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The Bride of the Map
Hi guys, I'm not dead just busy!

Two suggestions, if we wanted to compromise on the map we could "move" the Beanbean Kingdom to the Mushroom Kingdom's coast above Delfino Isles and accompanying islands. I don't want to bring up old wounds though, just a suggestion.

The second suggestion is that we use this mod for the base of the Human portraits (when said mod is finished of course). Although the cartoons aren't EXACTLY in Paper Mario's style, it would save a tonne of fairly tedious work if we based our portraits of this mod IMO.

The Southern Coast (Near Mount Rugged and Dry Dry Desert) could work. The Mount Rugged region has a Mushroom Kingdom railroad station, so it's probably part of Peach's Realm, but Dry Dry outpost is of more ambiguous status. Still, we could find a region there that makes sense.

I currently have it bordering the region of the Mushroom Kingdom beyond the Toadwood Forest. It's on it's own layer though, so moving it will be easy.

Here's what the Provinces.bmp currently looks like:
plV1MAB.png


Also, I think you're on to something with that graphics mod.
 
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The best thing about using the "Paper Mario" sprite sheets is that people make fan art of almost every single character in that style. Using the fan art from Google Images and changing their features on MS Paint, we should be able to make at six different eyes, faces, and the like for each species, to give enough variety to each character!
 
Thanks to his brilliance, Avrolancaster will now be considered the primary Modifier. He is, much to my embarassment, coding and writing the entire map, and he's okay with it. In exchange, he asked me to supply him with names and to work on "Localization". Not sure what that means.

Anyway, expect some changes on the first post.
 
Thanks to his brilliance, Avrolancaster will now be considered the primary Modifier. He is, much to my embarassment, coding and writing the entire map, and he's okay with it. In exchange, he asked me to supply him with names and to work on "Localization". Not sure what that means.

Anyway, expect some changes on the first post.

Frankly I'm both surprised and honoured. I'm happy you left it a Turtleshroom production, since in many ways this is still your brainchild.

The provinces.bmp is nearing completion, which means that I'll have something that the game will load soon.

I'll be needing to define each province's culture and religion, and I'll be using placeholders for most of it. If there's anything you'd like to specify or reiterate about which areas get which religion/culture now is the time to do it.

Also, expect the first few iterations of the de jure set up to be a complete mess.

On a semi-related note, I have some ideas about Astrotheology. Twice throughout the Mario series there have been mentions of Dark Star spirits. They exist in Mario Party, but only as a -1 point Ztar with little background or information. The other instance is from Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, where an Evil Star spirit and its associates attempt to turn the Mushroom Kingdom into a nightmareish hellscape.

How would you feel about upgrading Astrotheology from a specific religion to a religion group? This way the faith of Peach, Mario and most of the world could be something like "Faith of the Seven Stars" and we could have one or more heresy of Dark Star worshippers, maybe a Ztar faith and/or a Dark Star faith?
 
Thanks to his brilliance, Avrolancaster will now be considered the primary Modifier. He is, much to my embarassment, coding and writing the entire map, and he's okay with it. In exchange, he asked me to supply him with names and to work on "Localization". Not sure what that means.

Anyway, expect some changes on the first post.

"Localization" basically that, names. The idea behind localization is that Paradox doesn't want to have to rewrite their entire game to translate it to other languages so they use localization to do that. Without localization, instead of the "Holy Roman Empire" being written across the screen it would be e_holy_roman_empire or whatever the tag is. Using this system you can also localize things to different languages, but that probably won't happen unless this mod gets really big.

Frankly I'm both surprised and honoured. I'm happy you left it a Turtleshroom production, since in many ways this is still your brainchild.

The provinces.bmp is nearing completion, which means that I'll have something that the game will load soon.

I'll be needing to define each province's culture and religion, and I'll be using placeholders for most of it. If there's anything you'd like to specify or reiterate about which areas get which religion/culture now is the time to do it.

Also, expect the first few iterations of the de jure set up to be a complete mess.

On a semi-related note, I have some ideas about Astrotheology. Twice throughout the Mario series there have been mentions of Dark Star spirits. They exist in Mario Party, but only as a -1 point Ztar with little background or information. The other instance is from Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, where an Evil Star spirit and its associates attempt to turn the Mushroom Kingdom into a nightmareish hellscape.

How would you feel about upgrading Astrotheology from a specific religion to a religion group? This way the faith of Peach, Mario and most of the world could be something like "Faith of the Seven Stars" and we could have one or more heresy of Dark Star worshippers, maybe a Ztar faith and/or a Dark Star faith?

That's a good idea. Astotheology could be the religious group encompassing religions like the worship of the Shrine Sprites and Happiness.

And again I apologize for not doing much work on this so far. I'll do work on this after exams, which should end very soon!

On an unrelated note, have we set up a GitHub or something similar for this mod? Because we should do that.
 
That's a good idea. Astotheology could be the religious group encompassing religions like the worship of the Shrine Sprites and Happiness.

And again I apologize for not doing much work on this so far. I'll do work on this after exams, which should end very soon!

On an unrelated note, have we set up a GitHub or something similar for this mod? Because we should do that.

Shine Sprite worship seems like an obvious match for the religion group. I'm less inclined to agree with Happiness.

Astrotheology literally means the religion of the stars, and fits Shine, Star Spirit, and Dark Star Spirit worship quite well, since all involve stars as the focus of the religion. Shine worship seems to coexist quite peacefully with the mainline Star Spirit worship, and could represent a different branch of the religion, like Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

There's no obvious Shine heresy, and that's fine I guess. Not every faith needs a heresy, and the lack of a heresy could be a Shine "mechanic" if we chose. We can always revisit the topic later when it comes time to code the religions, and as the mod becomes playable.

Happiness has nothing to do with stars, and as conceived earlier in this thread it centres around the Super Happy Tree, fruits, and hearts.

As for Github, no. Currently the mod only exists as a handful of snippets and assets. In the next couple of weeks we'll have something for the game to load, and we can set up a Github then.
 
Shine Sprite worship seems like an obvious match for the religion group. I'm less inclined to agree with Happiness.

Astrotheology literally means the religion of the stars, and fits Shine, Star Spirit, and Dark Star Spirit worship quite well, since all involve stars as the focus of the religion. Shine worship seems to coexist quite peacefully with the mainline Star Spirit worship, and could represent a different branch of the religion, like Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

There's no obvious Shine heresy, and that's fine I guess. Not every faith needs a heresy, and the lack of a heresy could be a Shine "mechanic" if we chose. We can always revisit the topic later when it comes time to code the religions, and as the mod becomes playable.

Happiness has nothing to do with stars, and as conceived earlier in this thread it centres around the Super Happy Tree, fruits, and hearts.

As for Github, no. Currently the mod only exists as a handful of snippets and assets. In the next couple of weeks we'll have something for the game to load, and we can set up a Github then.

Only reason I thought of Happiness being part of the religious group is that it would make no sense for Mushroom Kingdomites and Yoshis to be shaking their fists at each other for being heathens.

And if we're going to have a heresy of Star Worship it would be the Dark Star worship, as heretics hate each other.
 
Only reason I thought of Happiness being part of the religious group is that it would make no sense for Mushroom Kingdomites and Yoshis to be shaking their fists at each other for being heathens.

Hmm... good point.

CB modding is a pain in the ass, but we could add trigger restrictions for Holy Wars of the main "good" faiths to not be able to Holy War each other. Opinion modifiers are another matter entirely. I'm not sure how open the religion modifiers that they added in RoI are, but it's possible that we could add some sort of opinion modifier. I don't think the game has a "heathen_opinion" modifier, but we could give Astrotheology the _christian or _muslim tag and change the localisations for both the religion group and opinion modifiers? Another solution would be to give a flat diplomacy bonus to Happiness followers. We'll have to experiment to see what works best I think.

EDIT: I was mistaken, the game does have a heathen opinion modifier, it's just unused. It's infidel_opinion. The first one I'd like to try then is giving Happiness a relations boost with infidels to counteract the infidel penalty.
 
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Hmm... good point.

CB modding is a pain in the ass, but we could add trigger restrictions for Holy Wars of the main "good" faiths to not be able to Holy War each other. Opinion modifiers are another matter entirely. I'm not sure how open the religion modifiers that they added in RoI are, but it's possible that we could add some sort of opinion modifier. I don't think the game has a "heathen_opinion" modifier, but we could give Astrotheology the _christian or _muslim tag and change the localisations for both the religion group and opinion modifiers? Another solution would be to give a flat diplomacy bonus to Happiness followers. We'll have to experiment to see what works best I think.

EDIT: I was mistaken, the game does have a heathen opinion modifier, it's just unused. It's infidel_opinion. The first one I'd like to try then is giving Happiness a relations boost with infidels to counteract the infidel penalty.

But it would just make so much more sense from a gameplay perspective to have Happiness and Astrotheology be part of the same group.

Maybe we could combine the two into a "Good Religion" group?
 
It's hard to see how it would all interact with each other at this point, so I don't want to speak in absolutes.

No matter what (even if we went with an Indian style hyper-tolerance, you'd still have free title revocations, imprisonment, etc) you'd have religious tension/conflict from being the wrong religion, even within the same religious group. We could code out the holy wars, marriage aversion, and opinion effects from religious intolerance for any or all of the religions we choose. This basically erases the inter-religion-group problems, and since we can be selective about it, we can do this just for the "good" halves of the religion groups.

I see your point though about grouping Astrotheology with Happiness for gameplay reasons. I view it like a Yazidi/Sunni or Manichean/Zoroastrian problem. In vanilla these unrelated faiths are grouped together for convenience because Paradox has no plans to add depth to any of these faiths. I'm a member of the camp that is skeptical of these groupings. To me, removing the practical barriers between close faiths, but grouping them based on theological similarity makes more sense. Still, PDX maintains the groupings for gameplay. I think it's a design philosophy choice really. It's hard to say which will work better until we have some test scenarios.

Right now we have the following religions planned:
Astrotheology (star faith?)
Dark star faith
Ztar faith?
Shine Faith
Happiness
Greed
Gambling (Greed Heresy)
Cult of Bowser
Twilighter
Smithy's faith?
Shroob faith?
Kong Faith
Kremling Faith

I think a Good group and a Bad group might cover up some of the interesting variety we have building.
 
You forgot "Conquest" (which covers generic villains like Tatanga and one-shot villains like Wart and Smithy), which is probably meant to be a Heresy of Bowser. There is only one Dark Star (in "Bowser's Inside Story", I do believe), but there is a Ztar (pronounced "zuh-TAR"). "Mario Party I" and "Mario Party IV" both mention Ztars as the antithesis to Power Stars. They possess negative energy and literally cancel the effect of any Power Star they come in contact with. (As such, one Ztar deletes on Power Star.)

Excluding the RL-style suns, there are three primary types of Star in Mario's world.

1. First are the Star Spirits and their baby equivalent, the Star Kids. Star Spirits are gods in the Mario World (and there are seven chief Star Spirits) and Star Kids grow up to become lesser Star Spirits in Star Haven. The Seven Star Spirits are near-omnipotent, but they can be sealed off and their powers limited to simple telepathy. Star Kids and lesser Star Spirits execute wishes not granted by the Star Rod, often by direct action. (Twink, for example, directly granted Peach's wish for aid by appearing to her.) Star Kids cannot attack (although they can intimidate) and possess no supernatural abilities.

2. Second are the Power Stars ("Super Mario LXIV"). Much like Star Spirits, they have an adult version and a baby version. Baby Power Stars are called Lumas ("Super Mario's Galaxy I"). They are considered the fundamental essence of life and form Galaxies (which house all life on their own) and RL-type stars (like the sun) to sustain life. Power Stars are used to seal and unseal any given portal or world ("Super Mario LXIV", "Mario Party" series). To create life, or galaxies of sun-like stars, a Power Star (or, in an emergency, a Luma) must destroy itself, as seen in the ending of "Super Mario's Galaxy I". (I am not sure if they die to unlock minor doors, though.) The overseer of all Power Stars is Rosalina, but she is depicted as a caretaker and not as their deity. Ergo, the Star Spirits apparently control Power Stars indirectly and Rosalina was one of their Chosen Ones to help them grow. When sufficient amounts of Power Stars congregate, they can merge and form Grand Stars. The First Grand Star was obtained at the very end of "Super Mario LXIV" after Mario destroyed Bowser. It took him out of the Bowser Dimension and returned him to the castle entrance, successfully unsealing Princess Peach. Grand Stars seem to have reality-warping powers and can unlock or seal anything, even living beings. They are also sources of boundless energy and are critical to the creation of all heat and light in the Mario universe.

3. Then, there are the Starmen. These might be Power Stars, or they might be their own thing. They grant their holder invincibility and inundate him with great power, speed, and control over themselves or their vehicles. If the wielder so chooses, he can kill anyone with a Starman by touching them or do them harm, but he can also withhold that ability. Starmen are power-ups and live in relative harmony in the Mushroom World with others. Catching one activates its power and, like Power Stars, only by the destruction of a Starman can its powers be deployed. Starmen can be evil, such as the Angry Sun in "Super Mario Brothers III". (Though the Angry Sun could also be a lesser Star Spirit, given that he is corporal.)
 
Avro Lancaster has informed me that he is finishing up the Province Map and its color coding. He is asking me to make De Jure maps of it, but I am unsure how that'll work, especially since some areas of the Map that are far apart would make sense as the same Duchy or Kingdom (such as the various Wario holdings under one unified Wario Kingdom).
 
I'll be needing to define each province's culture and religion, and I'll be using placeholders for most of it. If there's anything you'd like to specify or reiterate about which areas get which religion/culture now is the time to do it.

If I had a Map showing the name of each Province (like in-game), I could easily color-code the Cultures that are obvious, and then we could guess on the rest. This is the same reason De Jure is going to be hard. There are several cases where provinces with no borders to each other (if any, such as islands) would belong in the same Kingdom as a mainland province. The scattered Peach's Castles and vacation homes (which would be Baronies), for example, need to be de jure Mushroom Kingdom. (Is it possible for a Barony to be de jure under a Duchy or Kingdom but not its respective County? I know a Kingdom or Empire can hold Baronies in fief without the County or the Duchy, etc., but if it can't be done de jure, that'll mean we need a lot of one-Holding Counties to represent the clearly present diaspora of some properties. Mario has a house AND a Castle. Luigi has two mansions and lives with Mario.)
 
Son of the Bride of the Map
So, I discovered a way a while back to have an event in-game that "creates" a heresy. I haven't seen this method used in any other mods, and it isn't used in vanilla, so I'll assume it's a novel method. What you do is set up a religion as anything other than a heresy, but don't allow it to exist in-game. Then you have an event that utilizes set_parent_religion to move it to heresy status to an existing religon. I'll make reference to this as I go.

Also, since we're turning each game into a start date, I have had the desire to write events that would simulate the games' plots that occur after the selected startdate.

For instance, our first (9 July 1981) startdate (as far as I know) will involve a Donkey Kong/Peach conflict/kidnapping/whatever. The much later Paper Mario start date (August 11 2000) would be the political setup of Paper Mario, and the conflict at the beginning of this start date would involve Bowser capturing the Star Spirits/Occupying the Seven Star Astrotheologians' holy sites/whatever and having possession of the Star Rod. What I intend is that if the player starts in 1981, they won't have to forgo the events of Paper Mario, because there'd be an event waiting in the code somewhere for the conditions to be right for Bowser to take a run at the Star Spirits, and attempt something similar to Paper Mario.


You forgot "Conquest" (which covers generic villains like Tatanga and one-shot villains like Wart and Smithy), which is probably meant to be a Heresy of Bowser. There is only one Dark Star (in "Bowser's Inside Story", I do believe), but there is a Ztar (pronounced "zuh-TAR"). "Mario Party I" and "Mario Party IV" both mention Ztars as the antithesis to Power Stars. They possess negative energy and literally cancel the effect of any Power Star they come in contact with. (As such, one Ztar deletes on Power Star.)

Excluding the RL-style suns, there are three primary types of Star in Mario's world.

1. First are the Star Spirits and their baby equivalent, the Star Kids. Star Spirits are gods in the Mario World (and there are seven chief Star Spirits) and Star Kids grow up to become lesser Star Spirits in Star Haven. The Seven Star Spirits are near-omnipotent, but they can be sealed off and their powers limited to simple telepathy. Star Kids and lesser Star Spirits execute wishes not granted by the Star Rod, often by direct action. (Twink, for example, directly granted Peach's wish for aid by appearing to her.) Star Kids cannot attack (although they can intimidate) and possess no supernatural abilities.

2. Second are the Power Stars ("Super Mario LXIV"). Much like Star Spirits, they have an adult version and a baby version. Baby Power Stars are called Lumas ("Super Mario's Galaxy I"). They are considered the fundamental essence of life and form Galaxies (which house all life on their own) and RL-type stars (like the sun) to sustain life. Power Stars are used to seal and unseal any given portal or world ("Super Mario LXIV", "Mario Party" series). To create life, or galaxies of sun-like stars, a Power Star (or, in an emergency, a Luma) must destroy itself, as seen in the ending of "Super Mario's Galaxy I". (I am not sure if they die to unlock minor doors, though.) The overseer of all Power Stars is Rosalina, but she is depicted as a caretaker and not as their deity. Ergo, the Star Spirits apparently control Power Stars indirectly and Rosalina was one of their Chosen Ones to help them grow. When sufficient amounts of Power Stars congregate, they can merge and form Grand Stars. The First Grand Star was obtained at the very end of "Super Mario LXIV" after Mario destroyed Bowser. It took him out of the Bowser Dimension and returned him to the castle entrance, successfully unsealing Princess Peach. Grand Stars seem to have reality-warping powers and can unlock or seal anything, even living beings. They are also sources of boundless energy and are critical to the creation of all heat and light in the Mario universe.

3. Then, there are the Starmen. These might be Power Stars, or they might be their own thing. They grant their holder invincibility and inundate him with great power, speed, and control over themselves or their vehicles. If the wielder so chooses, he can kill anyone with a Starman by touching them or do them harm, but he can also withhold that ability. Starmen are power-ups and live in relative harmony in the Mushroom World with others. Catching one activates its power and, like Power Stars, only by the destruction of a Starman can its powers be deployed. Starmen can be evil, such as the Angry Sun in "Super Mario Brothers III". (Though the Angry Sun could also be a lesser Star Spirit, given that he is corporal.)

I'm totally okay with using "Conquest" as the religion of Tatanga et al, but I think it would be cooler to do unique faiths for Tatanga, Smithy, Wart (Wart's another issue though) etc, even if they are just graphically different versions of "Conquest." After all, I think there'd be no love or feelings of sameness between Smithy and Tatanga.

One of the ideas I had been mulling over was to have a star faith heresy centered around Ztars. Mechanically, this would be a lame-o heresy like Lollardy that is unspecial and just exists to piss off the mainline Seven Star Astrotheologians. However, the event that would set up the "Bowser's Inside Story" chain would activate Dark Star worship as a far more interesting/dangerous heresy to the mainline Seven Star Astrotheology, giving Seven Star Astrotheology two heresies in total.

In the same way, Super Mario Galaxy I and II could be represented just as narrative event chains that activate the Power Star/Luma faith (an accepted additional branch of Astrotheology, not a heresy) that would be headed by Rosalina, the curator (head of religion).

Starmen I think we can treat as items, however we decide to approach them. I have some ideas, but I'd like to be a little farther along in development before we decide this.

Avro Lancaster has informed me that he is finishing up the Province Map and its color coding. He is asking me to make De Jure maps of it, but I am unsure how that'll work, especially since some areas of the Map that are far apart would make sense as the same Duchy or Kingdom (such as the various Wario holdings under one unified Wario Kingdom).

I am actually done with provinces.bmp, and have handed it off to tsf4 to be defined. The other files, like rivers and topography, I'm working on now.

If anyone wants to see the files they're here: https://app.box.com/s/rfgf5w5ct84e233qahph

If I had a Map showing the name of each Province (like in-game), I could easily color-code the Cultures that are obvious, and then we could guess on the rest. This is the same reason De Jure is going to be hard. There are several cases where provinces with no borders to each other (if any, such as islands) would belong in the same Kingdom as a mainland province. The scattered Peach's Castles and vacation homes (which would be Baronies), for example, need to be de jure Mushroom Kingdom. (Is it possible for a Barony to be de jure under a Duchy or Kingdom but not its respective County? I know a Kingdom or Empire can hold Baronies in fief without the County or the Duchy, etc., but if it can't be done de jure, that'll mean we need a lot of one-Holding Counties to represent the clearly present diaspora of some properties. Mario has a house AND a Castle. Luigi has two mansions and lives with Mario.)

Unfortunately, all that exists is the provinces.bmp and the excel file to act as a colour decoder. It'll take some patience, but you can use an eyedropper tool to get the colour ID from a province, find the province's name in my decoder, then decide its de jure placement. There's still some map work to be done before the game loads any files. We'll be at that point soonish though.
 
For those of you still following this Mod, I wish to inform you that Avrolancaster has made great progress on the Map and is trying to set up every county so that I can load CK2 and manually compile the de jure duchies. However, Avrolancaster is apparently busy with RL and has shelved the Mod for the time being. I will contact him about it soon and will keep you updated.
 
But don't lose hope, Mario fans!

I am currently working on the definitions. Almost 65% through them, making great progress so far in 2015. Extremely interested in keeping this mod alive and helping Avro & Turtle out.
 
Cool, this mod looks really neat, will DKC areas be in or not? Perhaps a K Rool invasion chain?

Specifically right now we have no in-stone plans about any invasion chains, but yes the DKC islands, the Northern Kremisphere, the Fruit Kingdoms (from jungle beats) and Timber's Island are all currently on the map. Collectively this region is referred to as "The Rare Chain." Due to climatological reasons I've actually placed the otherwise unrelated Vibe Island amongst the Rare Chain as well.

The idea right now is that by the time we're totally done with this mod all games that are set in this universe will be represented by a start date that corresponds to the release date of the game. Every game will also have a unique event chain that can fire to represent that game at a later date (if you start in 1985 the Mario Sunshine start is represented by an event chain).

There are two games that look like great candidates for scripted invasions just off the top of my head, the Shroob Empire from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time and the Snowmads from Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze