magic - antimagic factions antagonism

[Freddybear]

I like that idea a lot. It kind of goes along with a brainstorm that I had. What about making that "second level" of antimagic a new character class which is dedicated to the Zigur philosophy? They get the "first level" antimagic skill tree by default at "birth" plus some flavor of melee and/or archer trees and have other talent categories which would give higher level mage-blasting and mage-suppressing abilities(ToME2 "antimagic field"). They can use Angolwen to complete the "Storming the City" quest and cooperate with the Sun Paladins in the Gates of Morning, including the use of the Orbs of Scrying and Many Ways (do the others have any uses?), but they can't use runes or wands (but they get some teleport-by-another-name skill to make up for that).

And they can do the escort quests but they can't make use of the magical reward choices from them. If the player wants to role-play the fanatical bigot type of Zigur that's up to them, they can refuse to help magical types if they so choose.

[Canderel]

In the current game setting, I would say giving each character the option of using magic, and not using magic seems to make a *lot* of sense.

With that in mind, you need to boost the antimagic part of the game, you need to seriously penalise people who switch. Also remove the meta-related part of the game.

I like the idea of non-magic characters starting with the 1st tier antimagic unlocked (or unlock it with the initial entry into the anti-magic guild), then make the 1st requirement of the zigurathians that you spend X points in that tree. So remove the 10 level meta gaming out of the game. At the start of the game, both are available to you, once you've made a choice all opposing skills, infusions and abilities become obsolete.

So as magic has runes, anti-magic should have inscriptions/tatoos. Activated anti-magic shields, silence, spell saves, debuffing, disrupt opponent runes and skill cooldowns etc.

[Sirrocco]

There's actually an interesting point peripheral to this. Runes are true magic. Why are they being sold openly in Derth? Infusions are going to be pretty common - wilders seem largely accepted. Beyond that, though, it might make sense if every inscription type was available only from its particular corner of the woods. Psionic inscriptions would be available from psychic monsters and from the Wayist city in the yeek homeland. Divine inscriptions can be found in Last Hope (both sun and moon), and so forth.