Necromancy!
What is up everyone?! Thomas Blixtev Blair here, and I’m super pumped to chat with y’all today about our newest crafting profession, Necromancy! Crowfall's vision for Necromancy is not the same as traditional fantasy RPGs, where you raise pets from the dead and force them to do your bidding. While that does sound pretty cool, Necromancy in Crowfall is more about digging up desiccated body parts, restoring them, and combining them in such a way to make a playable character class. To top it off, there is a whole lot of customization options via optional looted and harvested components we call Additives.
Because every player will want one (kinda like a thneed!), Necromancy is sure to be a popular crafting profession. In fact, most players will probably want several custom vessels in order to cover all the archetypes they enjoy playing.
Changes to Archetype Selection and Vessel Quality
With the changes coming to Big World, players will now arrive in-game initially as a Crow Soul. There is no such thing as character creation in a lobby anymore. Visiting a temple in a world as a Crow will afford them the opportunity to possess a white (standard item quality level) quality vessel type available at that temple (Human Temples have the Human Archetypes available, Elven Temples have Elven Archetypes, and so-on). All vessels generated by a Temple are at the white quality level.
If a player wants to possess a green, blue, purple, or orange vessel they will need to have acquired one from any of the various methods of acquiring objects. The only way for a vessel above white quality to enter the game is through the Necromancy profession!
The quality of the vessel is incredibly important as it means that vessel will have more attributes such as: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Spirit, and Constitution. That’s right, vessel creation through Necromancy is the only way to increase an archetype’s attributes. Increasing an attribute will also increase any statistic that is a child of that attribute. For example, increasing a character’s Dexterity attribute will also increase their Critical Hit Chance statistic (and the values of other child stats).
Profession Dependency
Necromancy is very dependent on the Alchemy profession for the solutions and mixtures required to restore a desiccated body part to usefulness. Alchemists also craft the Philosopher’s Stone, which returns the vessel to life.
The Magnum Opus or creation of the Philosopher’s Stone is the pinnacle goal of any Alchemist. To create the Stone it was thought to require a transition of materials through 4 coloring stages; a blackening, a yellowing, a whitening, and a reddening. Of course no one ever made anything resembling what was promised-- just a whole mess of gunk-- but hey, it’s good lore!
Crowfall Alchemists can make 5 distinct color solutions via a combination of ground minerals and powdered stone dusts. Each solution maps to one of the character attributes. The Philosopher’s Stone recipe requires any 4 of the color solutions the Alchemist wishes to use. Want to go all Strength? Use all red solutions. All Dexterity? Use all black solutions. Basically, use whatever attribute mix meets your end goal.
The Philosopher’s Stone is also eligible for use in mass production via crafting factories. So when you finally get the perfect combine, make a blueprint and have those thralls produce a bunch.
Vessel Crafting
While the Alchemy requirements for Necromancy can be mass-produced, vessels cannot. Each vessel is a handcrafted masterpiece potentially loaded with optional additives (or, conversely, a poorly crafted mess). The better-supplied, more skilled Necromancy crafters will find themselves constantly deluged with orders to make specific vessels.
This is the first crafting profession we have made a considerable amount of Additives for. The restored head recipe, for example, can take up to 2 enhanced eyes. Use a Scout’s Eye to increase the Perception statistic, the Master’s Eye to increase Crafting Assembly, or the Bowman’s Eye to increase Critical Hit Chance. Currently additives mainly come from loot drops off of the Risen and sometimes from critical harvests while grave digging.
There are less stages in Necromancy than a profession like Blacksmithing, however there are lots of them (all those arms and legs!). Since vessels are mostly handcrafted it will take a good portion of a crafter’s time to keep their shop stocked.
Crafting Stages
- Turn Desiccated Body Parts into Restored Body Parts. *Additives can be added at this stage.
- Combine Desiccated Body parts into a Vessel of the appropriate type. There is a unique recipe for each vessel type which generally have similar requirements. *Except for centaur-based vessels, as always they remain a pain in the posterior to develop for and crafting them is no exception.
There you have it, our latest crafting profession coming to Big World! We hope you have as much fun playing with it as we had building it.
As always, please feel free to leave comments on the forums, and we’ll see you in game!
Thomas Blair
Design Lead, ACE