of miniaturizing a 3-d space so that you can put miniature gears and axles into a single construction that occupies a single tile, but has mutliple functions inside of the gearbox by essentially being a small (let's say 20x20x20 area) of mini-tiles you can place mini-components in.  Such a thing would allow you to build objects that have self-contained sets of mechanical logic operations (instead of having gearworks that use magic pressure plates with infinite range to operate logic operations) in a relatively small space.

If you could mass-produce gearboxes that are exact copies of one another easily, it would even expand what could be accomplished with gear logic by effectively making "reusable code" in a programming sense.

I fully agree that being able to mod such things to the current custom workshops would be ideal.

Gearboxes would be nice, but I'd rather have more methods to use that energy first (especially for easier transport of materials, which I expect would ease some of the pathfindinging burden on all our beleaguered CPUs as haulers made smaller trips).

[dragonshardz]

Well, gearboxes would lead to conveyor belts...

Though I find my CPU only has issues when switching seasons, not hauling stone back n' forth.