ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Adds the Vor'tep as a new Giant sub-race, a breed of of altered trolls. Get it on te4.org or the Steam Workshop.


Vor'tep have a life rating of 13 and an experience penalty of 30% and start with +3 STR, +3WIL, +3CON, +3MAG, -2DEX, and -2CUN.
Vor'tep posses the strength and will to wield any one-handed weapon in their offhand innately.

Vor'tep have the following racial talents:

Trollkin Fortitude
For 5 turns, each magical, physical, or mental detrimental effect applied to you by an enemy will have the duration preemptively reduced by X turns or 50% (rounded up), whichever is greater. If this reduces the duration to 0 or less the effect is completely negated. The power of the effect improves with Constitution.

Trollblood
Passively increases life regen by X and healing modifier by Y%.
Scales only on talent level.

Blood Rush
Sustaining this talent will cause talents to cooldown by one turn at the begining of each turn. This will occur regardless of stuns or other effects that would normally reduce or prevent cooldowns. This will not effect talents with a fixed cooldown.
CAUTION:
This will cause you to take X% of your maximum life as irresistible damage on the first turn, increasing each subsequent turn. Each turn the damage dealt will be 15% greater than the turn before. If your life is below 20% of your maximum at the start of a turn, the sustain will automatically deactivate.
The damage of the effect is reduced by Willpower.

Internal Inscription
You are able to internalize a rune or infusion of your choice. Once chosen, the inscription will be triggered instantly when you are below 15% of your maximum life. This has a cooldown.
Cooldown decreases significantly with talent level.

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Birth lore explains the name and theme, as well as why they are considered part of the allied kingdoms faction. They begin (surprise!) in the Trollmire.

Questions, comments, and bug reports are welcome as always.

Enjoy!

v1.0.1 and v1.0.2 ... and v1.03
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[General]
Fixed a typo in birth description which stated -1 Dex instead of -2.
Tidied up the birth description and intro text a little bit.

[Trollkin Fortitude]
Properly ignores beneficial effects and effects from yourself.
... for real.

This is a very very good race. Maybe too good in fact. Perhaps it may be best to consider balance? It's got a few steps in the right direction, Blood Rush is perfect for example, but I feel like it's not quite there yet.

For example, basically having a contingency inscription/rune for whenever you want with one single point in the talent. The cooldown is a good first step to reigning this in, but think about things like Heroisms (though granted the next version of ToME will reign that in by itself) here for example. I kinda feel like the tiers you can use with this talent should open up as you put points in the talent too. One gives you emergency regen, healing, and Out of Phase while one or two more give you Shielding, Movement, Lightning, etc.

Thanks for the feedback.

I agree they have strong racials and their high life rating and innate ability to off-wield, to a lesser extent, make them quite good. I'm not a fan of high experience penalties, but it felt justified to offset their inherent strengths, in this case.

The talents probably could use a little more balancing, though. It's interesting you mentioned a tier cap based on talent level for Internal Inscription because that was part of the original design. For some reason the check was not working and I got tired of messing with it and decided to just remove it for the time being. I'll keep that in mind for when I have time to tinker with the race some more.


I also want to switch up the activation method but I'm still playing around with ideas for that. I'd like it so you could choose when to activate it, but still have activation rely in some way on Bad Stuffs happening first. The new flags for 'in combat' give me an idea to make it activatable after taking a cumulative, large percentage of your total life since the start of combat. A more simple approach might be to just make it activatable only while your life is below a scaling percent of max life, maybe 15-30% or 20-40%, somewhere around there. If I went that route, I may also add a talent level 3 or 5 bonus that would trigger it automatically if it's not on cooldown and your life drops to 0, or below a very low percent, like 3-5%.

It will be a little while before I have time to play around with it, but I'm always open to more feedback in the meantime

Got around to tinkering with this a little bit. Removed the extra starting inscription and revised their starting stats a bit. Internal Inscription has been changed to activate automatically when your life is below 15%, and the cooldown scaling has been reduced (longer cooldowns at all levels). Decided against giving more control over when the inscription activates. Might play with it more in the future.