More Witches...

Apparently, now that the 'main map' has gone into 3D mode, Babbi Yaga's Shack can climb trees. I wonder how much climbing skill it has.

So more thoughts on witches... This time, I will talk about blood foci. If any of the five people who are likely to read this don't know, witches need blood in order to make most of their spells work. It's a nifty sort of limitation on the otherwise Awesome Power that the witch possesses, and really, if you're not killing things and draining corpses of blood in a sort of Satanic ritual, what kind of witch are you? (I wait now for some wiccan/modern witch to stumble upon this blog, misconstrue things, and start up a shitstorm of comments...) Anyhow, past a certain point, blood is a pretty easy component with which to come up, and one of the first things you learn as a witch is to just drain pretty much every corpse you make or come across into the old blood pouch. And once you're skilled enough to start manufacturing shrunken heads, you're basically golden forever for most of your spells.

One of the big factors that comes into play with blood foci is the rarity of your blood types... It takes increasingly-exotic blood to pop out more powerful spells, and for a couple of spells, you basically must have one type of blood or another, like faerie blood to cast the crudelis curse.


One issue I do have with blood is that the rarity of blood types don't always follow how difficult they are to get, considering that elicat blood is considered 'exotic', and the things basically infest the Temple of Discordia... or that you can make eight 'exotic' shrunken heads (more if you have a brute or battlerager nearby) out of a single hydra... And of course, there's unicorn blood, which is supposedly a 'very rare' type (more common than 'exotic', in other words), despite the fact that no unicorn has been spotted on the MUD since the last time someone mistakenly tried to kill the Red Bull, leaving only a single source (that I know of) from which to get the stuff. Plus, unicorn blood is a necessary component for one of the Ordo's most powerful spells. A little more than 'very rare', I would say...

In general though, I do like the blood component. It makes the witches a bit different a guild than the other mage-type guilds out there, and gives them a bit of flair.

One thing that would be very nice (if not completely necessary) would be a way to determine what types (and maybe how much) of blood you had on-hand in your foci, since the only real way to do this now is to cast a spell and see whether or not it goes off and what kind of blood it ends up using (as far as I can tell, anyhow).