Completely rewritten Blood Cult from the ground up with as little carry over as possible.

# Completely rewritten Blood Cult from the ground up with as little carry over as possible. What I want to keep: > * Blood cult is a team antagonist. > * Blood cult's goal should be to summon Nar'sie. > * Blood cult is a stealth antagonist first and foremost. > * They act in stealth until either a MECHANICAL or PLAYER AGREED point, in which case they will go loud. > * Blood cult has access to constructs, machine like mobs that have skills that are beneficial to the cult in either power, stealth, or utility. > * Blood cult is a magical antagonist. Anti-magic sources are viable against them, as well has holy sources. New core tennants to the game mode that I want to push with these changes: > * Blood cultists should not rely fully on blood cult's resources. They should be able to augment their surroundings with blood magic, and create SOME tools to help them reach their goals, but they should not need an encyclopedic knowledge of every blood cult mechanic to play this antagonist. > * Blood cultists should be limited in quantity on station. They should have a team of humans who should be the primary threat of the station, but they should not be able to convert literally everyone on the crew by manner of numbers. > * Blood cultists should not have tools to hard-remove players from the round automatically. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE COMBAT TOOLS, but turning someone into a rock forever disengages a player caught by the cult. > * Blood cultists should not get sweeping potential based on the lack of a chaplain. The chaplain is a specialized role that has specific bonuses against magic, but should by no means be necessary to defeat a blood cult. > * Blood cultists powers should all come from one source, not spread out over a wide variety of sources. > * A blood cult victory should be on par with a revs victory, in order to prevent cult turning into a round-ending threat. They should be all means be THREATENING, but the idea that a cult must be completely erradicated and round-removed should be changed. > * There should be an intrinsic gameplay value to deconversion of blood cultists over just beheading them. Not sure where to take this just yet. So, based on these requirements, clearly theres some room to work around here. I'm not sure I'll get it right on the first try, but I also want to get something locked in that is a workable, **CONCRETE** place for the gamemode's current and future tenants. ## Take 1: The Nine Man Squad. Cult as a gamemode is locked behind specific population requirements. To spawn, at least 24 players are needed to ready up at roundstart or when triggered by dynamic gamemode. With 24 players, roughly 4-5 players will start the round as a blood cultist. Players do not start with cult metal anymore, but have daggers just the same. Players also have a heads up on the strength of their cult, not giving you a hard number of cultists/living players, but a 3 stage heads up (Eye Closed, Eye Open, Eye Glowing) To let the player know how many cultists are currently on the team. The Eye being open means you have enough players to complete your objective. Eye Glowing will only show up when the maximum number of players are on the team. ### Big Arcane's Big Challenge #1: How the fuyck do you get converts. Early game blood cult is about converting players to fill out your team, while maintaining stealth. A tool or spell should be designed to enable you to kidnap players for long enough to convert, but should have... some kind of counterplay. We **DON'T** want to re-introduce a hardstun, because stun combat just enables them to win literally ANY fight in the current combat meta. EASILY, **FIGURING THIS OUT WILL BE THE LARGEST CHALLENGE OF THE GAMEMODE'S DESIGN**. Instant conversions are not in the spirit of this gamemode, unlike revolution. However, we don't want something like voluntary teams like families, either. So, here's one suggestion that I'm going with for now: **Just steal their soul!** > To convert a player into the blood cult, you must have a near death experience. Either a player is knocked into soft-hardcrit, or fully killed. Once dead, the blood cultist may use a soul shard on the target. ***INSTEAD*** of the old behavior (Player is dusted, removed from the round and sent to rock prison until they die), they are instead fully revived and converted. For a period after revival (With a longer period/more obvious tell if fully killed), they have the trademark cult eyes/halo. Eventually it will pass, and they'll look like they did before, with their new cult holy weaknesses, and the ability to conjure their own cult dagger. The flavor or fluff here is that the dying player is forced into making a deal with Nar'sie in order to survive. *THAT'S RIGHT BABY. BLOOD CULTISTS ARE OFFICALLY PACT WARLOCKS NOW.* I'm unsure how to stack pros and cons just yet here, but if I had the words it'd be below. ### Big Arcane's Big Challenge #2: How the fuyck do you get cool powers AND what powers do you get?. A big draw of any cult game mode, clocks, blood, plant, whatever, is the cool shit you get to do it with. Some history, if you will. Classic bloodcult was about unlocking the secrets of the words to make cool runes. It was interesting, but a headache to manage and rather unfun to bully the words out of players who don't know what's going on. Paper Cult was about making spells in a can, basically, to spring on unsuprising players to best them in combat. It was less engaging, honestly, and felt like there wasn't as much to do at the end of the day. Robustin Cult was all about casting carved spells in your flesh, and gave cult players a wide, WIDE variety of spells and powers to beat players while also cutting down on beurocreatic headache of managing words. However, there are now so MANY tools that the cult wiki page reads like an encyclopedia and it's harder to tell what the best tool for a specific situation IS. So, that's all the toys in the toybox. If there's one thing we need going forward, it's a LIMITED powerset for the cult to have access to. These tools should still be POWERFUL, as they ARE antagonist tools, but you should be able to look at your options in-game and know exactly what powers you have without every cult round being a wikidive. The powers and spells should either be a medium size set of RELATED and clearly linked powers, OR Several smaller powersets linked to a class system. Classes could be swapped between at a health cost. Remember blood cult is a magical antag. Giving them some kind of magical power is in the spirit of the original. Instead of being full spells like wizard or alchemy like heretic, these are closer to rituals as I see it. Ideas of powers and tools to give the cultists: * Ability to create NEW soul shards with a blood % cost and a nutrition cost. * Ability to leave your body for ~20 seconds as a ghost for recon. You are sent back into your body after the timer is up. Soul-less body will retain cult red eyes for the duration as a tell. * If a cult construct has been built, this spell will enable a cultist to take remote control of a construct, while leaving their body behind soulless. Spell use is retained by the construct to re-enter body. * Constructs now function like soul mechs instead of requring a commitment to the construct. * Ability to conjure/store your cult dagger inside yourself at a tiny brute cost. Returning your dagger restores a diminishing amount of the cost (So perhaps 5 to summon dagger, heals 3 when returned.) * **Limit runes down to the following core set to keep required knowledge to a minimum:** * Sanctify: Convert the area into cult floors and walls, and places a cult pylon atop the rune. Requires a stack of metal on top of the rune. Pylons still heal cultists, and recover the cultist's blood count. * Armament: Convert a portion of your health into a cult melee weapon. using the rune alone just creates a new cult knife you can store inside yourself. 2 Summoners: A cult sword. 3: A cult axe. * Using the sword or the axe actively gives the cultist a halo until put away. * Gate: A living human cultist or construct selects another cultist to cast this rune on. This spell creates a one-way gate between the target and the rune, for 30 seconds. The target also has to agree to the rune targeting them, unless they're already dead, which auto-accepts the request. * ABSOLUTELY NO REVIVE RUNE. * Summon Narsie rune, as is tradition. All of this would be to replace the empower rune's interaction with tons of spells and internal fuckery. You should start with some magic, and the runes themselves should be single effect, higher power rituals that use teamwork. ### Big Arcane's Big Challenge #3: So what the FYUCK is your actual goal supposed to be? Old blood cult's objective sucks. It has it's unique challenges, sure, but it's fundementally uninteresting. Finding a single target to sacrifice not only can turn a single round into a complete sweep if the target is unrobust, but it also leads to a huge degree of technical fuckups. An ongoing list of ways to fuck the blood cult just because THIS is their gimmick: * Behead the target, the target's original head must be sewn back on in order to sacrifice it. * Cremate or gib the target, with no body, the cult can never summon and the round is lost. * Cremate the body, but leave the head of the target. The target can rejoin the round,as a borg, but as theur body is gone you need to surgically implant their brain BACK into a new body to sacrifice the target. * Mind transfer into a simple mob, butcher the simple mob. So it's ANOTHER THING TO COMPLETELY REDESIGN. Note: These would be several ideas taken from a list, a final round would have a total of 2-4 of these tasks to complete based on threat and population. #### Ideas: * Rift: Create a series of geometers on the station. Having all three geometers on various summoning locations when the shuttle arrives will cause the veil to rip open and summon narsie. * Area conversion: Place a pylon or manually convert a room into cult metal up to a percentage. Serves as a difficult task to do without going loud. * Flesh Smithing: You need to steal a high value item from the station, which was spiritually linked to the previous high priest of narsie. Then, use the item as a catalyst for re-learning the summoning spell. Of the three objectives, only flesh smithing is required to summon narsie, but completing the other two decreases the summoning time. When completed fully and successfully, you can summon narsie automatically as the shuttle leaves. If you're performing a rushed summoning, you get the full annoucement that there's a summoning occuring, and crew will try and stop you. ## Startwork: How to get to the end of the project. Alright, here's the groundwork that needs to be done, and the work surrounding it that will enable you to get to the end. 1. **Demolition:** * Remove all runes in-game, except for teleport (In order to retool into *gate*), but remove all others for now. Adding new runes can come after step 2. * Remove Blood Spells, except for summoning knife, and the spells used by constructs (Rune construction.) * Leave weapons and armor in the code for now, repurposing can be done afterwards. 2. **With most major features removed from the game mode, it's critical that a deep clean of the WHOLE cult folder be done in terms of code quality. This means rewriting as much of it as possible to modern code standards.** * Document all procs. * Document all variables within type definitions. (You're good at this!) * Optimize procs for early returns when possible. * Consolidate common behavior into components so that it means less code reuse. * Get a maintainer's approval of the code quality at this point. **This will require and possibly enforce teamwork.** 3. Begin working on implementing new powers from the above lists. 4. Begin work on numbers and balacing placements. 5. ??? 6. Test.