Sepiche

Corruption works, but you have to cast it on an uncapped shard. It only bugs out completely if the shard has already been capped.

I killed off the earth elemental lord the other night as well, visited all the marked locations, and nothing happened (and the quest to clear it was still there), but when I reloaded my game the quest was gone, and the green borders disappeared.

To add to this: I've noticed that same thing if you try to corrupt a "capped" shard, but if you cast corruption on an "uncapped" shard it will disappear, but on the next turn you can click on the now invisible death shard and it will appear and start building a shrine when you click build.

Dark Pact Strategic ? ? (Fairly modest since it's cost comes in other ways...) Probably Spell would have some sort of effect that helps defend or boost the city Death Cast it on a city and in exchange for a few population points per turn the spell would help protect the city or something like that. Maybe it creates undead units whenever it's attacked that help the defenders, maybe it helps nullify ma

Kudos for mentioning Dom3. I think there's an awful lot of brilliant game design that went into Dom3 that is all too often overlooked because of it's graphics.

In the thread on sovereign creation I mentioned Dominions 3, and for what it's worth this is more or less how Dominions handles sovereigns being killed too. In Dom if your pretender dies he loses a little of his magic power and will sometimes have lingering wounds, but can be brought back to life by ordering priests at a temple to "Call God". The more priests you have the less time it takes. It's a good system though... it penalizes you for losing your pretender, both in h

Not sure if it has been mentioned, but for further ideas in sovereign design I think the pretender creation in Dominions 3 is an excellent place to start. Depending on the faction you play you have a large selection of different forms for your avatar (everything from dracoliches to gorgons to hags), you select your magic spheres, and you have options to change the "scales" of your land (are your people productive, organized, lucky, etc). Once you get familiar with the game, th