Religion in JADE

[Nezur]

I'm eager to know how many gods there will in the game. One for each ethical alignment (Good, Uncaring, Evil) for every race a bit like in ADOM or one god for each alignment combination? It would be nice if worshipping a given god granted special benefits.

[theotherhiveking]

Like in Stone soup dungeon crawl? That game as a GREAT deity system, and i love it a lot, much more than adom one.

[Grey]

Anyone mind describing this great deity system in stone soup dungeon crawl? I've never played it (though I've heard it's got some great features).

[theotherhiveking]

Anyone mind describing this great deity system in stone soup dungeon crawl? I've never played it (though I've heard it's got some great features).

Sure (its need to be adapted)

You start with no god (unless with some classes) After a while, you can get to an altar an chose one, gods are very diferent, praying draws their attention and do not annoys him (note that by praying
the god will not heal or fill you stomach) Some gods enjoy kills, other not, so if you start as a death knight, you can chose to draw your powers from the death god, so killing everything in the most horrible way, will make him happy, as you get close to him, he will grant you with powers, for example, 1 power you get in a death knight is to animate corpses, after more killing and making him happier, he will make you even more powerful, giving you lost of the necromancer's skills, the downside is that if you cant make it happy all the time, he will forget you and retire most of your powers gradually.

Each god as diferent personality, for example, the death god does not like having corpses sacrificed, he prefers that you animate them for further killing.

Other odd god is the chaos one, he treats you as a toy, you are his toy, he can make the things extremely nice for you giving powerful weapons, and a turn later, poisoning you when you are 2hp left you to see if you manage you survive.

[IronJelly]

Sure.

Basically, each of the gods (there are currently 14), have rules for worshipping them (ie: you must be an orc to worship the orc god, you can never use magic while being a follower of one of the other gods, ect.), and you gain piety in various ways (some like to see LOTS of bloodshed, others want you to slay undead, or fight honourably, or burn every book you see). Eventually, with enough piety, the gods give you various rewards in the form of either an ability, or an item (the spellcasting god allows you to learn additional spells, the god of war allows you to summon a servant, the necromancer god protects you from some of the side effects of necromantic magic).

On the flip side, the gods also watch you, and if you do something that offends them, such as worshipping another god, or breaking their rules, (with some gods, they only see this if you do it while praying), you suffer penance. Each god has punishments fitting their theme (the god of chaos could accidentally reward you, the spellcasting god lowers your intellect, among other things). You can overcome the penance, but i find most of the time, if my character is not particularly powerful, an offense means death.

I do think it has some nice features, such as being able to pick your god, even if they don't actually suit the character you started. There are restrictions which make sense (ie, if you are a mummy, you can not worship the god who fights undead), and some classes start with a god (ie, a healer starts the game worshipping the healing god), which makes it difficult to change.

The diety system serves a few purposes. I like the flexibility, in that you could choose to use the benefits of your religion to cover your weaknesses, or to enhance your strengths (a necromancer who also follows the necromantic god is quite powerful in the late game, but one who follows the god of violent death has a much better array of abilities at his disposal for the few times that the undead slaves can't cut it).

One god of note is the god of the abyss. This one, really is in place to add an additional method of escape from the abyss, and his altars can (AFAIK) only be found there. While being really powerful, he also is dangerous, but is welcome as far as flavor goes.

I definately think JADE could benefit from an expansive diety system, and because the game does not particularly need to be balanced (unless there is multiplayer i haven't heard about), it is probably ok to allow the gods to be diverse without severely overpowering any specific class.

EDIT: damn, i was too late.

[Grey]

Very interesting... and obviously much more complex than ADOM's race and alignment based pantheon. Would be nice to see something similar in JADE. Perhaps it could have the regular racial gods too, and PCs would be allowed to worship several gods at once (as long as they are similar gods - the gods would have their own relations with each other) but can only become champion of one.

[yisk]

If we have a gods in JADE, therе should be a theory of athomism (for thouse who think that their world begins to exist without help of Thomas)

[kala]

Sure (its need to be adapted)

You start with no god (unless with some classes) After a while, you can get to an altar an chose one, gods are very diferent, praying draws their attention and do not annoys him (note that by praying
the god will not heal or fill you stomach) Some gods enjoy kills, other not, so if you start as a death knight, you can chose to draw your powers from the death god, so killing everything in the most horrible way, will make him happy, as you get close to him, he will grant you with powers, for example, 1 power you get in a death knight is to animate corpses, after more killing and making him happier, he will make you even more powerful, giving you lost of the necromancer's skills, the downside is that if you cant make it happy all the time, he will forget you and retire most of your powers gradually.

Each god as diferent personality, for example, the death god does not like having corpses sacrificed, he prefers that you animate them for further killing.

Other odd god is the chaos one, he treats you as a toy, you are his toy, he can make the things extremely nice for you giving powerful weapons, and a turn later, poisoning you when you are 2hp left you to see if you manage you survive.

sounds quite interresting... might have to try this some time soon.

[electric_wizard]

I've never played soup stone either (sounds good though) but I'm not a huge fan of the way ADOM does gods. I definitely think you should be able to choose who you pray and sacrifice to. If you give your attention to an unsuitable god then there should be consequences, but it should still be up to you.

[adom-admin]

I'm eager to know how many gods there will in the game. One for each ethical alignment (Good, Uncaring, Evil) for every race a bit like in ADOM or one god for each alignment combination? It would be nice if worshipping a given god granted special benefits.

So far I have not given much thought to the religion system in JADE, but alignments actually are different from ADOM. I have adapted the Order...Balance...Chaos and Good...Neutral...Evil scale from another well-known roleplaying game because it IMHO fits extremely well to computer roleplaying games.

This also cleans up the ADOM problem of letting Chaos always appear evil and Order always good... the forces of Chaos from ADOM according to my current line of thinking will be called the forces of Corruption in JADE (basically Chaotic/Evil to make the point clear). This also fits to my Andor Drakon PC from an ancient AD&D campaign who was a C/E priest worshipping a minor demon from the Abysss, later slaying him and final raising himself to Demonlord status to gain eternal life... he was modelled after the bad guy in that movie with Eddie Murphy and this golden child... can't remember the name right now.

Ok, enough rambling... JADE has two scales :-) Whatever that means for religion. But I like the idea of being able to choose the deity your worship. I think I will go for a unified pantheon (with some race-specific deities and some for general concepts and different names for various races) where the effectivity of your pious deeds is proportional to how close you are to the deity (e.g. a C/G elf sacrificing to O/E hobgoblin deity probably won't receive all that much recognition). Or so... we'll see. Please keep posting suggestions - I liked them a lot so far :-)