1. CAVERNS
M: Earth; Metals; Minerals; Mountains;
I'm not so much a fan of making Caverns a sphere. Rather, they should be the places where spheres come to occupy.
Basically, right now, all caverns are the same, while you have tremendous aboveground diversity. (Especially if we start adding in tons of other spheres to color them!) In order to be interesting once more, it would really be necessary to make different caverns have different spheres associated with them.
Again, this is why I prefer the idea of horizontal sphere alignment, since it means that every layer of the caverns might have different sphere alignment that results in different events at each cavern layer. One cavern layer is a singing cavern layer, while another is a fire cavern layer, and the creatures you encounter in each will be different, like you would find in the difference between embarking on a haunted forest compared to an untamed wilds tropical marsh on the shores of a joyous wilds ocean.
As such, I don't see why you'd even want to have a "cavern" major sphere in the first place. (Especially since you link earth, mountains, minerals, and metals to it, which suggest something more like "earth" as in opposition to "sky" or "sea".)
> A lot of the current cavern wildlife has the [EVIL] tag, which implies that Caverns is at least allied to Darkness (which I have designated as the primary successor to at least the relevant aspects of the current Evil surroundings).
This assumes darkness and evil are the same thing, which is
a potential pitfall.
"Night creatures" are generally hostile, but this isn't always strictly the case, and there can certainly be [EVIL] day-dwellers and nocturnal bats and cats aren't particularly evil.
6. Caverns are also the representative of the classical element Earth, and the current game has various inorganic “element men” in the deep cavern layers. Most of these are aligned with one of the Caverns minor spheres.
Have I mentioned recently how much I loathe every game ever and its dog trying to shoehorn the Four Greek Elements into its gameplay?
There is no good reason for doing this, you're simply doing it because everyone else does it, and it's just assumed you have to. What gameplay or storytelling value does it add?
For storytelling purposes, as many people have mentioned the current spheres seem more aligned to the roles of Greek Gods than the Greek Elements (which came after the Gods, I'll point out...) then it makes far more sense to have sky/sea/plutonic deities than it does to have airman, waterman, earthman, fireman.
Player
1. Dwarves being dwarves, the majority of actions related to the caverns seem either difficult to avoid or difficult to pull off. That complicates things.
2. The majority of forts will probably grow the “six dwarven crops” in large quantities. This shouldn’t align the area with Caverns, or at least not too much.
3. Ditto for mining.
4. Putting your grazer pastures underground so they eat the cave moss might work.
5. Once planting of trees is implemented, an underground tree farm might also work.
6. Using magma furnaces rather than normal ones might help.
Again, in broad terms, how much of the earth you have excavated is a good way of measuring your relation with the earth.
Maybe dwarves who want to be in balance with the earth (or plutonic deities or whatever) should take sparingly, and build temples in thanks to the earth as means of placating the stone? Overly avaricious strip-mining may cause retribution.
You could, for example, make leaving raw stone boulders laying around a source of problems, while carving stone crafts or smoothing and engraving stone balances the power out.
O: Darkness is allied with Caverns (see that section for details).
You really should be avoiding making every major sphere blend into one another. The key example is that good and evil biomes are oppositional forces, and that savagery is irrelevant to the two. It's possible to have Joyous Wilds and Terrifying biomes, which combines the functions of multiple spheres.
That is, any relation other than opposition should be irrelevancy such that they can overlap.
If one depends on the other, and it's hard to imagine one without the other, it's probably best to just merge them. We need a smaller set of these, anyway.
4. Some of the magical wildlife associated with frozen biomes (the ice wolf, for example) might benefit from being split off into a distinct “cold” sphere (Winter and possibly one or more additional new spheres like Snow, Frost, or Ice). On the other hand, biome and surroundings in the current game are almost completely independent of each other. A distinct “cold” sphere would be much more difficult to apply outside the cold biomes (Tundra, Glacier, and possibly Mountain) and this goes against that precedent.
5. Since “cold” is being treated as part of Darkness, other cold effects, such as snow and hail, might be more common in areas where the Darkness sphere is strong. Freezing rain, and the resulting glaze ice could be especially Fun.
Assuming cold and darkness are aligned why?
The depths of the caverns are filled with magma and heat, and yet it's aligned with darkness which is cold at the same time, according to what you've already said. And then see the following:
O: Fire shares the Light minor sphere with Sun, but the two have little common ground beyond this.
You're blending vague concepts and then forcing your conclusions to adapt to the theory. As the old joke goes, "When the map and the land disagree, you can usually assume the land is right." Perhaps it's better to work from the ground up, as it were, rather than the top down, and start with actual game effects, and work towards spheres from there?
2. Large unlit indoor spaces might help, particularly those built above ground.
This will only make sense when
all aboveground spaces
aren't lit, even when covered with hundreds of feet of stone on all sides.
Basically, the whole sphere requires the lighting arc to make sense, although that shouldn't be a major bar to it in the abstract.
DEATH
[...]
Player
1. Things die all the time from various causes, so this on its own is not enough.
2. Similarly, it is hard to avoid being on the receiving end of a siege. Lots of death all at once is also not enough.
The presence of multiple threads where people complain about the lack of sieges in the current game beg to differ.
3. The real answer here comes back to decay. Leaving the bodies from a defeated siege out to rot will align your area with Death. Burying them in coffins as promptly as feasible will remove this effect.
4. Related to this, leaving the remains of wild animals you use for target practice to rot will align your area with Death, while bringing them in for butchering tilts you more toward Nature.
5. How you deal with sieges can also affect things. Obsidian casting them will not increase your area’s Death alignment, since there is no body to decay. This falls under Fire instead.
6. A designated and stocked hospital will also align your area away from Death. Successfully treating someone might be an even stronger hit.
Most of this is fair enough, but I'm not sure why butchering is more towards nature, exactly. I still think that births and celebrations of life (possibly including weddings or other parties) can be a means of countering death-alignment.
4. FIRE
Again, loathing the use of fire as a major sphere just because we HAVE to use the Four Greek Elements no matter how much we have to mangle the rest of the myth to fit in with it.
You're again using fire to mean both light and magma, which is associated with dark. They're paradoxically delicious! There's no reason not to associate magma with plutonic spheres, fire with war or chaos, let light be its own thing, and dissolve this sphere entirely.
5. MOON
M: Balance; Boundaries; Coasts; Dawn; Dusk; Rebirth; Twilight;
S: (AGRICULTURE) Spring; Fall;
T: I am using Moon to represent the liminal, things that aren’t quite one thing or the other, including things in transition.
Twilight or Boundaries would probably make a better "title sphere" than "moon", because moon is associated with night, which is associated with darkness. In fact, I'm sure we can just make up words for titles, and just call them "transitions". You can make a case for it as liminal, but it's confusing to someone just reading the word "moon" not to simply associate it with the night and darkness. Names exist solely for the purpose of making their intent known. Taking the time out to describe why something's name makes sense in a certain context proves it's not the best one you could have chosen.
In fact, if we're talking transitions, then wouldn't it be more suitable for a Law versus Chaos dualism? Boundaries implies distinction and order, while transition implies the lack thereof. Your "feathertrees are a mixture of animal and plant" talk later on suggests the destruction of boundaries, not their existence. This major sphere needs to be broken apart and re-examined for consistency.
I'm not sure how death is opposed to the seashore. Nor how moon is associated with Spring and Fall while not with Summer or Winter. In fact, "Death" traditionally (in places like the Tarot) has been used to describe transitions, with the afterlife and the mortal life being the two opposites that death lies between. Since we have a game where we're supposed to be capable of walking into a land of the dead, that's probably an angle worth considering. (Hence I prefer the idea of "immortality" or "undeath" being in opposition to a "natural cycle" of life, death, and rebirth.)
1. The theme of combination and transition, applied to animals, fits well with the current “animal people” category of modified wildlife. These are not quite animals, but not quite humanoid. As a bonus, this also references the were-creatures (a different way of being part animal, part humanoid).
Animal people are a result of the nature spirits needing something, according to "Root". (Even when that something they need is to correct the mistake they made in trusting a former creature they made...) Animal people, in general, seem more suited to the things you keep calling "civilized" spheres, for reasons you, yourself, already mentioned.
It would also heavily suggest they're entirely different sorts of creatures from were-creatures.
Also, when we're talking about spheres, there's no reason to chain yourself to just what Toady has in the game, now. He's going to add tons of things later on down the line that upset everything you're restricting yourself to, here.
3. I am at a loss as to what Moon magical weather would be like.
Player
1. The overlap with Agriculture (Spring and Fall) suggests that farms might be one way, but farms are probably too universal to be a good choice for this.
2. Making large amounts of agricultural products for export (prepared meals and dyed cloth items, as the most obvious) is another matter. Dye in general is also less absolutely necessary than cloth, so it might work.
3. Selecting a fortress site that is at the border between two biomes (including, but not limited to, those of an ocean or lake) is one way that might work. Most players will do this, but this is merely how the player is encouraged to act, not something that requires a very specific starting build and careful planning to avoid.
4. The liminal is hard to represent in the current game. The closest I can come up with is mismatching. A room with both stone and wooden furniture; a wooden door in a stone wall or vice versa; that sort of thing.
5. Some decorations might work. They can continue the mismatch idea, and are less absolutely necessary than most of the items that might be decorated.
All of this, again, sounds like the problem of trying to force the conclusion to fit the hypothesis.
6. NATURE
M: Hunting; Trees;
S: (AGRICULTURE) Animals; Plants;
T: I’m not sure I agree with the name Nature. Despite the elves’ claims to the contrary, the giant animals of the current Savage surroundings, and the unicorns and pixies of the current Good surroundings, are no more part of “nature” than the beak dogs, harpies, and so forth of the current Evil surroundings. Perhaps Fey would express this better?
Again, there's no need to force this to fit with current schemes, or to force the land to fit the map.
Personally, I find the best corollary to be The Ring of Nibelung, (inspiration of Lord of the Rings,) where Chaos versus Law meant simple, nature-loving peasants had their peace upset by a ring made by a greedy dwarf and stolen by the gods that gave the power to rule the world through industry. It was a direct allegory to the changes of the Industrial Revolution, and resulted in the peasants overthrowing the gods/captains of industry in a bloody insurrection.
Or basically, nature is the opposite of technology and progress, which dwarves tend to represent. This is the traditional source of the elf versus dwarf thing, and also what Toady seems very much intent upon highlighting by forcing elves to ONLY use wood and plants as weapons, without using a single thing associated with technology.
Nature, as a sphere (which probably should exist in some form, since it's
directly associated with elves all the time,) should probably be more about the pristine-ness of the landscape, as opposed to how you tend to overturn the landscape to suit your own industrial needs.
8. WATER
M: Fish; Fishing; Lakes; Muck; Oceans; Rivers; Salt;
If you made "seas" the sphere, salt would make sense, but not water. Isn't salt kind of opposed to water?
9. WEATHER
M: Lightning; Rainbows; Sky; Storms; Thunder; Wind;
S: (WATER) Mist; Rain;
T: Fairly self-explanatory, especially with the list of minor spheres.
O: Strong overlap with Water, so I consider them related.
So if they're the same thing as water (not air? every bit of this forcing things to fit the Four Greek Elements thing results in terrible mish-mashes of ideas!) why make them separate? Oh, right, because making ocean and thunder the same thing makes no sense.
Again, just make it sky and sea, and have them oppose, and it's so much easier.
> The civilization counterpart to Weather is probably Art.
... WHAT?
Seriously, this works a lot better if you start from the practical up.
DUALISM
I'll make a list, here, of what I would see off the bat as a set of decent "category" spheres that their "friend" spheres are hangers-on to... Also, I'll try to make some "opposites", like the way that Good and Evil are opposite, while things like "Savage" are unrelated to other alignments. Of course, don't get hung up on this idea, and go for whatever you guys think makes for a fun sphere. It should just be a decent starting point.
Instead of having a dualist system (one versus its diametric opposite), however, we can also have a stand-off between multiple spheres - for example, day and night oppose, but twilight and morning stand between the two extremes. (This might be resolved by having a "are any of these powerful" metric, and then having a "which one of these is the most powerful" metric, so that not all terrain becomes one of those spheres.)
Okay, here we go:
2. Nature <=> Moon <=> Death
Each of the three opposes the other two. There are three distinct conflicts here.
Nature vs. Death
This is the most obvious one. Nature represents life: animals, plants, trees, and so forth. It represents healthy growth.
Death, in addition to simply representing undead, represents disease and decay. Undead themselves can also make a mess of things.
Nature vs. Moon
Moon represents things that aren’t one thing or the other.
Nature represents exaggeration, which is easily slides into flanderization. Moon has a bit more focus on the complexity of each individual, while Nature only focuses on the complexity of the ecosystem as a whole.
Moon vs. Death
This is the most subtle one.
Moon represents things that aren’t one thing or the other, so at first glance undead (neither living nor dead) would seem to fit perfectly.
However, Moon also represents transitions, especially cycles. Dawn and dusk. Spring and fall. The moon itself waxes and wanes. Birth, life, death, and rebirth.
Undead are stuck at one place in the cycle; they are not moving on. They are also going through the cycle backward: birth, life, death, then directly back to life without passing through birth first.
Your difficulty in making all these things fit together, especially moon and death, is probably a good indicator it needs to be teased apart a bit more.
Again, honestly, I think this needs to be put back into a more fundamental mode, where we start with what player actions and effects we want, and build sphere organization from there, rather than having a ton of overlapping effects from nebulous spheres.
Further, you have to keep in mind that part of the point is that
every non-opposing sphere can overlap! What is a Death-Water-Sun-Cavern-Weather surrounding like? You have even more of these representing what you're calling "civilized spheres" on the way, as well... This is why you need either strong opposites or spheres that are irrelevant to one another, rather than having them all blend into one another and have overlapping function and relevance.
Author
Topic: Organizing the Spheres (Read 13627 times)