Icewind Dale II Forum Update
Posted Friday, November 8, 2002 - 18:05 CEST by Veldrin

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Drow Don't Worship Human Gods!: Yeah, the next thing you know, people will want to make drow rangers who worship Mielikki. It's not like dark elves can track anything over rock in the Underdark. And Mielikki is the goddess of the forest. Do dark elves have any forests (other than mushroom forests filled with myconids)? No. Ergo, it is completely unthinkable that a dark elf could become a ranger or worship Mielikki, much less both.

Sorry, but if we had three human, three elven, three dwarven, three gnome, and three halfling deities, that's still fifteen deities. And it doesn't cover distinctions between drow and surface elves, etc. I'll try to come up with a "fair" list here:

Human:
* Lathander (NG)
* Tempus (CN)
* Bane (LE)

Elven:
* Corellon (CG)
* Lolth (for drow) (CE)
* Rillifane (for wild elves) (CN)

Dwarven:
* Moradin (LG)
* Dumathoin (for gold dwarves -- I guess) (N)
* Laduguer (for duergar) (LE)

Gnome:
* Garl Glittergold (NG)
* Callarduran (for svirfneblin) (N)
* Urdlen (CE)

Halfling:
* Arvoreen (LG)
* Brandobaris (N)
* Urogalan (LN)

That's fifteen deities -- six more than were actually implemented in the game. On top of that, these choices leave slim pickins within races. Instead of having nine fairly race-friendly options to pick from, humans get three, and the other races have, at most, six. Of course, their alignment will also limit this further. Want to play a chaotic evil halfling cleric? Too bad, jack, you just can't; there aren't any deities within a step of CE in the human or halfling pantheons. How about a lawful neutral elven cleric? Nope. Just can't do it.

This also doesn't address orc deities. You could pick any three, I suppose -- Gruumsh, Ineval, and Luthic. But then that makes eighteen, double the number of deities that were implemented in the game. That would be twice the number of special powers to implement, and twice the number of domain spell lists to create.

I know that the limitations can be frustrating, but the nine we picked cover all alignments, and are open enough demi-human races that it is at least possible that the deity would allow clerics from those races.

Chad Nicholas, Scripter

Creating New Domains: Extra domains cannot be created, but altering the name is as easy as finding the string reference used to display the domain name and editing it. I'm not sure if Near Infinity can do that or not.

Importing Spells From Other Games: Whether or not a spell can be brought in from another game or not will have to be looked at on a spell by spell basis. I don't believe any of the code for Breach or Time Stop is in IwD2. I'm not sure about Mantle. What did that one do?

Change Favored Class and Add New Races: I asked the programmer who wrote the code for both of those functions and both are hard coded. Sorry.