User talk:Tomsod/YANIs and patches/Infidel

Now that the Infidel role is becoming more widely adopted, should this be moved to a regular article instead of a subpage? --Aximili (talk) 10:30, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

It probably should! I'll need to incorporate EvilHack-specific info into the article for it to be useful, though. Tomsod (talk) 12:30, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

To save yourself some work, perhaps keep your infidel article true to the work you've done with your patch, and then mention which variants have incorporated it, and then point a link to that variant's page with whatever changes they've made to the role to fit their variant. Right now it's just EvilHack, but I'm confident it'll be added to SpliceHack as well, and I imagine the infidel role will be changed in different ways for it also. K2 (talk) 12:56, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Legacy text

Had an idea about the legacy text for Infidels (the bit at the beginning with Marduk and all); K2 said to run it by you, so here I am.

The current text describes that Moloch stole the Amulet, hid it in Gehennom for a long time, but then some hero managed to come in and steal it then their ascension run back out, but just as they were getting out of the dungeon, the Cult of Moloch ambushed and killed them. Then they sent you off to return the Amulet to Moloch. But this raises a lot of flavor questions. Where exactly did the ambush happen? It seems to have been outside the dungeon, but the ascending hero never actually comes out of the dungeon, instead going directly to the Planes. How were the cultists able to overpower the hero, who has at this point fought through crowds of demons and Moloch priests alike, with a full ascension kit? Maybe they were super-elite, powerful cultists who can take on anything and win? But if they were, why do they send YOU, a puny level 1 Apostate, down into the dungeon to return the Amulet with no backup at all? Moloch really, really wants the Amulet; it seems like he should throw all his resources at this to get it back. So it doesn't really make sense that the cultists who intercepted the ascension-ready hero aren't helping out at all.

Also, the setup in general (moloch steals the amulet! then someone steals it from moloch! then moloch steals it back!) evokes a giant cosmic capture-the-flag game, which doesn't seem tonally right.

Why not simplify things a bit by flavoring this as the very first time Moloch is getting his hands on the Amulet? The theft from Marduk didn't happen ages ago - it's currently in progress. The player is the lucky one escorting it to Gehennom for him. This solves the flavor problems I described above (there's no longer a need for any super-powerful Moloch agents in the story, and Moloch's power base isn't as strong, which could help explain why he's not generally as helpful as other gods) and also opens up some interesting opportunities for making the dungeon or Gehennom generate as "newer", if desired. (I can think of other interesting ways to take this, as well - the infidel receives the invocation items in the Sanctum after dropping off the Amulet and has to do a "reverse invocation" in order to seal the Sanctum behind them, then distributes the invocation items around, for instance.) --Phol ende wodan (talk) 00:54, 23 August 2020 (UTC)