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[Tristan Alkai]

Okay, apparently I phrased things badly again.  I do that sometimes. 

Chemosynthesis is real science, I'm not arguing that, but there's a big difference between "it exists" and "it can support this particular behavior." 

Issues:
1. Chemosynthesis is limited in the primary production it can generate, much more than photosynthesis. 
2. There have been comments about hydrothermal vents and the clams and worms that live near them, but my understanding is that they are roughly equivalent to mountain grass in the current game: they can reach impressive density, but won't grow back on a fortress mode time scale. 
3. Since they won't grow back, they won't support much in the way of grazers, to say nothing of bigger stuff that eats those grazers. 
4. In addition to grazers like dralthas and elk birds, DF has huge carnivores like jabberers, cave dragons, and giant cave spiders.   Huge carnivores require a correspondingly huge base of primary production to support their food needs.  My understanding is that chemosynthesis can not provide nearly a big enough base. 

Summary: I am not saying that chemosynthesis violates the laws of physics.  I am saying that the claim "chemosynthesis can support the observed cavern ecosystem" violates the laws of physics.  There is a difference. 

[Sergarr]

I still don't see why plants have to transform sunlight into xeno-energy. Why not just have a sort-of-negative-sun-down-below which emits xeno energy which fuels all the cavern plants?

[Tristan Alkai]

I still don't see why plants have to transform sunlight into xeno-energy. Why not just have a sort-of-negative-sun-down-below which emits xeno energy which fuels all the cavern plants?

Read the thread first!  I have been over this, particularly in reply 131, reply 121 and reply 105 (which contains a reply to this exact suggestion in reply 104). 

[GavJ]

My complaint is not that the cap is too low. My complaint is that it is too "flat"

Okay... but I'm struggling to see what this has to do with xenosynthesis. If you want to make a suggestion forum thread for populations of animals being dynamic, then great, go for it.

But flat or not, the point as is relevant to this thread is that the populations are very very low. Yes a GCS is a large predator, but I only even catch a glimpse of one once every 5 years or something in my forts, even though I'm covering acres and acres of cavern land.

You also have to consider that underground animals may just be flocking to your fort in higher concentrations than in the world in general. Drawn by rumors of wealth, or just hearing the scratching noises you make when you dig with their keen ears, or whatever. Just like FBs and megabeasts. You can't even take the (already very low) population density you observe to be the world population. It's probably lower still.

DF world is also vastly closer to the magma than Earth is that near the surface. There would probably be a huge amount of extra sulfur gases and things than there are here. Dwarves don't choke to death on them because... the cavern ecosystem is soaking them up! And growing much faster than on Earth in the process.




At the most, this argument seems to call for making cave grass not regrow in game, and that being pretty much sufficient for explaining most of the ecosystem. Which would be fine with me.

[Sergarr]

There are also freaking CLOWNS at the bottom.

How do THEY survive? Answer me, how can your fancy plant xenosythesis make demons move without having the xeno-energy go from the bottom?

Your theory is overcomplex, Tristan Alkai. Admit that XE comes from the bottom and NOT from the Sun!

[GavJ]

Another reason I dislike this approach, which perhaps I didn't put into words appropriately before, is that it lacks any falsifiability or challenge at all to explain anything.

Come up with any weird happening, pretty much, in the entire game, and you can pretty effectiely just wave your hands and "Oh demons? They have XE receptors, hurr durr." "Oh pigs grow without eating any grubs? They have XE receptors, hurr durr" "Your shoelaces aren't tied the way you remember trying them? Must be those pesky XE receptors, hurr durr"

There's no effort or elegance involved. It sort of reminds me of that Breatharian guy whose response to any issue whatsoever is basically "Oh that happens in the 5th dimension [something something] you can't perceive anything but the tip of the iceberg" And then conveniently, only he can visit the 5th dimension to verify this.

The scientific route may very well be able to come up with some fringe explanation for most things, but at least it actually takes some effort, and requires a new updated explanation / theory for the new things that are brought up. And they have to follow rules still, however flexible. It isn't trivially reductionist, and thus feels like less of a copout.

[Sizik]

I can imagine blind cave dwellers making the same arguments against the sun. "How to plants grow without any XE receptors? Must be the sun." "Daily fluctuations in temperature? Obviously the sun." "Weather never running out of rain? Gotta be the sun, hurr durr."

[GavJ]

I can imagine blind cave dwellers making the same arguments against the sun. "How to plants grow without any XE receptors? Must be the sun." "Daily fluctuations in temperature? Obviously the sun." "Weather never running out of rain? Gotta be the sun, hurr durr."

Except the sun actually is real and does a finite number of already-established things, and you can't just make up new properties for it when convenient in a discussion... That list of things you started writing there already has limits. Whereas the list of things you could attribute to XE does not.

[Tristan Alkai]

I guess I spoke too soon about being able to give this proper attention. 

1.

Another reason I dislike this approach, which perhaps I didn't put into words appropriately before, is that it lacks any falsifiability or challenge at all to explain anything.

Come up with any weird happening, pretty much, in the entire game, and you can pretty effectiely just wave your hands and "Oh demons? They have XE receptors, hurr durr." "Oh pigs grow without eating any grubs? They have XE receptors, hurr durr" "Your shoelaces aren't tied the way you remember trying them? Must be those pesky XE receptors, hurr durr"

(. . .)

The scientific route may very well be able to come up with some fringe explanation for most things, but at least it actually takes some effort, and requires a new updated explanation / theory for the new things that are brought up. And they have to follow rules still, however flexible. It isn't trivially reductionist, and thus feels like less of a copout.

I did have at least a partial answer to this. 

DF is explicitly still in alpha testing.  When something in DF does not make sense, and is not blatantly magical (undead and mud men, for example), my default assumption is that it is a quirk or limit of the game's engine that will be corrected at some point. 

When I talk about mana and things interacting with it, I am trying to explain a very small segment of the weirdness in DF.  Pigs growing without eating any grubs are a textbook example of what I am ignoring, although dogs are slightly faster to explain.  Dogs have a [CARNIVORE] tag (actually BONECARN, but the wiki's page on creature tokens states that this "implies CARNIVORE").  However, the current game engine does not actually interact with that token in a way that requires the player to provide meat for them. 

For comparison, there are cows from much earlier in the history of DF.  That page of the wiki specifically mentions that cows can't be milked (an attempt has been made, but it does not work as intended), and grazing does not appear in its raws until the 0.31 series.  Dogs (and crocodiles and so forth) will require meat eventually (pigs and birds are more omnivorous, so more complicated); Toady One just hasn't gotten around to it yet. 

In contrast, the iron man has a [NO_EAT] token in its raws.  Like a dog, it does not require food.  Unlike a dog, this behavior is explicitly declared to be a deliberate choice.  Dogs simply represent a missing feature, while iron men require some other explanation.  Dogs are weird, iron men are magical.  My comments on mana are only concerned with the latter. 

Backing up a bit, the game's state of continuous development is my default explanation for weirdness.  Mana is a distant second, and only called in at all when the first choice falls flat for whatever reason. 

2. Now that I have that clearly spelled out, I can answer a different point. 

My complaint is not that the cap is too low. My complaint is that it is too "flat"

Okay... but I'm struggling to see what this has to do with xenosynthesis. If you want to make a suggestion forum thread for populations of animals being dynamic, then great, go for it.

The full text of my side of this also invoked user-friendliness and computer hardware and software limitations, so I need to modify the "will be corrected eventually" assumption.  However, either of these explanations would be sufficient to put population caps in the "weird" category, which is distinct from the "magical" category.  I can see why this got pulled into the argument, but I am trying to pull it back out.  Mana is neither necessary nor appropriate to explain it, so I consider it off-topic. 

The game's state of continuous development is an "out-of-universe" explanation, as are player-friendliness and computer-friendliness.  All of these are invoked in preference to "in-universe" explanations like mana.  Extra sulfur gases flowing from the magma sea through the thin rock layers into the lower caverns would also be an "in-universe" explanation. 

3.

I can imagine blind cave dwellers making the same arguments against the sun. "How to plants grow without any XE receptors? Must be the sun." "Daily fluctuations in temperature? Obviously the sun." "Weather never running out of rain? Gotta be the sun, hurr durr."

Except the sun actually is real and does a finite number of already-established things, and you can't just make up new properties for it when convenient in a discussion... That list of things you started writing there already has limits. Whereas the list of things you could attribute to XE does not.

I have at least a partial answer to this in reply 131, with the list of things I want, and am actively trying, to attribute to mana (XE) and the ability of creatures and other organisms to interact with it. 

The goals:
1. Give the game more depth by presenting the player with conflicting goals.  These require the player to evaluate opportunity costs and prioritize which goals to pursue and which ones to sacrifice.  (NW_Kohaku, Improved Farming, original post, section "Choices".)
2. Assist Toady One in defining and implementing a stated goal of "lands with more variety."  (Me, this thread, reply #110.)
3. Provide a well-described physical mechanism for how cavern plants grow without sunlight.  (Requested by NW_Kohaku, Improved Farming thread, reply#236 (linked to in the same thread, reply #3). Also in this thread, original post.  Answered by me, this thread, primarily in reply #85 and reply #124.)
4. Explain why nearly all current cavern plants only grow in certain seasons, even though the temperature swings that define seasons on the surface do not occur underground.  (NW_Kohaku, this thread, reply #67.)
5. Explain why magical creatures (for example, the giant animals found in Savage areas) are different from their mundane counterparts.  Re-phrase: Explain how they got that way.  (Me, this thread, reply #85, section "Implications Part 3: Magically Altered Creatures".)
6. Make inorganic creatures an integrated part of the ecosystem.  (Me, same post, section "implications for how it should be implemented," item 3.)
7. Support increased numbers and diversity of magic-users. (Me, same post, section "Implications Part 2: Magical Creatures," items 3 and 4.)
8. Permit and support an alchemy system. (NW_Kohaku has started an entire thread on the subject.  Also by me, this thread, reply #110, section "Alchemy.")
9. Permit changes during play to surroundings, and give players the means to trigger those changes.  (Me, this thread, reply #121, section 6.) The main Improved Farming thread focuses instead on changing biome (NW_Kohaku, Improved Farming, reply #1, section "Forestry, Wild Soil, Soil Erosion, and Ecological Damage.")
10. Support a religion system, with real gods capable of answering prayers. (Me, this thread, reply #85, section "Implications for how it should be implemented," item 4; and section "gameplay implications," item 5.)
11. Minimize the impact of the various improvements on FPS and RAM use. 

Goals 3-10, and to a lesser extent 2, would constitute at least a rough estimate of the limits on what mana can do.  I do not foresee further expansions to this list. 

Does the list of limits provide enough "falsifiability or challenge," or do I need to keep working on that?

[bahihs]

I haven't read the entire "better farming" post yet, but one thing that I would love to see with farming is the implementation of genetics and artificial selection. The main problem (which I believe was readily addressed in the previous farming post) is the fact that small plots of farmland can support many, many dwarves with very little maintenance (if any).

The first step would be to reduce yield of most crops, necessitating more farmland. The second step (to make things interesting) would be to mess around with fertilizers  and of course, genetics. The latter can be abstracted with "magic" (of whatever kind you prefer) and the former would be more of a science.

In the real world, much of the world's population is alive right now because of significant advances in agriculture/genetics/horticulture. e.g synthetic nitrates for fertilizers, dwarf wheat (yes, its very fitting, isn't it?) etc. And this allows smaller (read: the same) pieces of farmland to support more people.

Fields of magic, while interesting, don't seem...I don't know, realistic enough I suppose. For me, it takes away from the simulation aspect of the game that I so enjoy.

Also, I always assumed cave varieties of plants were in fact chemoautotropic which would explain their need for water, and soil, but not sunlight.

Finally, I like to think of magic (in any low-fantasy universe setting) as applied science whose underlying theory is not understood (assuming magic behaves somewhat rationally/logically). For example, primitive people might think natural magnets are a form of "magic" (or gunpowder used to make fireworks), they can still use it for useful things however, without knowing how they actually work. "Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

[Tristan Alkai]

one thing that I would love to see with farming is the implementation of genetics and artificial selection.

I am given to understand that, with the recent closing of "breeding by spores" for animals (0.40.19, IIRC) selective breeding of them is now possible.  I think I heard somewhere that their genetics were already implemented before that point, but breeding at a distance makes it all but impossible to control who the father is. 

For plants to be selectively bred in any sort of meaningful way, several things would be required. 
1. Some implementation of pollination.  This by itself is non-trivial, especially for underground plants.  Bees are in the game, but as far as I know they don't actually pollinate.  They just produce honey as long as the hive has access to the outdoors. 
2. Traits of individual plants within a single species that actually vary and are influenced by genetics. 
3. Tracking of which genes are attached to each seed, rather than all seeds of each species being identical.  (Given how many seeds I typically produce, this by itself sounds like it would rapidly turn into a major memory hog.) 
4. Some way for the player to either manually select which seeds to not plant (a micromanagement nightmare) or communicate to dwarves which traits are desired (and which are not) so they can do the sorting (still sounds like a rather complicated user interface). 
5. If player management is used, it will require some way for the player to see at least what the "mother" plant was like, to avoid planting seeds from plants with undesirable traits.  Ideally the "father" plant (the one that provided the pollen) as well, but not all pollination systems permit that. 

To the best of my knowledge, none of these traits are currently in the game for plants.  Putting it in sounds like a large increase in the game's bulk for something only a tiny sub-set of players will actually bother with.  Before you turn that criticism around on me, keeping magic fields a small drain on memory and CPU (FPS) has been a high priority from the start, and I think I pulled it off (not all in that initial post, of course).  If what I have said already isn't enough, that "perpetually coming soon" post on the properties of mana will describe how I think it should be implemented and why. 

The first step would be to reduce yield of most crops, necessitating more farmland. The second step (to make things interesting) would be to mess around with fertilizers  and of course, genetics. The latter can be abstracted with "magic" (of whatever kind you prefer) and the former would be more of a science.

The parent Improved Farming reboot thread covers most of this.  In particular, NW_Kohaku raises the point that farming is a "free stuff button," ("The Problem," or the first spoiler tag in the OP; fourth paragraph), since dung and compost are not implemented.  Kohaku specifically calls for re-working farming into a "cradle to cradle" approach (reply #1, section "Urine and Feces," second to last paragraph). 

Merely reducing the yield is covered, with the explicit conclusion that it would simply mean throwing more dwarves at the problem, not really add anything to the game. 

Fields of magic, while interesting, don't seem...I don't know, realistic enough I suppose. For me, it takes away from the simulation aspect of the game that I so enjoy.

Also, I always assumed cave varieties of plants were in fact chemoautotropic which would explain their need for water, and soil, but not sunlight.

The OP of this thread covered chemosynthesis to my satisfaction, and I ended up covering it in my own second post.  GavJ still disagreed, and it turned into a recurring aspect as we debated back and forth. 

I like to think of magic (in any low-fantasy universe setting) as applied science whose underlying theory is not understood (assuming magic behaves somewhat rationally/logically).

I have covered my own theory of how mana works at some length.  I treat "magic" as physics principles that do not operate in the real world, and I do not see it as having any truly special traits.  Magic can be examined just like any other branch of physics. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Apologies to any who care (although I doubt anyone is starting on this post...) about it, but Tristan Alkai asked me to comment on this thread again since I re-emerged, so I'll be necroing this to respond to a necro.  (The sphere of death waxes in power this night...)

Before I get started, a quick aside about "Xenosynthesis Energy", though; Personally, I would go for "xenoenergeia" or the like.  "Xenosynthesis" would be specifically the biological process of metastasizing xenoenergeia/magic. (Lit. "Foreign/Unknown Energy") The term itself actually does a good job of encapsulating the idea behind Xenosynthesis/Xenoenergeia, however - that it combines magic with a sense that it is a type of science, just not one we know. 

There's a LOT to get through.  You guys sure love to talk even when I'm not posting text walls, myself.  (Love you guys!) I'm going to start, however, with a few baseline topics, because they need to be addressed if this topic is to have any meaning.

Arguments can only be resolved when people agree upon what the goals are, and what the facts on the ground are.  If one person is trying to solve 2 + 2, and the other is trying to solve 5 - 3, they'll never agree on the answer.  A lot of this is talking past one another. 

There's magic stuff down there.  There is no way of getting around that.

Except there is.

You could just as easily do the opposite of making magic plantlife to match: you could change the magical animals to be less magical, then make realistic underground plants. I don't think amethyst men etc. really add much to the game anyway that slightly different sensical versions wouldn't, this doesn't seem like a big sacrifice.

The problem with basically all of GavJ's approach to this thread is that its goal is to argue that DF doesn't need magic.  That the magic can be retconned away, and that we can then go back to playing the low-magic DF that DF has been in the past, and that a lot of people have grown to love.

I'm honestly quite sympathetic to that, and I look forward to the magic stuff with some trepidation, myself.  However, that's not the purpose of this thread.  That's not the purpose of DF, either.

DF, as the Cado story shows, was never meant to be Low Magic.  It was ALWAYS High Magic. 

DF was always a game where you could find a magma river that had magma men hanging out in it.  You could close your eyes and kind of go "LALALALA!" to pretend it didn't break the low magic feel of the game, but they were always there.  HFS is a place you can just WALK into.  The game's been growing more magical, with things like the shadow beings existing in another dimension, being able to cross over whenever it's dark outside because they're sympathetically aligned with Shadow. 

The original purpose of this thread was to try to square the circle of a realistic farming suggestion with a world that had the capacity to walk off into alternate realms, speak with the dead, and use blood sacrifices to summon divine beings.  Because that's what DF is supposed to be, and is going to be. 

Arguing away xenosynthesis doesn't change that Toady wants to further DF's evolution into a high magic game, as that's coming anyway.  What Xenosynthesis was supposed to accomplish was to say that, if this stuff is going to be in the game (and it is), then it should at least be, if you'll pardon a not-quite-word, engineerable magic. 

As you say, amethyst men right now don't add much to the game.  Necromancers are something that exists completely in their own little realm utterly divorced from Fortress Mode except in that they keep spawning monsters on your lawn.  You really can't do much of anything with them but to keep them in a pit and maybe let them out to raise some zombies on a goblin siege for the giggles. 

I don't think we want whole cadres of dwarven wizards, either, but magic is going to be a part of the game, one way or another.

At the same time, water, magma, cave-ins, drawbridges, animal logic, minecarts, etc. are all powerful tools for the player, as they are all engineerable forces within the gameworld. 

The reason I wrote all this was to try to find a way wherein magic is something that isn't as plain and boring as getting a slab and suddenly having infinite zombie hordes or having wizards spitting out fireballs based upon MP. 

We're going to have magic coming from alternate dimensions and sacrifices to gods and tomes of forbidden lore that give their reader the ability to walk into alternate planes, and even the capacity, according to Toady, to outright link your fortress map into a different dimension, so you can invade Heaven or something. 

Every time you add a mechanic to a game, you add to its complexity.  However, you can also add to its depth.  When you add mechanics that don't work with the other mechanics, you prevent its capacity for emergent gameplay opportunities, which add drastically to the depth that a game has.  DF is known for being so deep and having so many emergent reactions that Toady frequently has no idea exactly what his game is going to do, and that's because everything tends to be forced into a single "space" (or rather, spacial/physics simulation) where all the moving pieces interact with one another all the time. 

What this thread is about is trying to make that connection of these magic abilities that just spring ad infinitum from characters powering their abilities ex nihilo deflates that physics simulation, and weakens the capacity of the game in general to be engineerable. 

Xenosynthesis says that, rather than these powers springing up ex nihilo, they are the side-effect of what we already do in the physical space of this world. Hence, it's directly linking the power and type of magic in the game to the way in which you play the game, rather than it being arbitrarily decided by the RNG before you start playing. 

"Random crap happens for no good reason," is not nearly as satisfying a game or a story as, "Your continued abuse of magma has caused Insel Shamshok the Flames of Loathing, to curse your caverns! The powers of magma course through the veins of the creatures of the deep!  A magmaman horde now trods from the depths to beat at your door!"

(Jeez, and I thought I was keeping it relatively short... Response to Tristan in particular in a bit.)

[NW_Kohaku]

[A lot of stuff, skipping to the part that is sort of the crux of the argument]

6. On the other hand, surface plants have access to mundane sunlight.  With this source of energy, they can produce more XE than they consume.  They become the (primary) magic fountain that sustains the caverns. 

I have several problems with this, and I could actually launch into an argument similar to the one GavJ was using about how you're now adding magic in arbitrarily to a single chemical process with known mechanics while saying no other magic suspensions of disbelief can occur.  (Plus it raises the question of why caverns have the same magic everywhere, even when there are deserts and glaciers that prevent plants from growing...) However, that's beyond the point of this thread.

The major problem I have is that I see it as weakening one of the major reasons of having Xenosynthesis in the first place. 

To go back to the previous argument a little, the purpose of xenosynthesis is to take a magic system that exists within its own little arbitrary rules system, and push it out into the same gamespace where everything else plays. 

If you forgive the fact that it has a different overall topic, this video by Errant Signal (on why violence is prevalent in video games) goes into great detail about why everything that goes on in games needs to be represented in the physical space of the game for the player to really understand it.

The Importance of Physical Gamespace

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In fact, I've referenced this in some of the Interface arguments in the past:

[snip]

Don't lie to yourself - the way that you see the game now significantly colors the way you actually think about or do things.  Playing the game by Stonesense means caring about things far different from things you care about when you play the game normally.

I'm probably one of the very, very few players who actually builds multiple vertical shafts to compact my fortress vertically, rather than spreading out the fortress in a bunch of huge, clunky rectangle rooms specifically because players only view one floor at a time, and the digging tool favors rectangles.  Central staircase designs are a direct artifact of the current interface. 

If you change that interface, you change the way that players approach the game.  How?  You'll have no idea until after you do it.
[snip]

One of the big objectives with Xenosynthesis is to make magic something that is a reaction to the things the player does in the physical world that they can directly see happening.  Making the rules of the game play out in the physical gamespace makes them immediately graspable by the player. 

Consider the difference between the way a conversation affects the mood of a dwarf in this game, and the way that minecarts can be used to create complex logical mechanisms.  One is played out behind the scenes in a series of numeric interactions that most players rarely even recognize even happened without purposefully going through a series of screens to specifically peek in on the thoughts and relationships of a single dwarf.  The other is plain as day etched into the stone floor in front of you. 

Dwarven relationships are invisible spreadsheet managers.

Minecarts are visible physics problems taking place in the physical gamespace. 

What's more, by being in the physical space, minecarts can interact with other physical space systems to create deep, emergent gameplay opportunities. Water, magma, pumps, pressure plates, bridges and more are all in the physical space, as well, and that means that every single one of them can interact with the minecarts, (such as letting you dip minecarts into magma to "shotgun" magma at enemies,) creating more and more permutations of gameplay depth for a single fixed amount of additional complexity in the game. 

Conversations, however, are not part of the physical gamespace, and as such, they don't interact with any of those other "cool things" in DF, nor does the complexity in the conversation system apply to much of anything outside the conversation/personality system.

So, what does this have to do with xenosynthesis and magic? 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Xenosynthesis is there as a means of pushing magic into the realm of things the player actively manipulates through the way in which they build and run their fortress. 

The game, as Toady has told us he is planning on expanding it, is moving away from just "evil" and "savage" and "good", and towards a complex system of having dozens of spheres.  The "meanings" section you quoted earlier on Cado references how one wizard aligned himself heavily with "Illusion" as a sphere to become an illusionist, and at the same time, it corrupted his very essence.  There's then mention that there would have been more "balance" if the wizard had woven in a little "Truth" to counteract the imbalance of lies and illusions. 

The way in which you set up dead leaves as a source of magic attempts to answer a more immediate question of why stuff in the caverns exists, but it doesn't achieve some of the more important goals of xenosynthesis, which is making the player's decisions in terms of fortress-management have an impact on the type of magic a region experiences. 

Right now, we already have a "history" system wherein, to take the quote from GavJ for a second,

Usually, your chief imports are immigrants, beer, and optimism. Your chief exports are misery, limestone violins, forest fires, elf tallow soap, and carved kitten bone.

It's been a common running joke, great storytelling tool, and fantastic gameplay feature that what you do in a fortress is remembered... and it's usually the most chaotic and violent of things that are remembered.  (Although that can go back to the "why are games so violent" video for why...)

What if, instead of just having the way you kill an elephant show up in an engraving, it showed up in the magic of the world, as well?

Now You're Thinking With Spheres

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The key thing to understand about how Toady deals with his approach to magic is that it is sympathetic magic.  (You might want to reference this thread, from 2012-2013 for when I was more explicitly on this topic.)

That is, shadow creatures attack at night because their energies only work properly when the world is covered in darkness.  The powers of the shadow creatures (and the creatures themselves) come from an alternate dimension, but what changes is whether or not the world is sympathetically aligned with the sphere of darkness. In places of the world that are going through the darkest parts of the night, they are sympathetically more aligned with the shadow realm, and as such, more of the energies (or creatures) of that world can spill through.

The thing is, you need to transfer these sympathetic magic acts into things that exist in the physical gamespace.

Let's say for example that killing an elephant with fire or magma generates "fire" or "magma" sphere energy, while killing them with the military generates "violence" or "war" sphere energy, while starving them generates "famine" sphere energy.  (Or sphere sympathy or xenoenergeia or XE or whatever we want to agree on calling it.)

Every animal that is born adds to life sympathies, while every animal slain or butchered counterbalances it with death sympathies.  Because linking old quotes is oh-so-much-fun, I wrote a different thread concurrent to this one back in 2011: Organizing the Spheres, which was about trying to work up a system where you could have all the important spheres organized in opposing fashion, such that the normal world is one where all forces are in relatively equal opposition.  As you perform actions that favor one over the other, you tilt your biome more and more towards one extreme of a sphere or another.

This means that you have a direct choice in what sort of spheres your fortress is starting to align with.  (Or in some cases, you carelessly allow the choice to be made for you for want of preparation.)

What Physical Gamespace Can Do For Magic

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

To throw this all together, magic without something like xenosynthesis would basically be something where necromancers just arbitrarily raise zombies because "shut up magic, they just can," and can either do so infinitely, or else based upon some arbitrary MP system that is invisible and not within the physical gamespace (and hence, a series of complex mechanics that have no relation to anything else in the game,) or you can use something similar to xenosynthesis or sympathetic magic. 

The point of xenosynthesis or sympathetic magic or whatever is that it brings the source of magic into the physical gamespace, where it can be impacted by player actions. 

Let's say the player is very careful about how things work in their fortress specifically to undermine necromancer attacks.  If you make sure to have as few creature deaths as possible in your realm, all while fostering life sympathies by having lots of births (presumably, this means trading your animals away instead of butchery,) you can undermine the death energies present in the region, weakening the powers of a necromancer. 

In much the same way as engravings already try to hint, if you constantly magma-flood creatures and leave your fortress's front step a blasted hellscape, it pushes your fortress into having magma-themed creatures that represent that history in the physical gamespace for you to contend with. 

Maybe if you are extremely capable at handling the stress and happiness levels of your fortress, the sheer joy in the fortress sympathetically attracts joy motes or other creatures that feed on the sheer bliss of a dwarf eating a masterwork dwarven rum roast in a legendary dining room. (Which then gets swatted down and eaten by the cat.) Likewise, it may manifest as magical alterations of a creature like that cat.  Conversely, the sheer gloom of a fortress that constantly sees death may feed gloomshrooms in their growth or similar effects. 

Using Xenosynthesis ties what you can grow or ranch in with the magic system and the physical gamespace.  This means there are direct economic benefits to specific, if seemingly unrelated, actions as a player, which can be used to color your decision-making process. If, for example, you have a really powerful magma flooding device, it may work wonders in wiping out goblin sieges, but it may now have negative consequences for resting too much on your laurels by forcing you to face magma-immune monsters swarming your gates.  If you build multiple systems, including, say, a drowning chamber, you might keep your fortress's spheres in balance.  On the other hand, you may purposefully want to flood your fortress with a specific type of sphere's xenoenergeia because depleting it with the farming of magical crops or ranching of xenosynthesizing creatures may be part of your overall fortress strategy... just so long as you keep the fortress's spheres in enough of a balance that it doesn't completely overwhelm you.

... And there goes my evening...

[Ianflow]

To OP:

Your first reply to the HFS breaking topic made me think. It'd be lovely to have some demons escape via summoning. Comparable to that of Elder Scrolls summoning, but in addition the concept that occult beliefs work with in terms of summoning.
If and when magic becomes implimented in game, it'd be interesting to have secret occultists migrate for the sake of a using a ley line's node on the fort, and becoming possessed by a demonic or other entity (land spirit, etc). Their muscles go to max, they feel no pain, complicated motives, etc.

The physical gods bit I love, but one section about the extortion racket is a bit iffy for me. It's a great point, but with physical deities I'd love to see a huge variance in ethics. Ancient Egyptian Deities didn't work on the extortion racket principle, but the idea you have could work interestingly to portray varying cultures. Some oppressed by their deity, some freed by it.

It brings up the concept agan of using Occultism concepts, such as Servitors. The Dragon bit made me think of this, and using more modern concepts that still fit in line with ancient ones and practices could make a great mish-mash.

I know I'm taking a segway through this, but the concepts expressed I love in the Physical Gods topic. Dorfs worshipping the state religion, the local religion, and in addition their personal religion. Or more their pantheon is a mix of State Approved patron deities, Local Government Approved patron deities, and then ones that are allowed to be worshipped, but aren't being giving a thumbs up or down by the officials at large.
This could then lend to the Demigod Adventurers, where they are made naturally.
"In a moment Arshlur the Dwarven Goddess of Harvest came down and held both Urist McHusband and Urist McWife that night. Weeks later she came back with a bundled child and told them "This young one shall bring you great harvests even in old age" "
The Goddess works magic and creates a child with divinely bestowed ability to do planting and harvesting (proficient herbalist, grower, planter, etc from birth), but still a child of the parents (and a demigoddess). In other situations this could result in the Goblin God of militias in the form of a muscled goblin flirting with a dwarven woman in a tavern. He takes her into a private room, and she days later becomes pregnant.
The child resulting is a Dwarf, but with noticably non-dwarf traits, that seem to relte to the Goblin God of Militias. People figure out he is a demigod, etc etc.
This wouldn't even require half breeds, just variables that in the right circumstance replace normal ones in a dorf's description


Anyhow back to Ley Lines. That could be a way in world gen to cement magical energies. Nodes would be significant biomes (like lakes), whereas the lines (large or small) are like rivers, streams, even waterfalls. Existing across the XYZ plane, we could have harpies forming villages in the clouds to an extent.
This would add an existing primary source of magical energy. We could additionally factor in treating magical energy like radiation a la Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where too much magical discharge causes spatial, temporal, and biological distortion.
This could (in site selection) be viewed as "Aural Tendency", and a spectrum of low, moderate, high, all being natural magical energy. You might have reasons to put a Mage College on a High Aural Node, but different (yet valid) ones for placing one at a place with no natural magical energy.
This wouldn't interfere with existing biomes, only alter them in the same way they alter each other. You're more likely to find fantastical creatures in a high aural setting. They don't require it, but it's just easier that way.
Living beings as a source of magical energy is another way to look at it. Some can harness the natural biologic energy inside of themselves, and some don't figure it out. This also lends way to darker magical practices, such as larger scale sacrifice (sacrificing a hundred bulls at one site to generate enough of a magical discharge to be harnessed by a battery so to say).

I need to read through the thread and finish the first post on the topic, but I needed to gush.

EDIT: Okay so I thought about shit. When it comes to the horn of plenty concept I've got something. So instead of having a Chimera just DIE once it is living outside an area of magical influence, why not have certain traits degrade.

The best example is that the Chimera, prized for it's deadly venom, venom milking notices that it's degrading in potency. Slowly it seems to be producing venom comparable to a spider. It isn't dying, but it's becoming of lesser value as an animal.
A Golden Ram's fleece may dull, and a Cockatrice may not get others hard as fast as it used to (they make pills for that now*).

That * brings us from a joke to seriousness. As I mentioned the synthesis of magical energy from biologic components, say we sacrifice a hundred bulls. What will we do with that magical energy?
Many trees get a deep root feeding when cared for properly. This feeding isn't daily, hell it isn't monthly if I remember right as most gardeners do. In this case the deep root feeding can be done yearly. As a cow's milk dries up after it's calf grows large enough (or more over time), so too does this Chimera's venom.
Though that's why we do the sacrifice, to harvest the energy and feed it to the Chimera so it shall produce potent venom once more.

This sacrifice brings me to another thing I just thought of, which is State Approved Sacrifice. Many 'primitive' governments had a state religion such as the Ancient Egyptians. Farmers would volunteer for priestly duties (often for a month or so), and they would do the religious duties in their community. Certain offerings (the results of taxation) would be offered. Depending on if the offering was to the deities or the akhu (valued ancestors), the offering would either be eaten by the priests after the gods were done with it, or never eaten.

In a similar fashion, not only could we have procedurally generated offering methods and customs, BUT also procedurally generated preferences for offerings. The aforementioned Goblin God of Militias might prefer horse tripe to cow brain. This God might refuse to accept cow brain or cow parts at all. It might refuse all brains. It might accept a statue as an offering, but require it be smashed, melted down, or even displayed where nobody can ever see it (a sealed treasure room, and the haulers don masks to prevent them from seeing the treasure trove).

Then, we could even have the Occultists who are doing dark things create a temporary workshop. They may go into a mood, such as "Urist McNametorunawayfromfast has started a summoning". We may see it at stages akin to normal moods. A book open to a page showing for example "Kirlo the Satyr bound in chains" meaning that this summoning is a binding. It may then list items required to do so. While we can do unpredictable stuff, we can also have it formulaic. Higher quality goods equals a higher chance of success. It may go haywire and have Kirlo go into a rage, breaking the magical bonds, murdering Urist McInolongercareaboutthename and in addition everyone else in the tavern before using the remaining magical energy to go back home. That is unless the area they were summoned to has a more beneficial magical energy (pro vs con as decided by the entity), and it might stay.

Though to go back to state approved sacrifices and magic, we could designate for example "sacrifice any and all unowned cats", "sacrifice any and all unowned dresses", etc. We could specifically mark items as offerings or for use in rituals, and we may not even have to do a blood sacrifice. A ritual may have the cat sacrifice as having a symbolic sacrifice. It is sat on the altar, red dye put across it's neck, and then several hairs plucked from it's body to signify skinning the sacrifice.
The game could approach numerous magical systems and how they are dealt with in accordance to legality and publicity.
As I'm learning in my art class, before film, paintings were the height of drama. That and statues, and other such things. This means that the yearly offering to the Harvest Goddess as conducted by her demigoddess is a public event. There's a festival around it. After the demigoddess dies, her title may become a role that is passed down through generations, as people from nearby settlements come to view the ceremonies. They might start charging outsiders admission. As a source of drama and entertainment it might become important.

Then I also wanted to breach the messengers of divine forces rather than simply having a god or goddess just pop out of thin air. A man kicking a statue might not warrant turning him into a vampire. Hell it may not warrant anything. If he were to hump the statue and call the virgin goddess of the hunt a dirty whore, we run into "me smite you naow" territory. It might be weighed as "this one is drunk" to "wtf man". Divine entities being thinking, flawed beings on the same level as dorfs, just endowed with more mentality. This may all result in anything from being ignored, to a messenger being sent down to knock the idiot out, to a priest pulling the man into an alley and disemboweling him.

[NW_Kohaku]

What is it about this topic that sparks so many long, rambling posts? 

OK, to take bits and pieces of that...

EDIT: Okay so I thought about shit. When it comes to the horn of plenty concept I've got something. So instead of having a Chimera just DIE once it is living outside an area of magical influence, why not have certain traits degrade.

Well, the thing is, some creatures are just "savage versions" of a normal creature, so a giant sperm whale that leaves a savage ocean for a normal one might reasonably shrink down to a normal one. 

And for that matter, there was that story about how a good biome changed to an evil one, and turned satyrs to foul blendecs, which implies that, where it is a change from one sphere's influence to another, it's possible for one type of sphere-aligned creature to turn into some "equivalent" sphere-aligned creature.

However, a zombie is normally a corpse. 

You might think of it like a battery charged by an electric field charged by a tesla coil.  If you run outside the area that charges you up, you start to run out of juice, and eventually just shut down unless recharged. 

In fact, there are two types of zombies.  One is created by necromancers, who enforce their will over zombies, and would presumably be having to "pay" magical energy into the zombies to keep them running.  The other is created by an evil biome in general, and is powered more by the influence of "evil" in general.

If we were to talk about spheres beyond just good/evil/savage, then the spheres exert an influence that doesn't necessarily have to be good, bad, or sane by our human metrics.  Spheres of music might make all the animals sing because that's just what it does.  (And hypothetically, using the xenosynthesis ideas, if you have a fortress that uses tons of instruments and always stages bands to play all the time, you could create a Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarves type of place where the groundhogs or whatever sing along with random passing whistling dwarves...)  The sphere, itself, has its own agenda.  Maybe a deity embodies a sphere, and has some control, and you can negotiate with that deity or worship it, or maybe it has multiple independent avatars that can be negotiated with individually, but no single voice that speaks for them all, or maybe it's just like The Force, and it has no sentience, but has a will, anyway. 

In any event, evil biome zombies hate living things, and try to kill them (thus making them prime candidates for rising again, themselves) just because evil biomes themselves hate life and want to destroy it.