Shattered Kingdoms

You sort of can find shamanic symbols in the game, but they are not the same as religious stuff. There are animal totems that are kind of like symbols. If shamans got a "symbol' power, I think it should be craft totem. They would craft a the totem of a spirit animal and it would do stuff. Different animals would give different powers and so forth.

I'm not going to put to much thought into this 'cause I doubt it will happen. There used to be spirit belts for shaman which were kind of like symbols. I'm actually glad those are gone because they were sort of idiotic. You had to have a special belt to use some of your spiritual powers. Good call by Dulrik there.

If something like this would be coded in, that would be a nice thing. Though I would like to see the ability to wear the totem only given to those that complete a quest to find out what their totem animal is. Maybe have the generic thing be a bag with bits of animal pieces in it, then when it is worn by someone that completed the quest, it morphs into their totem animal. Then, if there are buffs with it, have the buffs only work for those who have done the quest and are wearing the right totem animal. That would stop people from making them, wearing them to change them and then handing them off to others.

Maybe you could drop your totem in the room you are in and it could pulse with magical energy every so often and grant you super special awesome perks.

Like an extra attack or, I don't know, maybe some extra mental energy.

Or drop it and it turns into a pet. Very low HP pet...

Wait, I like this. We could COMBINE those ideas.

You could have a low HP pet that provided bonuses to you.

This way people could kill the pet to take away the bonus. Brilliant!

One step further with this. If a shaman lets said pet die, their ancestors are upset and curse them, and they result with a blemish-like state until they complete a quest based on their totem animal. Such a quest would contain questions that would rotate similar to the death-quest and vary in length depending on the level of the shaman.

I figure if people want to have symbols, they should join a faith. If they want shamans to have symbols, then there has to be some drawback of ticking off their ancestors similar to a person in a faith that has upset their god.

I can't go on...

Awww, why not Grep? I actually like this idea. Heck, I'd be willing to write the questions for the atonement process, the descriptions of the totems/pets, the quest to get the totem. All that would need to be done is the code behind it.

Because of this.

There already are such symbols actually. Difficulty to obtain: moderate. Other consequences: yes. But they do have capabilities that can even trump faith-only symbol slot bonuses.