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Cyclone male Member

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Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, I got started with writing online on the Spore forums. Man, those were the days. We're talking like 12 years ago 2010-ish!

I've been here on and off for almost as long, and have GM'd a bunch of different things to varying success.

Word of my splendor:


Most Recent Posts

In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
@Antarctic Termite

No Dominions are still stupid. What purpose do they serve? They only increase overlap when multiple gods fall under the same absurdly broad dominion and limit potential directions in which you'd expand upon your character.

Why can't I have a god of both fire and rain?

One vague conceptual god that I had instead of the 'Master of Change' archetype that would become Zephyrion was 'Lord of the Forest that Thirsts'. How would you have a god of dark magic, bloody sacrifices, and weird rituals that also held power over trees and nature? I couldn't contrive anything that made sense. And that there is the crux of it: I always found dominions to be really annoying things to work around. Getting a second dominion is also needlessly hard.

@Double Capybara
If you still want to adopt a bunch of related portfolios as if you had a dominion there would be nothing stopping it, but I've always loathed the limits they imposed.

edit: responded to Capy's ninja and fixed a typo
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
I concur that Gods have too much destructive potential as-is and their restraint is built upon contrivance and player consensus. We can not assume any of these things will be present in Divinus Lite. Even rules-as-written, a God can create a star for 2 MP in Divinus Lite, which would nuke a planet in a heart-beat.

It was suggested, and I agree with this, that Gods are to be far more creative beings than destructive beings. Specify explicitly that Might can only be used to create things, and that it cannot be directly used to destroy things; no nuking things, no dropping moons on people, no conjuring black holes next to planets, etc. This should help curb destructive behaviour and encourage creative solutions to conflicts.

How to handle powerful weapons is another matter though. Weapons are technically created, which means they are valid in a system where Might can only be used to create things, yet they can still be obscenely destructive if you invest enough Might into them. The no-MP-hoarding system helps mitigate the strength of weapons which can be created. We could set a hard limit on the power of divine weapons, such that they can't reach WMD power. We could specify that any uses of WMDs need to allow a response from the other players.

Or, alternatively, we could do away entirely with the concept of investing lots of Might into a single item (as Termite originally proposed). A divine weapon costs a flat 1 MP to build (as a blessed item). You could spend another 1 MP to add a different function to it, or build another divine weapon. But at no point would you be able to build a 25 MP death-ray.

Spending lots of MP on a single item was never in the rules-as-written, but we've house-ruled it in anyway. Divinus Lite should explicitly specify that you can't dump more Might on a single item/action to make it more powerful.


I advocate to place no limits on how MP can be used (at least in terms of destruction vs creation; I actually sort of like discouraging the dumping of tons of MP into singular things, even as I am by far the worst offender of this in Divinus ).

The reasoning is because if we curb the power of gods down to a more reasonable level, where we have things more on par with demigods or the Maiar, this will sort itself out. A very destructive god would either just be a big dragon like Smaug (or some other cliche like a huge monster that wants to eat everything) that could destroy things directly but without being literally unstoppable, or they could sacrifice spending their energy and power on a physical form in order to be more like Sauron in that they corrupt and subjugate other beings to work their will. I'd like the variety between the two archetypes.
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
I completely agree with Termite's idea to start with some (a lot) of groundwork in place. Let there be some world already in existence, but let it be full of monsters and chaos and have no (or minimal) civilization to begin with.

I think so long as there is Might, Domain (Portfolios), Holy Sites, and Heroes, it'll be Divinus at heart. Leaving behind Fate and the Right Hand is the only real departure from formula we've discussed so far.


Yeah even those core things like Domain(Portfolio) are not beyond Cyclone's criticisms. If in the creation of this thinned Divinus all my wants were placated, there would be no resemblance.

I would get rid of domains and make it just portfolios as part of the effort to weaken gods, and I would also remove the arbitrary limits like the one that bars adopting two conflicting portfolios. In mythology there are examples of what we'd call contrasting portfolios; see Ishtar, the goddess of love and war.

In my view there's a few core features, without which I'd not be interested in the spinoff:
-Weaker gods, one par with some of the stronger demigods in this RP. Like, a particularly destructive god might be a huge dragon or something, but not a divine force capable of obliterating planets. The most powerful gods of creation should maybe raise mountains overnight, but not continents.
-A preexisting world
-More emphasis on mortals and worshipers; BBeast's idea about maintaining holy sites strikes a chord with me
-NO AMUL'SHARAR AND FATE, OR A RENAMED CLONE THAT'S THE SAME THING.

Everything else is negotiable.
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
Termite just hit the nail there with the contrivances about Logos and Xos; I brought that up on Discord with Kho, but he's a dummy with all the wrong opinions. You know what?

I'll just repost what I said to him in Discord in case anybody wants my two cents.



And now I'll be bowing out of this conversation because I think Kho was right when he said that I'm not even imagining a Divinus-lite so much as a Dominions RP anymore
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
I think there’s just a lack of creativity if you feel the need to have a figure like Invictus aka Amul’Sharar sitting dormantly for a RP and a half just on the offchance that te Gms need it for plot devices to force the story back on track.

Instead of having some supposedly omnipotent but actually dormant overlord awakening, there could just be some other crisis; ie the invasion of demons or gods from another plane, or the sudden draining of magic and divine power.

You know what? This Divinis has been getting a bit stale for me with using the same characters for so long, so a free Divinus with new characters sounds like just what I need.

Not to steal the idea and run off with it, but I think I’ll go ahead and give this a shot in the near future if nobody beats me to the punch.
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
For a free section those mechanics are still quite cumbersome. Perhaps it’s best to ditch some of the stuff like detecion, concealment, (maybe even levels?), and avatars. Make the gods overall a bit weaker.

Is Fate even necessary? I’ve always thought Fate and Invictus were really gimmicky and needless.
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
<Snipped quote by Cyclone>

Yeah, it was pretty damn complex when I tried playing it, I couldn't make it too far and ended up refunding on steam.


Did you read the 300+ page manual?

It really isn't for everybody, but I wish Steam allowed more than three hours before you could refund, though. Games like that take time to figure out.
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
You guys might dig this one game called Dominions. It's a (pretty insanely) complex, turn-based strategy game where you're a quasi-god with a bunch of mortal worshipers and you try to cast aside all your rivals and ascend to become the head honcho and supreme god.

I've played it and its predecessors for years and it's always reminded me of Divinus. What's more is that it has a lot of lore, most of which is based on mythology. Pretty interesting take on fantasy when the Not-Romans fall and turn into an empire of undead controlled by ghastly necromancer priests, the Not-Irish are enslaved by the one-eyed, twisted Fomorians from Celtic mythos, and Not-Egypt is an ancient empire of lizard people.
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
Ah, I had thought Yorum was on the northwestern coast. They'll be almost entirely clear of any disaster, then.

This stuff is happening within 1-2 years of Ventus' death. When did we decide that was? 5PR?
In Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II → 8 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
@Muttonhawk

You may recall the Termite collab I posted about a month ago where the djinni civil war sparked off, Barak's civilization was wiped off the map, some unnamed region was devastated by djinn fighting, and a gigantic horde of firedjinn were left leaderless and began rampaging across the countryside.

From a PM conversation between BBeast and I:

The horde of fire elementals is somewhere near the Ironhearts. I imagined Barak's civilization (and the cataclysmic battle) to be on the eastern side of the Ironhearts somewhere north of Amestria's ruins and south of Loralom, so barring anything else already being canonized there and in conflict with this, let's say that the rampaging firedjinn are over there.
...
Edit edit: Boreas is also at large; you may recall him as an icy djinni lord that's Scion of the Northern Wind, or as the guy who killed Thermaron. He's down really far south and is fighting with both sides of the civil war. Feel free to do something with him, too; his cruelty is already apparent even from his brief appearance, but I had also been meant to canonize his disdain for mortals through some mention of his interaction with the Treeminds and other mortals in the far north. Unfortunately that never came to pass (or hasn't yet; Kho and I still may still do something with Boreas).


I'm bringing this up now mostly to ask if that's a reasonable spot to say this happened, but also because it might somehow be relevant to your upcoming Loralom superpost (though by no means feel obligated to go back and reference this stuff just to appease me; most of it would have happened outside of Loralom, though they may have observed the movements of all these armies of djinn).
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