ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Terrain effects(fonts of life, fell auras, glimmerstones, etc) very rarely do anything, so I was thinking that some diggers could grant you the ability to create these effects. This also provides more thematic egos for diggers.

The way I imagine this working is, a certain ego gives you +1 capacity to a certain terrain effect, and that is how many of that type you can have active at once. Trying to create over your capacity, or lowering your capacity below the amount of you have active, destroys the oldest effects first. You create an effect by using the dig talent on an empty space, and selecting the desired one from a list.

I'd say having it grant a 'create foobar' skill would be neater mechanically then making dig do something else. I'd do it very similar to how wards work - the item grants the creation skill, then a number of maxes to the entities it can create.

It'd be an interesting option, not sure however that any of those ground effects are strong enough that anyone would take the items over anything better though.

If they are granted on-carry, they don't need to be that strong, because the only thing the option costs you is the encumbrance from having the digger in your inventory.

Fell auras, spellblaze scars, antimagic bushes, and fonts of life are definitely good enough to make a real impact. Since more people would be interacting with terrain effects, there would be incentive to tweak ones that turn out not quite useful, and maybe even add more eventually.