Forgecraft - a new magic school

If you wanted to bring your D&D or Pathfinder character to DCSS, you could be a druid with Fedhas. You could be a monk with Wu Jian. You could be a barbarian with Trog.

But you simply couldn’t be an artificer. That has changed.

Forgecraft - developed by DracoOmega

Forgecraft is the art of shaping tangible objects out of magic. Forgecraft
spells can construct a wide array of mechanical creatures that will fight
alongside the caster, as well as create traps and barricades and even turn the
physical resilience of one’s armour into a weapon.

It introduces the following spells:

LV 1 - Kinetic Grapnel

Forgewright starter spell. It inserts a bomb inside an enemy. The next time you melee attack them, the bomb detonates and does a little bonus damage.

LV 2 - Construct Spike Launcher

Forgewright starter spell. It transforms a nearby wall into a turret that attacks enemies.

LV 3 - Launch Clockwork Bee

Forgewright starter spell. A channel spell that eventually summons a powerful ally, which… runs out of steam after a few turns. You can wind the bee back up by bumping into it, giving it extra turns.

LV 4 - Rending Blade

Reaver starter spell. (What?? A buff? To the worst caster background in the game??) It makes your MP bar come alive in the form of an arcane blade - which starts slicing entire lines of enemies, line-passing through them Uskayaw-style and dealing damage proportional to how much magic you spent on it. This drains all of your magic points, but they are returned to you when the blade dies or expires.

LV 5 - Alistair’s Walking Alembic

A supportive friend! Its attacks are weak, but occasionally vent out some poisonous fumes around it. After a certain amount of attacks, it finishes brewing a fresh batch of potions and distributes them to allies within 3 tiles, including the player. This buffs everyone with various powerful potion effects! This seems a little OP to me (infinite haste potions, lol), but the commit message states that the randomness of it should keep it reasonable. We’ll see in playtesting.

LV 5 - Nazja’s Percussive Tampering

Slams a mechanical ally (anything created by Forgecraft) with a big hammer, dealing AoE damage and “upgrading” the ally with a bonus 4 HD (basically, spell damage) and 25% melee damage.

LV 6 - Forge Monarch Bomb
It’s a cute little clockwork insect which endlessly churns out mines. This does almost nothing, until you recast the spell, at which point all the mines explode and incinerate the screen.

LV 6 - Phalanx Beetle

A protective tank! It always try to stay as close to you as possible, buffing your AC as long as it is not separated. Amazing for the squishies.

LV 6 - Fortress Blast

The Mountain Dwarf special. Charges up for a few turns (you are rooted for the duration), then unleashes a big blast of raw AoE physical damage which scales only with how much AC you have. Spellpower only affects the charge duration.

LV 7 - Splinterfrost Shell

It’s a wall that explodes when it is broken, a little bit like Fedhas’s Wall of Briars. Don’t overthink it.

LV 7 - Diamond Sawblades

Summons 4 stationary sawblades which shred everything which dares come close to them.

LV 9 - Platinum Paragon

Summons a single gigachad extremely OP bodyguard. You can give it ANY melee weapon, even legendary unrandom artifacts. It will attack as you attack, block attacks for you, and gradually charge up an awesomeness meter at which point it will go full anime, explode and Manifold Assault everything around it. Yes, Felids can finally use melee artifacts. Welcome to the new DCSS.

Now Forgecraft spells: Summon Lightning Spire, Summon Blazeheart Golem, Hellfire Mortar, Hoarfrost Cannonade, Spellforged Servitor, Iskenderun’s Battlesphere, Animate Armour. Some of them have been renamed to keep in tune with the artificer theme.

Forgecraft Aptitudes:

  • Mountain Dwarf: +2 (but now have -2 Summoning)
  • Coglin: +2
  • Yellow Draconian: +2 (they were the only colour with no aptitude bonus!)
  • Demonspawn: -1
  • Felid: -1 (curse those non-opposable thumbs!)
  • Ghoul: -2
  • Minotaur: -2
  • Tengu: -2 (to contrast with their +2 summoning, as an inverse of MD)

In all other cases, species have the same Forgecraft aptitude as they had
Summonings.

New Summonings Spells

Because the Summoner background has been utterly mangled (RIP FeSu guide, for the second time), it gets these two replacement Summonings spells:

LV 4 - Summon Seismosaurus Egg

Summoner starter spell. Places an immobile egg that needs to be “imprinted” by standing near it while enemies are busy pwning you. Should you complete this little ritual, it summons a very OP (for its level) dinosaur with a 4 tile radius AoE attack, like a mini-Shatter.

LV 4 - Eringya’s Surprising Crocodile

Summoner starter spell. The crocodile starts as a mount, dragging both you and an adjacent enemy backwards one tile. Then, you hop off the crocodile - while it stands between you and your foe. It’s basically the best answer to Attacks of Opportunity ever engineered.

New Background: Forgewright

You can start your tinkering journey right away in trunk with the Forgewright background:

The Forgewright specialises in the creation of magical constructs, ranging from
simple weapons to elaborate and powerful golems. Many of their creations
benefit from fighting alongside them.

Let the Industrial Revolution commence.

7 Thanks

Is it just me or does Alistair still feel like the worst of the great wizards :joy:

Edit: Forum only lets me reply 3 times in a row :sob: but I’m having too much fun with forgecraft!

Starting forge craft book is solid. Gives you the bomb golem that summoners had so you can take it through S-Branch. Bee will probably get a nerf and I’m not sure if the wall can reach or not bc I swear I saw it hit an iguana 2 squares away one time and the pic is spears. Grapnel can lodge in insubstantial rn too so that’s fun.

Screen Shot 2024-11-16 at 8.08.22 AM

More silly spike tricks:
Screen Shot 2024-11-16 at 8.38.39 AM

You shape a spike launcher from a nearby wall.
<--- I step up northeast --->
The rocky spike skewers the frilled lizard!
The frilled lizard dies!
1 Thank

Bee is so good…

Use it on the bat…

And it clears the whole pack!

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I like the bee sprite. Very cool.

Edit: I also like the mechanic of bumping into the bee to rev it. It reminds me of those wind up hot wheel cars.

3 Thanks

Welp, rip 0.32. Time to trunk it!

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Dang, that bee is pretty serious! I just got one in a corridor, casting at 44% strength, that mowed down an entire yak pack (with me standing behind it to rewind it several times in the process)

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Even the spikes one will mow down a whole lane of enemies at its level.

edit: I also kind of love how you start with a little hammer.

3 Thanks

I like this school! I’ve run a couple of Forgewrights and they’ve been fun - got up to some lvl-5 spells and played around with them, found some neat little combos and some not-as-neat situations when I didn’t do it right :grinning: but I really like the variety that this adds. Looking forward to what I can do with one once I learn how to use it right!

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3 !Exp got me 16.9 Forgecraft and casting Diamond Sawblades at D:7. Mows through everything.

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This is nuts. 3 !exp and the book for Diamon Sawblades before D:7? nuts!

I want that!!!

Got my first Forgewright win to retain Grand Pode.

Once I had it castable, I quivered Platinum Paragon, immediately gave it this axe, and proceeded to p+tab my way through the rest of the game. Zot was about 15 mins start to finish and I’m glad I decided to stay up and tab through instead of risking the next day curse.

You finish imprinting the physical structure of the +9 executioner's axe
"Casoif" {spect, Fly rC+ rN+} upon your paragon.

Also, Fortress Blast reached max 6d39 around 73AC, might have been a few points lower I was stacking Phalanx Beetle, Ozo’s Armour, and Protection brand. I only used it a couple times but it packed a solid punch and being able to do other stuff was really nice.

2 Thanks

Seed might still work: 17519079620031720263

I’m looking through Fw morgues to see how people skill and I saw a morgue that has literally zero actions besides 3 potions between 10-12 and thought that is weird and then I saw the Casoif executioner axe in the morgue.

You found so many good spells in this game. OTR + Ignite Poison relatively early. All those Fw spells. Tons of great rings. Etc.

Thanks, bobross! Looks like you started about 4 days ago? So I’ll try this seed with version crawl_setup-0.33-a0-388-g12864aae5e. Much appreciated!

Huge fan of this, I’ve always loved heavy-armor casters, and mountain dwarves were great for that, and this is even better. The main suggestion I have is to swap one of the forgewright’s fourth level spells for animate armor, which would better indicate to a player who isn’t familiar with forgecraft that going into armor is a good idea. I also think the slay bonus on the grapnel should scale with spell power, as it currently seems very weak compared to sandblast, the first-level spell I am most familiar with, which I usually use all the way until I get stone arrow online, and sometimes beyond that, depending on my mana situation.

Having animate armour in a starting book seems OP. Animate armour does insane amounts of damage with the heavier armours. You could probably make it through all of D and L with plate mail using only animate armour. I wouldn’t be surprise if you could do all of the S branches as well with a very patient approach.

1 Thank

I don’t think animate armour is any more OP than blazeheart which can take you through S-branches and beyond. But not every race can use it and that’s probably a better reason to not include it in a starting book.

I feel like the current starting book is too strong though and the entire school itself should probably get a slight nerf.

2 Thanks

@Oneirical will there be a new pillow-pawed path?

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