I've heard lots of complaining about Druids and having no real strengths outside of demesnes, so I think some people should start tossing some ideas. Let's start with something I've been pondering on.

One of the big things i know about druids (or at least Hartstone) is the connections with the ancestors. Let's give them a skillset that deals with them, heavily. Spiritism.

You start with honoring your ancestor Druids and their work with the healing of the Basin. By connecting yourself with them you can gain several defenses and other interesting things. This goes on and on with prayers and prayer beads or things of the like. You start your career in spiritism knowing how to protect your body, then you learn more about warding charms to ward off malign spirits of angry druids bent on destroying your guildmates, but then, as you learn more, you learn the offensive. Calling down the spirits of the ancient druids to fight with you.

How you do that? You start with focusing on your target with a special ritual. Visualizing your victim in a special item (say a doll or a special charm) you can start putting a certain quantity of curses and afflictions on your victim. This requires a long extensive ritual.

The ritual itself does nothing to the victim, at first. You just "bind" certain curses on your victim. This process is lengthy and allows you to bind many curses on your victim through your doll or special charm. Now what? Well, now you are equipped yourself with your means of fighting. You are prepared to bring the dark curses on your victim.

This is the difficult part. You now start releasing those curses on your victim.

For this, you need to be in the precense of your foe. You start releasing those curses which give some afflictions that stay with them. After releasing them, your ancestors plague in their minds and spirits and deal afflictions similar to your demesne. Say, your ancestor does this every 10 seconds for a minute. This gives you the ability to prepare the affliction fest on them.

The amount of total afflictions you can have on your victim at any time should be minimal. I say four. That means you have four afflictions that can occur say three times at the same time if you keep stacking those curses every ten seconds (if I did my calculations right, that means afflictions at 40, 50 and at 60 seconds, which will descend to three on the 70th second and so forth). However, you have prepared many more than four curses on your doll. Say, I put 8 different curses (about all of the curses in the whole skillset) on the doll twice (16 curses total), so I can have some room for thinking on my feet and improvisation as needed.

The afflictions should not be ground breaking and the spirits themselves should be curable (destroying the ancestor plaguing you completely, causing the druid some grief and the need to release another curse on you). This is what your target wants, because not doing it opens up to the crowning skill. If you manage to chant a special curse on your foe, you can induce great pain for every ancestor that is plaguing you. So on second 50, 60 and so forth, instead of releasing more curses, you chant this special curse that will deal heavy damage on your opponent, who by this point should not last the minute. How does 2000 damage per ancestor sounds like?

The number of afflictions, durations and so forth are just examples. Those could be change accordingly. Mind you, this needs more developing as my goal was to create a skill that was on par to Psionics that could give the Druids to fight outside of their demesnes and also some minor bonuses and other fun stuff to the Druids.

I had a random thought about using the chakra to afflict.

Orange - overpower it and they get gluttony weaken it to give anorexia.

No idea of other afflictions but it would only have seven max.

/random idea from holiday

Easy.

Violet - some kind of spiritual affliction
Indigo - Dizzyness, blindness, transfix
Blue - Asthma, breakjaw or something like thath
Green - Palpitations or some heart sickness
Yellow - Wind and balance loss
Orange - Hunger or something like that
Red - Venereal disease or colon cancer

Blacktalon don't really bother with ancestors and what not. They focus on the here and the now. I think it'd be cool to see your idea given to Hartstone (no thanks to the 2k an ancestor though) and BT could get some kind of voodoo with dolls. Would be awesome. The problem though is making a skillset that is useful outside of a demsne and can support itself (like telepathy and tk) but not powerful enough to really help in demesne combat. Sap plus a really strong tertiary like telepathy would be devastating and OP.

I'd only say two per, one if you pump energy into the chakra and the other if you weaken it (sending them out of balance)

As to ancestors, guild specific skills might work. I'm sure the dark druid spirits would help the blacktalon... maybe

blacktalon could totally force the dark druids into obeying them... Crow is always a trickster, isn't he?

OR
they could not and just use false memory to pretent that they have the skills?

I like this idea, a lot.

What about if for the Blacktalon, you had to use corpses of various creatures, and use actual items to create before you used the skills. Say a doll requires crow feathers, but a trans doll needs deer antlers from the Seren (or whatever... you get it). Thus you could build your way to power. I always liked the prep skillsets, like runes. I know a lot of people wouldn't like it, but it would help getting the voodoo image to stick a little better if we needed items from around the Glom. I think the voodoo imagery would work fantastically with the Blacktalon actually.

What if there was a nifty skill, let us say for argument's sake, a buff. This buff required something that would be quite daunting for the Blacktalon in question. Sadly the only thing that comes to mind is a Glom sapling. Thusly, our poor BT is forced into bringing pain to their one true existance, the Glom itself, in order to empower themselves for her defense- which is a corollary to the BT -cut yourself and bleed- anthems and jokes that we get so much of.


EDIT: Defense? Is it spelled with an S or a C?

Defence. If the Americans contradict me, don't listen to them.

Yea I swore it had a c too but my auto spell check changes it to s.

On Topic:

Is there any chance the druids could get a movement skill in this new skillset? It doesn't have to be amazing like catacombs or the waypoint skill the bards have, but anything better than via would be nice. Maybe I haven't unlocked my BT movement skill yet, but I do not yet see one on my list...

What if it required the nest, thus showing our loyalty to Brother Crow, then we could get an egg from it and break it somewhere, smearing the bloody, angst filled contents about the ground, allowing is to travel there for X amount of time or until another egg is broken in a new spot? I'm looking at you oh dear missed Hermit card.

Though a movement skill would be nice, I don't see it as being necessary to druids. Not to the Blacktalon, anyway. I've never seen druids as the archetype that need to be able to move around quickly, unless its within the forest. Besides, we already to have few (forestal) 'movement' tricks to play with anyway, such as spores, and even returning to your demesne, which is quite nifty for returning back to an area if you need to go pick up a few supplies while bashing. Not to mention Blacktalon have crowsnest return, which is far faster than teleport and thus far more useful in certain circumstances. I never use teleport, in fact. So long as my nest hasn't decayed that is.

On topic, as Celina said, Blacktalon don't really give a damn about their ancestors, mostly because the Blacktalon as a people have only existed IG for just under a century. That and Glomdoring is all about adaptation and growth, anyway. I would -love- to see something voodoo-like though, that would be amazing. I can't see it happening however. After all, if we have something special to the Glomdoring, why would anyone want to go runes, dreamweaving or ecology? I'd rather beef up what we have than bring in something new.

I would love to make some runes changes or give it a spec, but, if I recall clearly and I believe I do; Estarra (or someone in power) has vetoed or "no'd" every change to runes in the past, arguing that is doubles as a sort of trade skill, or some such.

I'm not really a fan of fetishes so I wouldn't like another skillset that required we run around collecting corpses.

That said I would like a contract style skill, where you could go out (once) and contract with ancestors/glomversion by summoning them?

So maybe to gain access to some high end skill, a glom might need to take the essence from a grown tree or a seren may need to beseech the trees to give them their strength.

We don't have our own ancestors... but we do have those angry Dark Spirits who like to plague the living. Especially Serens. I don't imagine it would be too hard to make something working with them (trans skill: SerenBurn. 10p, works anywhere in the Basin, sets Serenwilde on fire and looses a horde of angry spirits to run around their forest.)

They really would tack the random powercost on even though it doesn't matter, too.

Defense defense defense defense.

Defence. And Defense.

Colour. Color.

A voodoo tertiary would be interesting.

Make the doll with cloth, get a limb (ears would be best) and put it in the doll. Use a needle to stab the doll, and you need to be within range of your enemy (same area, for example) to be able to use it.

The basic skill would allow you to stab anywhere to cause wounds. The higher up you go, the more you could do, like punctured arteries, or applying poison to the needle to cause various afflictions or something.

I donno. Just a thought.

It also could be a skill in Tailoring.

So far, I like Mrykr's interpretation the best.

I think if a voodoo skill were to be introduced (hopefully it wouldn't be a carbon clone of the other IRE's), from a BT standpoint, you would need an opponent's eye. Yes, it would take a bit for the skill to become useful till you get EyePeck in Crow, but still. I think it would be a valid solution.

I also like the idea of contracting the Dark Spirits.