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[James.Denholm]

I'm pretty sure Toady commented somewhere else that the ghost is the soul, and reanimated bodies lack the ghost and thus the soul, and that therefore the reanimated body has none of the traits of the original dwarf's mind though his family members might be upset at seeing their loved one's body disturbed, and that there was potential for dwarven ghosts to get irritated that necromancers were animating their corpses.

So no I-never-got-to-say-goodbye-I'm-so-sorry-give-Dad-a-cuddle moments?

That's actually probably a good thing, now that I think about it.

[EddyP]

Toady, you are awesome. No matter how much that gets said, it can't be said enough.

[Footkerchief]

If someone with a secret dies, and then they are raised, do they still know the secret? For example, if one necromancer kills another, and decides to raise his fallen enemy, does the newly undead necromancer maintain his ability to raise more undead?

To expand on this a little, what happens to the soul on re-animation?

"To avoid crossing various streams, animated corpses now keep track of the historical figure that was the source of the raised body, even though the historical figure's soul is detached from it (and available for ghostage). So relatives can still be properly horrified by a raised body without it actually being the person in question, and they might be haunted at the same time, oddly enough, provided that evil region animation continues to have nothing to do with the soul stuff."

The secret is attached to the soul, so reanimated corpse = no soul = no secrets.

Will all the secrets be big, special things like raising the dead, or will there eventually be less large secrets, such as the secret of making a musical instrument or how to cook something special?

Toady's last post mentioned that he doesn't yet know how secrets/knowledge will be used in the future:

I've heard a lot of talk about "secrets" lately.  Is the Dungeon Master's ability to tame exotic creatures also going to be one of these "secrets"?

It's possible to get sort of tech-treey with it, but I haven't done anything like that, and it's not set up to point to certain positions or to have positions confer any abilities on their own.  The larger questions surrounding knowledge and technology have not been resolved.

And on a related note: Do necromancers/secret-knowers take on acolytes or apprentices and further their knowledge and/or fortress conquering agenda?

He'd probably have mentioned it if that were the case.

[NW_Kohaku]

These question and answer sessions are always fun, since the questions you'd never think are always the ones that produce the answers you never would expect.

In the case of an adventurer, will we be capable of receiving training as a religious figure or whathaveyou that lets you acquire this sort of weakness-revealing information on your own, and become a "Adventurer Role: Slayer of Nightcreatures" in the sense of being a traveling exorcist?  Or must you go out and find those religious figures and ask them on the weakness for every night creature you run across?

There's nothing wrong with learning things in advance rather than on a case by case basis.  If we don't have time advancement, it's more of a char gen issue, which would be cool.  We'll see if this is necessary during testing when we have our first creatures with weaknesses/etc., which might not happen this time.

Hmm...

Does this mean that, instead of just "Peasant" "Hero" and "Demigod", we might be able to start out selecting "Priest" or "Fortuneteller" or whatever job produces this information?  Or is this going to be a set of skills that anyone can train?

... I wonder how one trains seances to ascertain the weaknesses of fell creatures, anyway?  Do you make guesses as to whether a coin flip will be heads or tails to up your prediction experience points?

[NW_Kohaku]

So, since corpses can be raised without their heads, how do you (at least temporarily) kill a zombie/skeleton? Will a complete corpse zombie still die when it loses its head? How bad off does a corpse have to be to be un-raisable? Especially when animated limbs/etc. go in, how do you kill those?

Same as it has been, with the "hitpoint" stuff, until we redo crushed-to-a-messy-pulp as a concept.  Any animated creature has to sustain banging around proportional to its size and it'll collapse.  It can be raised again immediately if it is still intact.  Right now we're using a sort of weird definition, where you have to have at least one head or grasp left if your original body had any of those.  If your body is weird enough not to have a head or grasp defined, and it is still marked as being from a "living" being, then it can always be raised, which would amplify your need to go after the source instead, if possible.  This makes completely exotic monsters trouble in evil regions, and I'll have to see if additional precautions are necessary.  I don't want to adopt a cumbersome tag system for this, but we'll see what's necessary.  A body could be marked as pulped if it is successfully felled a number of times, for instance, until we make pulping a reality.

Zombie floating guts once again says "Hi!"

... Or rather, something more akin to "blurglarglable"

[bitterhorn]

I'm curious about what kind of requirements are going to be placed on who and what can learn secrets. Could an ordinary wild badger learn the secret of necromancy, and if it did, would it build itself a tower and start raising the dead? And if there are requirements for secrets, will they be settable on a per-secret level? (Like "the secret words of wisdom" requiring [INTELLIGENT] to learn and [CAN_SPEAK] to use, for example?)

For the example I've been using, it is restricted to mortals with can learn.  Can speak might also be required, since kobolds shouldn't be able to read slabs.  The restriction tags available are the same as the ones you can use for the syndromes, so it's still ongoing.  You can use the current arbitrary string classes and specific creature tokens, so it's really whatever creatures you want.  They don't have anybody they want to teach it to at this point, but there is a tag for it.  I'm not sure what the future holds there.

It seems strange to employ CAN_SPEAK for whether or not a creature can read.  I wonder if a distinction between CAN_SPEAK and a hypothetical LITERATE tag would be useful for anything else...

Any animated creature has to sustain banging around proportional to its size and it'll collapse.  It can be raised again immediately if it is still intact.

Shit just got real.

[PTTG??]

Kobolds do not have language. Or at least, not language as we know it, more like dolphins. It's impossible for them to learn languages.

That said, a shamanistic thing would be neat.

[Zalminen]

...we were thinking of limiting it to otherly-sized body parts, sutures and grafted-on weapons

[King_of_the_weasels]

Will all the secrets be big, special things like raising the dead, or will there eventually be less large secrets, such as the secret of making a musical instrument or how to cook something special?

I can definitely see brewers and cooks making artifact recipes, which has been discussed quite a bit already.  But it's now much closer I guess.

[monk12]

color=limegreen If secrets are attached to the soul, and ghosts are the souls of the deceased, then would a necromancer's ghost still know the secret and be able to teach/use it? Have you considered secrets/interactions that require the subject to be ghostly or otherwise corporeally impaired? /color

I was gonna green that, but I figured it was too suggestion-y. Still an entertaining line of thought, though.

[metime00]

That thought immediately brings to mind Qui-Gon Jinn teaching Yoda the secret of becoming a ghostly Jedi after death through his spirit form. A ghostly mentor that confers the gift of immortality sounds very cool and probably rooted in traditional mythology (for bonus points!)

I've gotta say, this update is bound to be rife with modding opportunities as well as expanding the gameplay on it's own. From what Toady's said it seems like secrets will be quite versatile. Might have to move away from vanilla to take advantage of the curses and secrets that can be made with this.

Plus adventure mode being even more connected with the history is always interesting and brings alot of weight to raiding tombs when they have a historical basis that you can explore in true roguelike/archeologist fashion!

[Mel_Vixen]

Heh why i am thinking of "sith alchemie" now? Actually i wonder what it would take for a soul to replace another one thus someone coming back from the dead without being zombyfied.

How will the monument will be placed? Will there be stuff like valleys filled with Monuments or fields with grave-mounts respective whatever exists.

Also will there be political stuff around the "grave-sites" like starting a war with someone because they "disturbed the dead" from the builders pov.

[Neonivek]

Well the secret system can be used for other things... In fact

Toady from what I see a large portion of what your secret system is, other then magical, is the exchange and passing of knowledge. do you forsee using similar systems for recipes, technology, and other such things?

[NobodyPro]

Why am I now looking forward to playing as the leader of a group of chef-assassins who deal in food and murder, kidnapping the opposition and beating the secret recipes out of them? Is this normal?

[Rose]

Why am I now looking forward to playing as the leader of a group of chef-assassins who deal in food and murder, kidnapping the opposition and beating the secret recipes out of them? Is this normal?

It's like it's straight out of the animes.