Sorry for the delay folks, but without further ado let's recognize the hard work of our winning entrant Sam, and his entry the Greater Mercury Elemental!!
Feed back thread
here
#6
The theme was 'greater elemental', and so I thought about what that actually meant - the Western elements of earth, air, fire, and water are present as elementals in 'scape, but maybe there's room for the Chinese elements of earth, fire, metal, wood, and water... and just maybe, if we're thinking elemental properties, it's worth thinking about the periodic table of elements? My mind went to mercury, which both fits the periodic approach and the Chinese approach as it could be a variation of a metal elemental. For points, I figure anywhere between 110 and 150 would be reasonable, I'd lock that down later.
My design philosophy is, as much as possible, to find a strong theme and then to roughly approximate what the powers and stats would look like (broad terms, like 'moves fast', 'hits hard', 'has contact damage power', etc, but this also includes an approximate points range), and then when this is all making sense to tweak the mechanics to fit the theme. Here, I know mercury is liquid at room temperature, solid at -40C, and burns on contact which gave me some ideas for a state change power and contact damage.
(yes, I know you can touch mercury, but it's a bad idea and I'm choosing to ramp the concept up for dramatic and more immediate effect)
I didn't want the state change to penalise the figure, wanting it to be equally albeit differently playable depending on the state, so I figured it could be fast-moving most of the time but slower, more solid and therefore harder hitting on snow and ice spaces. Faster-moving suggested maybe Phantom Walk to assist in getting around, especially for a liquid-based elemental, but this had to go for the solid state. After that it got a refinement to how the contact damage would work, allowing it to happen less in a solid state as there's no 'splash' as a liquid state might have, and it was done.
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I want to congratulate all our other entrants below on a great competition! Everyone had creative and exciting ideas. If anyone wants their names and creative thoughts posted with their entries please PM me or feel free to add it to the thread.
Thoughts:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Lazy Orang
saw this contest and I wanted to try to do something a little different from the standard four European Elements. Having been vaguely familiar with the Chinese Elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water from an early age, I've thought ever since shortly after the Elementals were first released that the specifically Chinese Elements would make interesting additions to the game (at least partially because, at that time, there were still only six Generals, and the ones lacking Elementals, Ullar and Vydar, were perfect fits for Wood and Metal, respectively). As such, I decided I wanted to design a Chinese Elemental, deciding on Metal since it was my first impulse and I was unable to find a decent figure for a Greater Wood Elemental (at least until I stumbled across a perfect one after submitting my entry....). Having decided upon Metal, my main priority was to try to make it distinct from the Iron Golem - in order to do this, I dropped its attack to four and its defence to five (the defence rising back to six following playtesting) and came up with the Deadly Ricochet power as I felt it was thematic and in an attempt to make it more of a ranged counter and less of a hero-killer. I had also raised its Life to 4, but, at my brother's suggestion, I later included the From the Earth power, in an attempt to convey some of the Chinese spirituality of element generation (it perhaps should have been called Earth Bears Metal, in retrospect), and as such dropped it's Life to 3 since it was capable of healing. |