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[Xedra Evolved] Add Bloodthorne druids

Open Standing-Storm opened this issue 7 months ago • 1 comments

Summary

Mods "[Xedra Evolved] Add Bloodthorne druids"

Purpose of change

Add vampire-fighting druids who use stolen power from the Fair Folk to defend humanity.

Original idea by Maleclypse, implementation by me.

Describe the solution

Add the Bloodthorne Druids, with starting scenario and profession to go with it. Bloodthorne Druids use power stolen from the Arvore, and also have a small set of their own spells designed specifically for fighting vampires. Killing vampires (and Arvore for their power) gives them access to these spells.

  • [ ] Add Bloodthorne-specific spells
  • [ ] Add way to get those spells

Describe alternatives you've considered

Testing

WIP

Additional context

A random encounter where you find a few bloodthorne druids assaulting the vampire hunting lodge would be neat.

Standing-Storm avatar May 15 '25 15:05 Standing-Storm

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

Click to expand
  • Thornwitchery
  • Thornwitchery draws its power from the wild places, and while there you grow stronger. Your mana recovery is increased when in the wilderness away from civilization.
  • Woodblood Restoration

This alert is automatically generated. You can simply disregard if this is inaccurate, or (optionally) you can also add the new words to tools/spell_checker/dictionary.txt so they will not trigger an alert next time.

Hints for adding a new word to the dictionary
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github-actions[bot] avatar Jul 07 '25 19:07 github-actions[bot]

The kill detection should also check for the vampire traits too so it's futureproof. Killable vampire NPCs will eventually get added and AFAIK NPC vampires aren't counted as the vampire species.

I also plan to use the Anathema a final fight that would conclude a hunter quest chain (when hunters and hunter quests will be added), so it too could be futureproofed. It has an unique species so it can attack vampires.

By the way, the vampirism removal EOC doesn't handle nor prevent passing the vampiric point of no return. Something should happen if the player tries to be both bloodthorne and post-return vampire, as the heartvine is literally made to kill vampires.

The heartvine lashing out from the inside, it growing from all the new vampire blood the player has, it withering from the now-undead body that cannot sustain it anymore, etc. Anything but letting the player fully stack supernatural branches.

SariusSkelrets avatar Jul 08 '25 02:07 SariusSkelrets

I have another PR queued up after this so I can roll those changes into it (since most of it is for future proofing)

I admit I didn't think of players who would deliberately try to be Druidic antivampire vampires, but a solution presents itself--the heartvine feeds on vampire blood. If you try to avoid the wilderness to keep both thornwitchery and blood arts, the vine starts drinking your blood, and faster with every further blood art you learn, so that before you reach the point of no return, it exsanguinates you.

Edit: Mentors should probably run or go hostile if a bloodthorne Druid tries to talk to them. They'd have no reason to trust that this specific member of an order dedicated entirely to killing vampires isn't there to kill vampires.

Standing-Storm avatar Jul 08 '25 04:07 Standing-Storm

The mentors already check for the Anathema player, so it'll be simple to add the bloodthorne to that.

The mentors' lore is that they are excessively cautious due to their preference for playing the incredibly long game. They flee at the first sign of danger and won't show themselves in unsafe situations.

Why risk everything, when you can play it safe, take your time and turn that "if" into a "when"?

SariusSkelrets avatar Jul 08 '25 21:07 SariusSkelrets

Perfect, that solves the becoming a vampire permanently problem.

I wrote a system into the follow up where if the Druid is infected, the vine starts drinking their blood. First pretty slowly, buy increasing in intensity with every vampire power they gain, so if they wait too long, it will be too late—the heartvine will keep drinking blood faster than they regain it (even with magick)

I do plan to give them immunity but using that blood alchemy we talked about, not innately.

Standing-Storm avatar Jul 09 '25 04:07 Standing-Storm

I feel like I am tryign to review a PR for a different game.

It all looks like JSON! It doesn't seem to break the game. LGTM!

I-am-Erk avatar Jul 09 '25 05:07 I-am-Erk