Death Magic

I'm more or less with you. But I also like the way that the devs are planning to use Death magic - it's just another aspect of life magic. And it can be used for more than just killing and corrupting and raising dead. It should also be able to heal units (someone around here once gave the example of summoning parasites to eat away dead flesh, for example).

But I agree that death magic should be able to do all/most of the things you just said. Or at least things along those lines. But it shouldn't be limited to just blatant evil things. I want to be able to have an evil life-magic wielding channeler, and I also want to be able to have a good death-magic wielding channeler. 

Let's not forget a point brought up in Dragon Quest (old tabletop RPG) - ressurection requires a thorough knowledge of both healing AND death.

Prophecy movie series (not the one about the mutant animals) - just because you're on the side of the angels doesn't mean that you aren't a total b@$%%^^&.

Consider, for example, the evils that can be done with LIFE magic:

Want cancer?  Hope you did, cause you got it now.

I want to protect life - the smaller forms - the ones that are called parasites, and the germs that eat flesh or cause diseases.  All life is sacred, after all.

No, no, no.  This won't do at all.  Chickens should live as long as humans do.  I'll equalize the life expectancy between you.

Oh, do the women want to be fertile?  SURELY giving birth to 18 children each season isn't TOO much to ask of them - all they do is stay at home and give birth, after all.

I don't see any hydras mangling my enemies - but if I keep these snakes alive while I mangle their genes just SO....

Hope you believe in karma, cause I've changed your body into that of an earthworm.  You'll get to try it on me some lifetime.  Trust me.

And the big, world ender for life - I end all life that doesn't support me or my people.  Now we can have perfect peace.

Main point:

Stardock is known for complete tech trees, such as appeared in the Galactic Civilization series.  They've said that EVERY element will have its dark and light sides - which doesn't assure that the people USING them are light or dark.  I forget the exact title, but there's a book where an assassin, a thief, a dark wizard, and an antipaladin join forces to save the world from the power of GOOD. 

Secondary point: C'mon, if Stardock slips up on this (and I don't think they will), someone will just mod in the missing pieces of the puzzle. 

There's nothing forbidden about death magic in Elemental, it's just an aspect of life magic. Death is, after all, just a part of life, or the absence of.. well.. "vitality".

As for all the other magics being about "good for you" and "bad for them", we don't know that. There could be numerous tradeoffs for using a number of magics, wheter it's a fire spell causing draughts, or.. whatever.

The thing that I wonder is that if death is another part of life (which makes sense.  I mean cure and harm are the same process if you think about it.  And animating a dead body is about the same as bringing it back to life.) then what about your obviously evil necromacer type things.  Its a classic in games like this to have your undead cities with bone dragons and the like.  It would be strange to have the channeler using magic to spawn undead legions of darkness and still be focusing on the same life magic that makes everybody love the user, cure illnesses, and generally be happy.

The only thing that seperates life and death magic is which way the life is flowing. Death is the absence of life.Are you removing life from a container or creating life to fill an empty void?

Ripping life from one thing and putting it into another could be considered death magic healing.

Empowering someone to use 100% of thier brain could be considered life magic killing because that the same thing as having a seizure.

That's the kind of point that I haven't seen much yet in the death/life magic talk. Cancer, after all, is basically unlimited growth, and lots of people assume that life=growth.

I'm pretty sure that what we'll end up with is a major magic school, Life, which includes very evil practitioners, very good ones, and hopefully neutral ones, all of whom have access to a base set of overlapping spells (or spell types w/ different names) as well as some stuff that requires both an Element association and an alignment (no zombie-making if you're good, eventual ability to make liches if you're evil).

Pet peeve of mine.

You always use 100% of your brain. If you would only use 90% you would have 10% dead tissue in your head.

But not all neurons fire at the same time (that would be a horrible seizure).

</Off Topic>

 

 

Magic the Gathering had a nice spell for water element: Unstable Mutation. It gave the enchanted creature an attack and defense bonus but weakened it in subsequent turns, killing it in the end.

Which is imho a nice idea of an evil life spell, mutating a creature to grotesk proportions for a short time, which then will die a horrible death due the mutation being unstable.

The good version would then be Giant Growth, making a creature stronge (and larger) for a short time without any negative side effects.

Eh, semantics. When I walk around my house I turn off lights as I go so that the only lit room is the one I stand in. Our brains work much the same way.

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Giant growth spells are a pet peeve of mine come to think of it. Increasing the size of objects simply does not work unless you also increase density. If you enlarged a human to 100 feet tall his ankles would explode because the strength of the material has not changed and the joint can no longer withstand the stress that stands on it.

Giant growth spells could work by folding space in some undefined manner, from the giants perspective (and more importantly the laws of physics inside his body) he's normal size, from everyone elses point of view he's huge. Although freaky things will happen on the border: dose he hit with the strength of a giant, or the strength of a normal man devided across a larger area? I havn't really put much throught into it, just occured to me.

Back to the topic of death magic, I find the assumption that necromanctic summonings call evil things like dreadlords, there's plenty of non-evil things to summon, for example, lots of cultures have a legend about some great king or hero who will return when his people really need him, King Arthur is probobly the best known, why not have your necromancers find this guy and bring him back, in addition to being a hero you'd get some major morale boosts. A top level death spell might open a road between your lands and the afterlife removing the fear/sorrow of death entirely

First post, sorry if my ignorance is glaring.  If just stumbled upon War of Magic today.

Something that ties in with death and destruction is one essential game mechanic: How is the scoring to be done in War of Magic?

Something that bugged me a lot in MOM is that the total end number of population of your cities is a factor in the scoring.  I mean if you choose to be a necromantic bad-ass you should be rewarded upon the number of people you sacrificed and sent to hell and the number of square kilomether of  scorched earth that was once fertile grassland, not how many halflings populate the land after the game has come to its end.

I don't  like it if the  nature & life growth and prosperity make it an easier game to score than the chaos and destruction.

I am not an advocate of death (well not all of time ) but it makes for more fun game if good-evil morality is not forced upon the player via scoring.

 

 

 

 

I've been trying to watch closely since long before this project had a street name, and I'm still wondering if the dev plan includes a scoring system at all. I'm a bit conflicted about whether I want one or not, but that might be mostly because Stardock seem to have lost affection for the scoring side of GalCiv2 while I ended up finally doing some scored games after more than a year of playing simply to be playing. (GC2 folks: I know the non-Metaverse games also have scores, but I never paid attention until the AltMeta got going.)

If there is a scoring system, I definitely want the scoring algorithms to be based on the victory type, but in GC2 one win type (total conquest) is the 'baseline' and all the other wins just get a weaker multiplier). If Elemental has scores with weighting by victory type, I want them to look something like you describe, and maybe not just based on win type. If you are a water-only channeler, you should get a score boost for the number of turns where you controlled all the water shards (if you ever manage that).

I think scoring should depend entirely on who your channeler is and what the objectives of the scenario were. Even if that objective was base survival. There are simply too many variables otherwise to balance.

Personally I couldn't care less about scoring, and the only reason I'm not against the devs including a scoring system at all is because I know a lot of people love their scores . But basically, scoring systems are always biased in favor of something or another. I much prefer detailed statistics to be shown at the end of a game. Frankly it's much more meaningful than one ambiguous number. Best of both worlds i guess would be for SD to include both, and being able to see both would also make it easier to diagnose big problems in the scoring calculations.

While we're on the subject of variable magics of Good vs. Evil, I'd like to say that while the Death of Life Magic is very interesting, I'd rather like to see some examples of how this will work with the OTHER Elemental magics. How does Good vs. Evil Fire magic work?

What I'd prefer is a Positive vs. Negative spectrum instead, with 'positive' obviously being "good" while 'negative' would be "evil" (overall). For example, contrary to what some other game developers seem to think, Ice is not a classical element. Ice, moving away slightly from the classical dichotomy (where it would be the blend of Water & Earth; but that has nothing to do with the argument of Positive/Good & Negative/Evil), would in this case be the absence of Fire.

In the case of Fire, this is obvious, but what of Earth and Air? Except suffocation, how would someone 'showcase' Negative or Evil air magic? I'm looking forward to see how Stardock will handle Good, Evil & possibly Neutral in terms of magic in Elemental - without hopefully putting too much ummph on the diversity of Life magic, making it the only truly unique one depending on your choice of morality.

But wouldn't the increased size of the ankles themselves (just to take the isolated example used) spread the weight carried? Of course, this only helps to a certain degree before gravity kicks in and crushes your spine or choice-free bone.

But as I've said before; "A wizard did it". :p

Like I've said somewhere else, before (these death magic arguments seem to be popping up every once in a while) I'd prefer if 'Good' Life magic would be the traditional Holy, 'Neutral' would be traditional Nature, and 'Evil' would be traditional Necromancy. Overlapping as across a spectrum, of course.

Having all of these in the same school, overlapping and scaling across eachother, could potentially be very interesting.

 

Well, if we depart a bit from the traditional elements, you could do the following:

Fire <-> Demonology

Water <-> Ice

Earth <-> Poisons, Illness

Air <-> Spirits, Ghosts, Void

 

Demonology would involve summoning and using (classical fire) demons to do ones bidding. For example, instead of casting the classical fireball, you would summon a lesser demon that would then charge the enemy and explode on impact. It would also include blood magic, that is similar to fire magic (blood - hot) [bit fare fetched I know, but not impossible] but works more with sacrificing stuff instead of spending mana.

Ice as an evil version of water would work I guess. Pretty straightforward, that one.

The evil version of earth could be poisons, illnesses and maladies in general; be it Black Death or stuff to poison a well.

To abuse air you could have spirits, ghosts and other ethereal beings to help one and of course the absence of air, vacuums and implosions as direct damage spells.

 

My suggestions are a bit summoning heavy, but they're just examples of course. I think there are a lot of ways to make the other elements interesting in a good/evil or positive/negative dichotomy. With my examples good or positive channelers would have more direct damage resp. helping and support spells while evil/negative ones would have the more sneaky, indirect, damage over time, destructive spells.

I dislike the idea of associateing any spesific form of magic with any moral alignment, "traditional" necromancy comes with spell books that have been deliberately massaged by authors/developers to be filled with evil spells however if you think about it magic that controls death and the dead can be used for plenty of good things: sending unhappy restless ghosts safely to the afterlife, banishing undead monsters. While holy magic being good: that rather depends on who your god is dosn't it . Why should summoning angels to fight your rivals be any more "good" than summoning dragons to fight the same rival? In both cases your useing magic to kill people.

BTW just what dose "traditional" holy have to do with Life anyway? There are some forms belif that hold all life as sacred traditonal holy magic is all about the god, not life. I think that life magic would be a mixture of Nature and Necromancy, with both good and evil spells for each, I suppose that is holy magic to any belif system that holds all life sacred

 

I never really thought about the spectrum of the schools of magic ranging from "good" to "evil." I actually hope that's not how it works (after all, pretty much any spell could be used for good or for evil). I'd rather it just be a neutral dichotomy between two different skillsets. Basically, the "positive" spectrum of fire magic might be predominantly offensive destructive spells, while the "negative" spectrum could focus more on debuffs and the like (sucking the heat out of enemy soldiers, reducing their fighting effectiveness, etc), maybe also summons like Vandenburg's idea (although i wouldn't want it to be called demonology :P). I got the impression that the different aspects of the magic schools is a tool to increase player options as well as a way to add in some exclusivity (you can't have it all). 

I want the alignment of channelers to be independent of what aspect of which schools he chooses to focus on. Could be a little awkward to have a Death magic-wielding necromancer be good-aligned, though, but not inconceivable.

Edit: TheColorOfHeartache got to a lot of this while I was composing this post

I'm talking about the traditional fantasy holy magic, as opposed to divine magic which you speak of. There tends to be a moral divide between what is holy and what is divine in fantasy contexts, where holy is traditionally "good" and divine magic is just magic that happens to stem from the divine - wheter the divinity is good or evil has no bearing.

When I speak of traditional holy magic, I speak of Resurrection, Banish Undead, Divine Blessing, Searing Light, Sunbeam, 'classical' "Healing", and so on. In another context, say Arcanum, it's represented by a 'Good' restorative Necromancy school. In Age of Wonders, it'd be the "Life" school of magic.

Which is why I argued for Positives vs. Negatives, rather than a good vs. evil dichotomy. After all, I could easily see an evil Channeler wanting positive Fire magic & negative Life (Fire spell 'Wither' and death spell 'City Plague' from AoW2 comes to mind; a city-devestating combination).

Well to summerise my response: I now understand your point better, but I still somewhat disagree (at least its an informed disagreement this time )

Firstly in regards to Holy: Now you've clarified it mostly fits with caviats, searing light and sunbeam have nothing to do with Life, banish undead is purely a necromancy spell (and as a pure attack spell its also a "negative"), heal fits, resurrection requires both life and death magic (you have to find the origonal soul, getting a soul back from the afterlife, even a willing one, is necromancy). As for devine blessing, I think I've made my views clear

Nature magic also only partly fits, growth magic, healing magic, etc: they fit. Summoning animals, animating trees (add life to a tree and you get a bigger tree, not a walking talking fighting tree. However if you can find tiny fighting trees then life magic can grow them), summoning faeries and other nature spirits, not really.

 

Next you say you argued for positives and negatives, that's not exactly how I remember it [quote who="Vandenburg" reply="15" id="1977771"What I'd prefer is a Positive vs. Negative spectrum instead, with 'positive' obviously being "good" while 'negative' would be "evil" (overall). [/quote], ok you really could have explained that better lets move on. How exactly do you define positive and negative if not good/evil? All I can think of is Help me / Hurt him is that what you had in mind?

If so then I don't think it really works to holy and necromancy along those lines, there many postivies and negatives for both: at first glance you might see something like grow my crops vs wither his crops but you could invert it to grow weeds in his crops / kill weeds in my crops. Or heal vs hurt can be inverted to heal deseases vs hurt deseases. And the necromancy classic: raising skeletons to fight is argueably no worse than building a golem, it might be considered desrespectful to the dead but if you have their permission ("You'll be glad to know that with my necromancy after your dead your bones will go on to serve the commies a steaming platter of shame with a side order of suck it! Vote for me if you want to live!).

 

pigeonpigeon, thanks

Good and Evil don't really mean anything alone. So killing people is evil, compared to what? Without "good" evil essentially becomes meaningless. A while back I was thinking up fun ideas for MoM 2 since there was a chance that Stardock would be making it. Of course now we have Elemental instead so its a good time to break them out of storage.

As I imagined it magic is divided into pairs which oppose each other.

• The first up is Earth and Air. In general terms it would be more accurate to say "ground and sky". Earth and Air counter each other perfectly because they can not exist at the same time.
• The second pair is Fire and Water. What that really means is heat and cold, fire and water don't actually have to be involved.
• The third pair is Order and Chaos. As with Earth and Air they both balance each other directly.
• The fourth pair is Time and Stasis. Time involves speeding the flow of time up and Stasis means slowing it down. Neither school of magic is capable of stopping time completetly.
• The fifth pair is Life and Death. Both actually mean Life, Death is simply the absense of life.

This gives us 10 whole schools of magic. I will explain a bit futher when I get back later, but what I had in mind was rather long. I might have to start another thread.

You have to consider the existance of actual souls, which is usually connected to the light. 'Holy' magics is usually, in a fantasy context, indisputably a part of Life magic. I'm not saying that all indisputably belong to "Life". Also, as far as resurrection goes, remember that there is no death magic in EWoM; 'Death' magic is a confirmed part of Life magic. It's all in how you use it.Technicly, there's nothing saying that you cannot use a potential Life magic-spectrum interchangably with traditional fantasy Nature magic, including summoning faeries and nature spirits. Even the summoning of spirits can be tied to life force, especially if you consider their attachement to other 'foresty' aspects that are entirely possibly to achieve with the use of life magic.

, ok you really could have explained that better lets move on. How exactly do you define positive and negative if not good/evil? All I can think of is Help me / Hurt him is that what you had in mind?[/quote]No, positive and negative. Generally, this would be equal to the usual perception of good and evil (as I said in the excerpt you quoted). But as I expanded on after the excerpt you quoted, if you took the time to "read->comprehend->write", Positive and Negative are the presence and absence of the classical element.

To this, I used the example of the Fire element to create Ice magic. Because if Heat (Fire) is the result of the Positive of the classical Fire element, then Cold (Ice) would be the natural result of the Negative of the fire element. As I said, "Ice, moving away slightly from the classical dichotomy, would in this case be the absence of Fire". Just like Death is an aspect of the Life element (confirmed); But instead of arbitrary Good vs. Evil where death is the natural evil, we'd have positives (generally 'good') and negatives (generally 'evil').

You've missunderstood the words positive and negative. It's detached from morals, just like being HIV-positive is (generally) not a good thing.

Raising armies of undeads would no doubt be a positive thing for my vampirical empire, but the usage of the Life Element would be negative. Likewise, my good-aligned frosten kingdom with polar bear paladins would use negative fire magic, forfeiting the power to scorch the lands in favour of raising.. I have no idea. A glacial wall, or something.

Just because the other fantasy's did it dosn't mean they're right. Parts of traditional holy magics fit with life magic, other parts don't.

I use the term "death magic" as shorthand for "the aspect of life magic that is used to reduce life, or contact / control the dead". resurrection would require "death magic" to contact the soul and life magic in its positive aspect to heal the body.

 

You could say that about any spirit, they'll all have a connection to lifeforce. Without spirits of the other 4 elements there would be no life, and a fire elemental is alive so it has a connection to the lifeforce, no one is proposig a life mage can summon elementals.

That point was not in any way clear. Mostly because your mixing two very diffrent points togeather:

1) Positive and Negative refer to the presense and absense of the element

2) Positive is genrally good, while negative is genrally evil.

The first point I agree with, the second point I don't, and I think I've made my reasons clear enough on why

Actually unless your casting negative fire magic on a lake or something Ice isn't the natural result. Ice would require negative fire and positive water, pure negative fire would freeze people but it wouldn't be able to create a wall of ice for example.

Again, there is no reason that positives will be genrally good or negatives would be genrally evil.

It would help if you didn't keep saying that positives were "genrally good" and negatives were "genrally evil", its not really that suprising that I assumed you were implying morals with the words is it

This is just confusing. Until now you've been saying that positive is the element and negative is its absense. Here you've flipped it around so that Life Element is negative because your playing with vampires, why? (BTW vampires would use a form of Life magic that's both positive and negative to move other people's lifeforce into themselves)

 

I hope they don't follow this route with the different aspects of magic schools . First of all I don't think it's very workable (what is the absence of earth, water and air? The only things I can think of are liquidity, solidity, and void - but the first two would just result in negative water = earth and negative earth = water...). I would much rather the two (more?) aspects of the schools of magic not have anything to do with the presence or absence of the element, but rather just involve using the element in largely different ways.

One way of doing this is to have one aspect be mostly utility, while the other be mostly combat related. For example, one aspect of earth magic could be to ruin your enemy's crops and make your own extremely fertile, to shore up your walls, etc. The other aspect could be used to hurl boulders in combat, create earthquakes, etc. Each aspect should still have a little bit of the other aspect in it, though - but with much less variety, strength and efficiency. Likewise some spells of some elements might be very similar to spells in other elements. There are many ways to ruin somebody's crops or improve your own, for example. Plus the much desired multi-element spells - I really hope those are in.

And they needn't even follow the same mold for each element. Earth magic could be divided into utility and combat, life magic could be divided into giving life and taking it (and giving life should be capable of killing, and taking life should be capable of healing :P). Fire magic could be divided into two different types of combat-oriented magic (buffing/debuffing vs. destructive spells). I think a system like this would be much more interesting than one based on the absence/presence of the element or good/evil. It allows them to make much more meaningful boundaries between the aspects of an element. 

I think Stardock has said five magic spheres (Elemental Ones+ Life)

 

You can do a lot within those spheres, and some things I wouldn't be surprised if it requires two sources of magic at least somewhat- similar to disciples.

 

 

 

 

Yeah, but they've also said that each sphere will have a sort of spectrum. So, for example, knowing that your opponent is a fire channeler won't be enough to accurately gauge what you're up against - you'd want to know which side of the spectrum he is on, because that will probably affect what spells he can use well. That's what we're talking about.