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[Neonivek]

We need to make the dualities a bit more compatable within itself since from what I understand there are plans for a spherical land to have more then one sphere.

[NW_Kohaku]

We need to make the dualities a bit more compatable within itself since from what I understand there are plans for a spherical land to have more then one sphere.

I'm not sure what you mean by "more compatible"...

Right now, if you have a Joyous Wilds, you get good creatures and savage creatures at the same time, and Terrifying gives you evil creatures and savage creatures at the same time. 

If we expand this to 12 different umbrella spheres, with all their iterations, we'd probably have trouble coming up with names for every iteration (and probably shouldn't), but we could simply make a Mortal-Sky-Knowledgeable-Glorious region have the Mortality sphere creatures and effects fighting and/or coexisting with the sky creatures or effects and the Knowledge creatures and effects and Glory creatures and effects.

Just dump 'em all in the Fantasy Kitchen Sink, and see what happens.  No need to make anything more specially compatible than that.

[Neonivek]

Id figure dual lands and tripple lands would combine the concepts rather then include both concepts.

So a Firey land of death would include flaming zombies or flaming guardians of the dead... or, if resources were unlimited, have flames that didn't burn but instead simply killed what ever was heated by it.

[nil]

What kind of effects would you imagine arising from various sphere values?  I think to start we'd want to have more fantastic animals limited to (and excluded from, in some cases) specific biome spheres via RAWS, (as we currently have with [SAVAGE], [GOOD], etc).  I'm also with you on modifying otherwise normal animals, like the current skeletons and zombies and your winged sky zone "curse."  But at the same time I'm having trouble coming up with comparable examples for a lot of the other dualities, particularly ones that would amount to something more than flavor.

Also: Personally, I'd like it to be set up so that sphere values clustered around the mean to the point where the vast majority of biomes are affected by one or none, and anything more that three is extraordinary (although certainly possible).

This is a great idea, btw... basically what I've imagined based on everything that's been said about the future of biomes.

[Khym Chanur]

You make the current "Evil" region Immortality - a place where nothing truly "dies", but is left in a limbo state between life and death forever.  Hence, zombies.

The Mortality region, however, is something where the cycle of life and death become hyperbolically pronounced.

Hmmm, maybe Nature vs Unnatural rather than Mortality vs Immortality?

[Khym Chanur]

For example, in a biome where the grass is made of meat and eyeballs, and the trees are undead it makes little sense for there to be many herbivores, while carnivores would be expected to fare better, especially the bigger carnivores who can actually fight back against all the zombie and skeleton whatevers that will certainly attack them if they choose to spend much time there - hence, you should see a shift of the animal population more towards apex predator populations and away from herbivorous populations (if not eventually having a zombie apocalypse that kills all non-zombie animals).

So the undeath and meat-grass would be a temporary (as implied by the quote about the Elder Scrolls) modifier to another biome, rather than its own biome?  Hmmm, it might be interesting to have a permanent undath biome, where creatures had evolved to deal with zombies and skeletons, and maybe even some carrion eaters evolved to hunt and eat zombies.  Although you'd have to figure out something to do with the trees other than make them dead, and how undeath interacts with decay and recycling things back into the topsoil.

Also, wouldn't the meat-grass go into a different Sphere than undeath/immortality?

[SirHoneyBadger]

Are spheres easily moddable? Can we add new ones ourselves at this time?

[flieroflight]

i think the savagey/ biome spheres could work fine if done properly.
This could have a niceness indicator- with good-evil spectrum and a savagery meter with a peaceful to ferocius scale. a magical meter would be in place from- mundane to wonderworld
evil-o-meter determines what they eat- fleshy plants, regular, plants, or good plants or a mixture. in magical areas, animals may evolve to feed only on magic and so not need food.

summary of effects
good value of area- affects food animals eat, aggresiveness, appearance.
savagery- affects aggresiveness, size and combat ability
magic- affects all aspects with unusual changes- making a creature have disproportianate strengh, or other changes

ill go for some extreme examples for a non magical enviroment
evil region with low natural savagery- animals that are carnivourus and so graze on the fleshy plants but are not very dangerous if they go mad as its not a savage enviroment, can often be smaller than usual due to not needing to fight as peaceful area

evil with high savagery- carnivore style animals, bigger and stronger due to savage areas- lethal in fights and may actively attack your dwarfs

good with low savagery- animals that feed on good plants.  friendly with a nice appearance. poor in fights

good with high savagery- eats good plants, minds own buisiness but will fight back badly if provoked

[NW_Kohaku]

Are spheres easily moddable? Can we add new ones ourselves at this time?

No.  I'm not entirely sure they will become moddable, either. 

Right now, they aren't moddable because they don't really mean much, anyway.  Spheres are just things in religions that don't do anything, themselves.

As interactions become more notable, we'll likely see interactions that are moddable, and maybe then we'll get spheres that can be messed around with in the raws.

[NW_Kohaku]

i think the savagey/ biome spheres could work fine if done properly.
...

The thing is, this is based upon Toady's quote in the first post, where he said he didn't want to eliminate existing spheres, he wanted to expand upon them, but that he would simply be making some spheres less "important" than others.

As for why I don't like "Good versus Evil", I made a few long-winded posts about that earlier, which I'll just quote for succinctness:

Spoiler: quoting myself from another thread (click to show/hide)

Also, I want to clear up what I mean about "High Fantasy".  I'm not talking about how much magic is in the fantasy, I'm talking about what concepts the fantasy are built around.

High Fantasy is partially defined by the notion of a cosmic clash between two (maybe three) opposing cosmic concepts.

In The Lord of the Rings, the individuals are not nearly as important as they are in Heroic Fantasy for their own individual traits (the way that The Hobbit was, for example) as they are defined by their black-and-white demarcation of which cosmic force they belonged to.

Orcs are evil because they are on the side of "evil", and their entire race is evil because they have been declared on that side.  They cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with, they will commit genocide against humans and dwarves and elves unless stopped, and the only way to stop them is to commit genocide against the orcs first. 

Anyone who tries to negotiate with the orcish side is automatically evil, and will be shown as just doing it for personal gain, and become described in less-than-human terms for daring to think that the enemy could be negotiated with.

There are no innocent orcs - women and children (if they existed) would be fair game for genocide, since they are just "supporting troops" in the Total War of Cosmic Warfare.  You must commit genocide against the entire race if you are to be "good", because "good" is defined as committing genocide against "evil", and "evil" is defined as the things trying to commit genocide against "good", even if the only real difference between them is the color of their skin after a certain point of eternal mutual genocide. 

This is something you really get to see more when you are talking about something that better explores the role of the orcs, such as the ripoff-of-a-ripoff-of-a-ripoff-of-LOTR, Warcraft, where they've essentially come down to just making the two sides mirror images of each other, and just made them pretty much only aesthetically different and used different accents.  The more you explore the dualism, as long as it becomes nothing but a protracted genocide, and you actually start to understand the other side, the differences between "good" and "evil" fade away.  It just becomes genocide for genocide's own sake.

It is this aspect of "good versus evil" that I don't want in DF.  It is the moral ambiguity of Low Fantasy that I prefer, not its specific level of magicality.

Moral ambiguity is a core feature of Dwarf Fortress as we know it.  We have ethics that prevent some things, like cannibalism or slavery, but for the most part, the player can get away with almost anything the physics engine allows. 

Dwarf Fortress is guided by pragmatism, not ideology.

In this thread, I'm talking about dualisms (or trilisms or monisms) simply because that compresses data down to a handful of noise maps, although I'm not particularly pleased about having to do that, either. 

However, by splitting the world up so that you have "Sky", "Ocean", and "Land" regions, like the three male patriarchs in Greek Myth, as opposed to "Good" and "Evil", it prevents the choice of what side you will be on from becoming automatic - if "Evil" is represented by zombie apocalypse, then by not being an undead horror, you are automatically on the side of "Good".  That's just boring.

You can't negotiate with zombies, you can't have intrigues with zombies, you can't have subtlety with zombies, all you can do is aim for the head.

You can have a much more interesting set of interactions between Sky gods and Glory worshipers and Trickery religions than with the Cult of Undeath.

[thunktone]

Hi, new to the forums. Here is my suggestion for spheres, based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deities :

Sky, sun, moon, weather, earth, night, water, death, fate, fertility, health, household/hearth, knowledge/wisdom, thresholds/doorways, trickster, war, heroism, royalty.

I think sun, moon and night would be active across the surface, with green plants associated with the sun. Weather can be tied to rainfall, sky to elevation, earth to soil depth, water to the various water features. Hearth and threshold would be active in towns. Death, fate, war, heroism and royalty could come out of history (fate depending on numbers of questing adventurers). Fertility could come from rivers, volcanoes, and agriculture.

So that leaves health, trickster and knowledge to have "biomes".

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, welcome to the forums. 

The thing about this is that you might want to look up the DF wiki's list of current spheres, because Toady, the programmer of this game, has said that he doesn't want to reduce the size of that list (which is already over 100 long, and he says he wants to make it longer) while at the same time making some of those become "biome" spheres. 

Hence, in the first post, I was trying to bundle the existing spheres together, so that at least some general types of spheres get represented, not because I was generating spheres of my own.

Also, right now, these biomes only apply to the surface at all - I've made suggestions in the past where I suggested that caverns have their own biomes that change, but we don't have that right now.

[Silverionmox]

Making a duality of knowledge vs. glory wouldn't be too much of a stretch.  Realistically, learning and strength aren't at all mutually exclusive, but there's a long tradition of peaceful intellectualism versus aggressive martialism in both games and literature... I feel like it would be worth it to stuff a couple square pegs into squarish holes; 14 maps is a great, but depending on programmer ambition, a few less might be even better.

Are you worrying that Toady lacks for ambition? 

Actually, if we have something like the Glory idea, I think that something like a "humility" sphere popping up would make sense.  Maybe then a "Luddite" sphere or something for those who revel in ignorance.

The Luddites actually opposed industrializing the textile industry because they, skilled and knowledgeable craftsmen, would then be replaced by unskilled labour.

It'll be useful to have a few standard attributes for spheres (like creatures, minerals, item types, specific tasks, materials, etc.) that are well-defined and come in quite a variety already. That way we can associate any of these with any spheres we mod in or want to adapt. The procedural generation can take care of the rest. (More associated creature types and minerals found in relation with sphere x, jobs of the specified types get bonuses etc.).

[thunktone]

The thing about this is that you might want to look up the DF wiki's list of current spheres, because Toady, the programmer of this game, has said that he doesn't want to reduce the size of that list (which is already over 100 long, and he says he wants to make it longer) while at the same time making some of those become "biome" spheres. 

OK. I didn't mean that as an exhaustive list and I see now that most of those I suggested are already included. But it seems a good idea to me to connect some of these spheres to existing properties like rainfall and volcanism. Letting historical events affect them would add a lot of character too I think. And in the caverns you could have plants that grow near minerals, metals, jewels and magma, as well as those associated with the cavern sphere itself.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, again, this comes back to the sort of chicken-or-egg question where it is worth asking if an area is powered by "Sky" biomes just because that's where the gods divided up the world, and as such, "Sky" power is infused in that area, regardless of what is actually there, or do we want "Sky" magic to only appear in specific landmasses?

The first of those two means that we will see "Sky" mountains as often as "Sky" oceans or "Sky" forests, and that magic comes from its own source.

The second means that you might only get "Ocean" oceans, and never "Sky" oceans, and that you will never see "Ocean" sphere forests, where oceanic creatures can walk on the land or the like.