Piety for homebrew pantheon
 

i really like the piety mechanic from Theros, but I'm not a fan of the campaign itself. I'd like to get the mechanic working for my own pantheon I've already put in HL, but I'm at a loss on how to even get started. I've been studying the Piety page in the editor, but something's not clicking for me on how to start modifying it for my own gods. Anyone able to give me a push in the right direction?

Take a look in the editor at one of the Dieties from Theros. You'll see that it bootstraps the Piety ability (ab5CPiety). That Piety ability will add tags (5CPiety.1, 5CPiety.3, etc) to the Hero whenever they reach a piety score of a certain amount. The default amounts are 1, 3, 10, 25, and 50, because that's what the Theros book uses. It's possible to add different amounts from those, but more complicated and advanced than you may want to go.* So I'd suggest sticking with those.

The Deity also bootstraps each of its piety abilities, with conditionals that look for those tags. So when you reach piety 3 with Mogis, you get the "Mogis's Devotee" ability. If you look at Mogis, you'll see that it bootstraps that ability, with a condition of "hero#5CPiety.3", which is looking to see if the tag for level 3 piety is present on the Hero.

So you'll make your own deity, probably using "New (Copy)" of an existing Theros one. Make your abilities for your various piety levels, then replace the bootstraps on the copied deity with your new abilities, making sure the bootstrap condition for each ability looks for the appropriate tag for its Piety score requirement.


*To do this, I had to define custom tags in the COM_5ePack - Tags.1st file. To add new piety level tags, you'd need to make your own Tags file with a new group and new tags. Then you'd have to create a new copy of the ab5CPiety ability, and change its eval script to add your new custom tags at the appropriate Piety levels. Finally, you'd go back to your custom diety. Bootstrap your new version of Piety in place of the old one, and use your new tags as the conditions for your bootstraps. It's totally doable, just harder. And if you're going to do this, don't modify the community pack files; make your own separate ones. If you modify the community pack files, your changes will be overwritten the next time the pack is updated.

Got it!

Aw man, that looks good, thank you Fenris. I think you got me going in the right direction. I'll work on this weekend and see if I can get it going. I'll come back in here and update later.

Update: Success! First I moved ll the Theros gods and the piety abilities over to my Altannica Pantheon file, so I had them all on one file. Then I went into COM_5ePack - Tags.1st file and changed 5CPiety to WJRPiety. Then I went through every god, ability, conditions and changed 5C to WJR. Its working great. Thanks Fenris, for the help.

Scooby, you may want to make a copy of the Tags.1st file with just your special tags in it. The next update could overwrite the regular COM_5ePack - Tags.1st file, which would delete out your work!