ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Let's face it: molds, especially, and oozes as well, could use some spice.
So I cooked up two racial talent trees for them.
Please, taste and share your thoughts.


Racial:Molds
1) Running Mold: teleports the mold 1-5 spaces away, randomly. Cooldown decreases with skill level, to about 2-3 turns at level 5.
2) Hairy Mold: depending on it's type, there is a chance to inflict a status effect upon doing damage. Chance increases with skill level. (Something like physical:bleed, light:confuse, darkness:blind, nature:poison, lightning:daze, fire:burn, ice:freeze, earth:stun, water:knockback, blight:disease, arcane:silence, temporal:put some talents/infusions/runes on cooldown). duration/strenght of effect scales with skill level and mold's primary stat
3) Slimey Mold: a ring of slime (radius 1 at level 1, 2 at level 3, and 3 at level 5) forms around the mold, slowing everything in it's radius down. Slowing effect scales with skill level and mold's primary stat. Perhaps make it only affect the player
4) Hard Mold: Increases the hitpoints of the mold by 100% (at level1) - 500% (at level 5)


Racial:Oozes
1) Split: same as what they do now. Perhaps skill level increases chance to split into 3 instead of 2 oozes
2) Blindsight: grants extra infravision to the ooze. Scales with skill level and oozes' primary stat. At level 5, a decent-leveled ooze should be able to spot the average player (and thus start breeding) from further away than the player can spot the ooze. Fun times
3) Acidic Ooze: ooze's attacks gain armor penetration. Scales with skill level and oozes' primary stat
4) Trickley Ooze: increases damage penetration for the oozes' damage type. Scales with skill level and oozes' primary stat

Some inspiration for the oozes' skill names came from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooze_%28Du ... Dragons%29

Need some oozes that spawn in groups and recombine under duress, making giant oozes!

Oozes that change color when hit by magic and gain resistances/appropriate damage type. (antimagic oozes!)

Molds/oozes that can infiltrate an enemy (or an ally!) and control them until they pass a physical/mental resist check.

Molds that split damage taken between themselves and any oozes they are adjacent too - essentially, multi-tile molds.

Oozes that explode into slime/acid when hit, instead of/in addition to splitting.

Molds with probability travel.

Transparent oozes that have innate invisibility.

Opaque gelatinous cubes that block sight.

Some other ideas:

Molds:
Spore Cloud: A 'counter' effect. After all, it's a giant cloud of mold. When you smack it, it'll probably send out a cloud of spores that'll do who knows what. (Maybe replacing 'Hairy'?)
Spore Spawning - Inflicts a disease upon death; when it runs out, the mold has a chance of regrowing itself from the spores collected on the body of whoever killed it. Chance scales with level. (Effectively, chance of respawning another mold X turns later next to the player.)

Ooze:
Upgrade 'Acidic Ooze' to 'Digestive Ooze'... Not only does it have damage penetration, but it can also heal itself by hitting you!
Familial Ties: This probably isn't going to be easy to code, but... receives bonuses that scale depending on how many direct generations of slimes are still alive in the longest chain. Alternatively: receives bonuses depending on how many of a similar type are within X range of it.

martinuzz wrote:1) Running Mold: teleports the mold 1-5 spaces away, randomly. Cooldown decreases with skill level, to about 2-3 turns at level 5.

My objection to this is that it makes them too similar to crystals.

(On the other hand, would having this implemented mean we're eventually going to get Deathmolds as a playable race? )

Something a little complicated for the running mold idea...

Basically, this. The talent summons another mold in the direction of the player, at the cost of some amount of Hp. If there's another mold of the same type near the summoning mold, the talent consumes that mold instead of the summoner's HP. The talent would have a fairly short CD (probably 2-3 turns) and would be set to be used whenever the mold doesn't have something else to do. Higher level tlvls might throw out a longer string of molds toward the player, or reduce the health cost.

Basically, as soon as the mold saw you, it would begin to 'run' at you via chain summoning. The 'tendril' moving toward you would be slightly weaker than the main body.

The idea of making molds move like that feels weird to me since I view them as slow-growing mindless immobile masses [with a few of the more potently magical exceptions]. Personally, I'd rather see them bolstered either by distinctly magical ways [like the phasing] or with passive effects. Now, if we're dealing with intelligent molds, then things are different.

Aquillion wrote:(On the other hand, would having this implemented mean we're eventually going to get Deathmolds as a playable race?)

Unrelated to the main topic, but I actually made a custom race/class back in b19 where its primary form of locomotion was an uncontrolled phase door every turn, not walking. It was actually really interesting and I want to revisit that. (You could still walk, but to say you moved slowly would be an understatement.)