Well, I was sitting around mooping about our most recent ‘here you go… oh no, we need to take that back’ gift, and went hey might as well come up with at least some ideas to help de-lube the Druid archetype. Plus, my whining about RP in skills and such, I came up with the idea to build a new skill choice for them… well not build as that would require knowledge of the code which I do not have, but at least organize the concept. Now I am very aware that this may or may not be used, but hey, if I never post it, I know it never will. (Despite similarities, this is not drawn from any real world practices on anything more then the most superficial levels.)



An ancient art, one of devotion to even more ancient practices. It is rumored that this magic taps into the fundamental threads of creation itself, although any practiced mystic knows this is not true. They would also be the first to admit that they do not truly understand the source of their power though.

Mysticism is divided into two fundamental areas, The Ahimsa, and The Jiva. Ahimsa represents the taboo, the things that are not to be spoken of, or to do. Here, a mystic wields the light threads that exist between all souls, but does so in quite a crude way. Jiva represents the exact opposite of its sister the Ahimsa. It is used to preserve the threads, and use them instead of twist them to the mystics use. All mystics know how to use both basically, but they in the end dedicate themselves to one or the other.


Base Skill: Mysticism

Bones: Gather bones from corpses, and use them to wield mysticism.
Bonebag: Use of a bag to store bones in.

Divine: Drop a bone onto the ground, and command it to divine the location of the one you tell it to.

Needle: Create a small needle out of a piece of bone. This needle can be envenomed. (1 bone.) (Needles only last a month.)

Blowgun: Create a small blowgun to deliver a needle to a target. (2 wood, 1 bone)

Craft Image: Craft a crude image of any living being. The image at this point is nothing more then a crude stick model of the subject, with just enough detail to make it obvious that it is a cat, dog, or faeling.

Fuse Image: Fuse a bone into an image, and give it power. You can see through the eyes of any thing resembling the image. However, if using a crude or rough image, you will see through the eyes of a random creature or being resembling the image, with a rough image you will see from the eyes of anything in the area of the original image. (IE, if you have a crude image of Nementh, you will randomly see the room of ANY faeling in the realm, with a rough, it would be any faeling in the area he is in.) A complex or perfect image will let you see through the targets eyes always.

Bind Image: Based on the quality of the image, you may communicate with a player you possess an image of. A crude image will let you listen through your targets ears, but at a constant ego drain. A rough image will allow you to open a channel into your targets mind to talk with him. He will feel your presence in his mind. A complex, or perfect image will let you listen with no ego drain, and will mask your presence when communicating.

Rough Image: Need the hair of a sentient being (obtained with PLUCK HAIR FROM –sentient being-) to make a rough image of a sentient being. No restriction is placed on non-sentient animals. A crude image can be improved to roughly resemble the original subject.

Entangle Image: Use a piece of rope and wrap an image in it to entangle its subject. You must be in the same room with a rough and complex image; a perfect image only needs be in local area.

Expert Envenom: You can envenom a needle in such a way that you can cause a delay in the length of time before its affliction takes effect. (Up to 15 seconds delay.)

Blowgun Box (5 power): (Need to buy a box from a jeweler first, would work somewhat like decks and pocketbelts…) Craft a box to store your blowgun in, and up to 15 needles. These needles will not decay as long as they are in the box, and the blowgun decays at half the speed.

Call Image (2 power): Using a rough image, you can attempt to call the subject to your location. They can only be summoned to your location if they are in the same local area, and you have them allied. You must first ‘bind image’ before you can call. 15 second delay, movement does not stop, but monolith and shield prevents. (If you move to a monolithed room, it is stopped. A perfect or complex image may call anyone on the same continent. Destroys image.

Empower Bone: Give one of your bones a powerful magic charge.

Weigh Image: Tie a rock to the leg of a rough image. It will make the subject immune from summon, but the target can only move slowly. The mystic must be in same room as subject. This may be writhed out of.

Master: Become a specialist of Jiva or Ahimsa.



Ahimsa

Perfect Image: Only a mystic of Ahimsa will ever create a perfect image, as it will begin to leach onto the soul of the subject. It takes seven plucked hairs to create a perfect image, on top of the one used for the rough image.

Poke Image: Stab an image with a needle. If stabbing a limb, it will cause that limb to be knocked off balance, if the head, it will cause either blindness or deafness, if in the chest, it will cause bleeding, and if the needle has a poison on it, it will deliver the poison as if it were delivered with a normal weapon.

Enfeeble: Rub an empowered bone on the target, causing one random physical stance to be decreased with each rub. 25% chance for dexterity, constitution, and strength and 25% chance to have no effect. If the mystic uses any other mystic skills but enfeeble, the bone is destroyed, and the enfeeblement ends, knocking the target off balance for 5 seconds.

Merge: Place an empowered bone to your forehead, and merge with the Ahimsa. Gain deathsight, and 10% resistance to cold.

Strike: Throw an empower bone at a target, and cause cold damage to a target. If the target has drunk a fire potion, it will be stripped, and if no fire potion has been drunk, it will freeze the target.

Mystic Flotation (8 power): The Mystic can hover between the physical world and the ghostly one, causing him to fade in and out of normal perception. The mystic has a little control over those fading, and every time he makes an aggressive action, he will fade into the ‘prime’ phase. Once he regains balance or equilibrium, he will fade back. This does not make him immune to damage when he is faded out, but reduces health lose by 10%. In this form, he has no exit or enter text, but he can not transverse, or interact with doors and the such. He can also be hit with any ability to hit one out of phase regardless of his current phase. When he is faded in, he takes 5% more damage then he normally would.

Strengthen Poison: Drop an empowered bone into a poison. If used with a needle, this poison has a 50% chance of being masked when given to the target. It also has a 100% of being delivered, although resistances are treated as normal.

Cursed Visage: Attach an empowered bone to the head of a perfect image, as long as the subject is in the local area, he will be afflicted with hallucinations, stupidity, dementia, or narcolepsy, every 15 seconds for one minute.

Crush Limb: The mystic crushes a limb on the perfect image causing the corresponding limb to break. Subject must be in local area.

Ignite Image (5 power): Set the image on fire. Until the image is extinguished, or burns out (five minutes, or target dies.) that subject will catch on fire every thirty seconds. To extinguish the fire, STOMP image#. Local area.

Travel (4 power): Travel to the location of one of your perfect images.

Fling Image (2 power): Fasten an empowered bone to the chest of an image, and fling it into the air. This will cause the subject to fly into the air. If there is a ceiling in the room he is in, this will hurt lots, otherwise he would fall back to the ground. (Levitate would nullify this.) Local area.

View Image: View the defenses a target has up. May be used from anywhere in the world.

Strip Image (1 power*): Remove one defense from the subject of the image. If in the same room, there is no power cost. Local area.

Silent Dart: Secretly fire a dart from another room. No message will be given to indicate the direction it came from, but the target will feel a prick.

Fast Blowgun: Regain balance from firing a blowgun faster.

Bone Charm (2 power to fashion): Fashion a bone charm out of empowered bones. Once given to a target, it will latch onto the them, and any affliction the target delivers, be it through poison or skills, the target will also receive. For each affliction delivered this way, it drains 100 willpower from the mystic, and lasts for 40 seconds once latched on to the target.

Double Envenom: Coat a dart in two poisons that are both delivered when the dart hits.

Venom: Toss an empowered bone at the target, and reduce the poison resistance of the target by 10%.

Darkness (10 power): Jab the empowered bone used during enfeeblement into the neck of the enfeebled target. If any stat had been reduced past half due to enfeeble, this will cause the target to die. Otherwise, it returns all stats to normal, and causes a lot of damage, and blackout for 4 seconds.

Crush Image (6 power): Throw the image into the subject, then stomp on it. This will knock the subject prone, and cause massive internal bleeding, and chance to break most of the limbs of the target.

World Image (10 power): For one day, all image abilities can be used from anywhere in the world on the same plane and continent. This can only be used on one image at a time. The one day is measured by the time the target is in the realms. The target is notified that this power is being used.





Jiva Speciality to come after I finish this essay for free money!!!

I really like the idea, but the Skill name has to change because of the Lesson Pool Mystacism.

Isn't this somewhat like Vodun?

This sounds like a close replica to a certain skillset in another IRE game, which I always thought was completely overpowered, essentially once someone has made an image of you they can kill you at any time from a safe location with no help and no way for you to stop it. The only plane-wide things we have at the moment are rage and terror.. and they are severely limited time-wise, and easily countered by an inept skill.

Make shielding stop -all- of these attacks and it work on astrological signs, only working worldwide for a power cost when the sun is aligned with the person's birth sign, and then the skill would be less overpowered. With how the skill is set up, then it would be almost worthless though.

Superfically.. I did draw from real world voodoo on a very small level though, and vodun did the same... so there are simularities.

Also, I was assuming circle or pentagram would stop all of these but the stripping effect. And I was thinking about making it so the World Image is useable only once per month.

I don't mean it to be the strength of vodun in Imperian... as you noticed the only instant kill in the skill set requires you to be in the same room.

Overpowered in its current form. Bone Charm especially basically turns off your offense as long as it lasts, because Guardians and Wiccans especially would easily kill themselves if they attacked.

Why do you need a third skill again? You can already pick from Runes, Dreamweaving, and Ecology. Druids should have their current skills fixed, not get a new skillset altogether.

This is in part from fun, and a desire to have an ingame mechanic for a style of RP I would really love to play...

And besides, it would be nice to have another skillchoice :-p

Well, there are some nice skill ideas here.

But isn't most of the RP for this already in Ecology? I'd really like a 'spiritual' alternative for Druids to counter the physical, 'shamanistic' aspect of bone dolls, fragrant incense, poison delivery and animal herding that is already in Ecology. At the moment, Dreamweaving is the best we have.

I think this is better suggested as a revision to Ecology, rather than a separate skill.

Actually... this comes more out of the spiritual divisions between the 'light' and 'dark' of the mind. In Hindu, Jiva is the soul, and spirit, and Ahsima is the souless. I didn't go much into that element here, as I was looking at the skills more, but this is meant to be less related to the earth, which ecology is strongly related to.

I also, outside of the use of bones... see no relation to ecology... well poison use... but this is a lot more verstile in poison use.

I find Ecology is better than dreamweaving mainly because of its flexibility. Plus, I find fetish affliction faster and more effective than dreamweaving other than blackout. Charybdon doubleberserk overload is one of my favorite ecology kill preparations.

Back on topic, I find the skill similar to the process fetishes are created in Ecology, though more personal than fetishes because you can customize the images (or dolls). Since we already have three 3rd guild skill choices, I think the only way we could make this work is to integrate it with our current skillchoices. Perhaps, some of these skills can be used for fetishes in eclogy as well, or the doll can be a new equipment in Runes so you can fuse runes in your doll. The target whom the doll is fashioned from will be afflicted with that kind of rune. Motes can be done the same way for Dreamweaving. Just a thought...

The way you've set this out will mean that Ahimsa "mystics" will always be more powerful tgan the Jiva ones, because only Ahimsans can make "perfect" images, which are required to use the base skills in the most effective way possible.

And it seems basically to be voodoo with poison darts.

He was saying that dreamweaving is the best spiritual secondary skill that druids have, not that it's the best combat-wise.

Quite frankly, I think that there's some basic disagreement on the matter of what a Druid is.

There are two basic and different concepts, I feel:

1- Druid, a preserver of balance and the guardian of the forests- capable of summoning the power of nature to its own offense and defense thus serving as its force of arms and keeper.- the one which is currently being used, I feel.

2- Druid- a preserver of nature by the use of vodun and witch doctor's magic.


I find the two to be different and if anything, I think that the wicca archtype is much more in-tune with the latter as they call upon spirits to harm their foes in covens and work with spirits (fae) to help them.

I think that the druid archtype is already fashioned and should be left alone, a single archtype should not encompass everything that comes to mind.

Don't get me wrong, I admire the effort, the originality and time it took. But I think that adding -another- skill and aspect (for all skills tell of archtype aspects) to druids is unneccessery and even hinders the current definition of them - or basicly, melding the first and second definitions I presented earlier together.

The reason I choose not to use the word dolls, is because that connects it to voodoo. (Vodun is an IRE term :-p) I have always viewed as a shamanstic archetype, but outside of some of ecology, that has never really come through for me. So I looked at the many real world shamans, and then some of the common depicitions of them, and came up with the blend above.

Many cultures use 'images' of people in their belief as magic. Egyptians made dolls of people they hated, and burned them. So did Romans, Native Americans, Polynesians, Mayan's, etc... Voodoo is just the last real surviving example of this tradition.

And on the questiom of Jiva being weaker then Ahmisa, when it comes to directly harming its target, yes it will be a little weaker. They actually get Complex images, and their abilities go in a different direction. Here is an example, this is the transcendant skill, and the complex image skill:

Complex Image: You may fashion a complex image from any rough image you have. These are marked with ornate patterns, and abstract designs made to make it vaguly resemble the subject. Unlike perfect images, a complex image may be made of an inanimate object, as it does not require a soul to tap into. It takes considerable time to make a complex image, and you must be in the same room with the subject.

Animate Complex Image (10 Power): The complex image warps and grows into a 'copy' of its subject. If the subject is transcendant in the healing set (This will cause a drain on the mystics mana and ego for each affliction cured in this way.), it will try and heal your afflictions, otherwise it will attack your enemies. If it is of a sentient being it will only kick and punch unless you give it a weapon. It will not use its subjects skills in anyway. Furthermore, if you have an image animated of player, if the player dies, he will transmigrate to your image, destorying the image. If the image is of a weapon, then the weapon will attack on a base 4 second balence, plus delay from weapon speed. If of a blowgun, you can give up to 10 darts to it at a time, and it will fire them. An animated image lasts 1 day.

Also, side note... only one base skill is more effective with a perfect image over a complex image.

Transmigrate someone else, for far less power than it takes to Transmigrate normally? Hell no.

So you came up with a new skillset because something was overpowered and got reworked? One whole skill?

It's not like it's not ever going to be looked at again, if it was too much of a nerf it's always possible to add a little something back to it-- I know Athana is envoying new touches to the thing in order to make it, y'know, balanced.

I have to agree with Narses' assessment. I see Wiccans as being the more spiritual forestal archetype, while Druids are focused more on the "physical". The health of the forest, the soul of the forest, but not the spirits of the forest which also empower that soul (ie, the fae). The "soul" is essentially the Ethereal imprint, which the Druid calls upon in order to defend said forest, and which their Great Spirit is tied to.

Hahaha no.

The last thing druids need is another skillset.

maybe if we get a few more we could reach a zen like state where everything falls into place? Though I have to say I like the idea in the skillsets thread better...