So, this is a concept that came about when I discovered I could add skills via a mod. Basically add a skill for numerous anomalous ideas, and add a resource of some sort that is needed to make and/or power them.
A rough summary of some of the random ideas I’ve thought up:
Recipes: Most of them likely shouldn’t be autolearned. They’re weird devices that need to be learned from rare texts. A few such items might be available in item groups to use, and the few that rely on the skill to work would allow one way to exercise that skill, but if anything the lowest skill book likely needs to be at skill level 1 or higher. Basically either you spend points on it, or earn that first level through playing with whatever magical items you find.
Motes of Essence: These would be strange items that are death drops, in limited amounts, from Netherworld monsters and many other creatures with an overt, otherworldly nature. They are used in quantity to create the various items, and as fuel/ammo for most of them.
Crafting Tools: Certain items might be needed to start working with enchanting items. Ritual implements, essentially. Tools for various symbolic purposes. Some might be mundane like needing a cutting quality, others might be special tools like a stone altar, a silver dagger, a patera for libation, etc.
The Offering Chalice: An alternative means of generating motes of essence. Likely a rare find, assuming it’s actually findable without crafting it yourself, at great expense. It would be a part of recipes for creating motes using a wide array of symbolically important items, at a harsh enough ratio to make it more efficient to just hunt monsters.
Summoning Items: Monster-creating items like the goo canister can be made to use certain skills to determine the result. Needless to say, this makes it a natural choice for an example item to use the skill. Since many of the obvious choices for summoning would be supernatural creatures and thus drop essence motes, it would need a high cost of motes to use, and likely need very high skill to ensure the result is friendly. A SIMPLER alternative would be for the summoned creatures to be variants that don’t drop motes, preventing it from being used for mana farming.
Spells? Or The Equivalent: Actually adding innate abilities as a mimicry of spellcasting is beyond what I could mod in. Adding tools and weapons that produce various specific effects while consuming essense would be the simplest option. For example a talisman of fire instead of learning a fireball spell seems a lot less high-fantasy to me. Think Heretic or Hexen, not Final Fantasy.
Permanent-effect items: Essentially, enchanted items that yield some benefit or function that doesn’t use essence to fuel it. These would be advanced recipes, even moreso than items that consume resources to use, these need a high cost in essence to actually create, and symbolic costs related to what the item does. In addition, the base item itself would need to be made beforehand, likely at some expense even if it doesn’t consume mana to make the unechanted object.
Alternative Energy: It’s possible to create an effect that harms the player in some way. An item that inflicts a custom effect in exchange for reverting to a different item would allow for creating a resource of some type at the player’s expense.
EDIT: Oh…oh. “unknown skill arcana” it says. Fuck. Seems that adding skills via mods is fundamentally broken.
EDIT 2: Ahah, I’ve figured that issue out.
Here, have bonus screenshot:
