Playing with Fantasy II

Fantasy RPG thoughts.

• I like psionics; as I've mentioned, it's the thing my dwarves use instead of arcane magic. Only...I hate power-points. I also consider the sorcerer kinda a waste, just a wizard who doesn't know what he's doing. So, decided, in my campaign: sorcerers are still powered by Charisma, get their spells according to the same table, but those spells? Psionic powers. This doesn't hurt dwarves, as it normally would, because my dwarves take a penalty to Dexterity, not Charisma.
  
  (In 3.5 the psion became Int-based, rather than each ability-score powering one of the psionic disciplines. They also introduced "wilders", psion-sorcerers powered by Charisma who were very much the answer to a question nobody asked.)
  
  In my setting, where wizards are powered by Int and therefore, manipulate things by knowledge about them, sorcerers (=psions) are powered by Charisma, and manipulate things by feelings about them. So they also have an element of the wilder. Don't think I'll have psychic warriors; there never really was an arcane-magic equivalent (as a basic class), so it's not like they fill a necessary void.
• Decided my campaign's calendar will be lunisolar but work out like the more-or-less purely solar Mesoamerican ones. While the solar year is divided into eight seasons (or rather, both the beginnings and high-points of the seasons are marked, a bit like on the Chinese calendar), the phases of the two moons provide each day with a secondary name.
  
  There are two sets of day-names, one based on one moon's twenty-seven day period, and the other on the other moon's sixteen-day period; they sync up every 432 days, and then they also sync up with the year every 432 years (I'm skipping the fact neither moons nor planets are actually likely to have periods evenly divisible into days). Those two sets of day names come from the elves and dwarves, each of whom is from one of the moons, originally.
  
  And the reason that they assign a different name to each day of the planet? Why, when you live on the moon, the planet is always visible overhead, if you're on the right side of it. And the fact it runs through a full cycle of phases every twenty-four hours would quite certainly get noticed, as would the fact that there is a certain number of those cycles in each of your world's days (which from the planet are the moon's phases).
• It's actually something of a challenge to model witchcraft, as an anthropological phenomenon, in a D&D game. None of the normal classes really cut it; certainly warlocks (which in 3.5 at least were also crazy OP, at least at low levels) won't do. I considered the goofy cultists of the demon- and devil-lords, from Book of Vile Darkness (blech), but still not enough like a skinwalker.
  
  Instead, I decided to gestalt the "mountebank", as updated to 3.5e in Dragon Magazine Compendium, with the sha'ir from the same book. Only instead of elemental and genie-based powers, gave the sha'ir evil powers and ties to fiends. Likewise changed the basis of the mountebank's powers from "bargains with demon lord" to "deliberate breaking of taboo".
  
  The resulting witches are both the mages and the priests of an ancient human civilization that once tormented my campaign-setting, but who are vanished now. (I think I mentioned them before, the ones the elves and dwarves caused an Ice Age to break the naval power of?)
• Along with being sorcerer-based, my psions now have familiars. Because I hate psicrystals, they're talking rocks. Another thing I did is that both elves and dwarves normally take familiars from animals native to the moons they left behind, weird technicolor critters with modified anatomy, like green nocturnal ravens with slit-pupils or fire-resistant yellow bats (which, being based on flying foxes, have no echolocation but do have Scent, and give a bonus to their master's Intimidation checks rather than Listen, because flying foxes are really territorial).
• Don't think I mentioned it here, but I have had some chance to play 5e with my brother and his friends. In general, I approve of most of the decisions they made, or at least don't disapprove (although trying to minimize your references to gender more or less renders the entire drow culture non-existent, what with them being reverse-Taliban and all). This is, at least, an Impressionist painting of Dungeons & Dragons, even if it falls short of the detail some of us would like.
  
  I won't, however, be making the switch myself, because aside from how there is nothing good in 5e that's not there in 3e, is the fact that they have all the classes use the same attack table. Which...what? Fighters are good at, y' know, fighting, that's why their attacks get better every level. Wizards are not good at it. Clerics and rogues are only okay at it. (Also? Adding a "path" for monks to have elemental powers à la Avatar, is stupid. Shades of 4e's sad MMORPG mimicry.)
• My setting only has one "race" of fiends, made up of basically every "guy with horns and wings" fiend, from imp to balor, regardless of Blood War faction or home plane (since my cosmology's different). Then I added succubi.
  
  Also added an ability like the one "pseudonatural creatures" have: the fiend can do something that reveals it's not a guy with horns and wings, but rather an eldritch abomination that operates by fundamentally different laws. Like by opening its mouth to reveal a functioning eyeball, bending a joint the wrong way, or opening a vertical mouth in the middle of its chest. (This is actually stronger than how the pseudonatural creature does it, since that only imposes a -1 penalty on attacks against the creature, while the fiends make anyone who fails a save be "shaken"—a -2 penalty to several rolls—for the duration of the encounter.)
  
  I'm having trouble coming up with how to mechanically represent the context, but I think I'll have elves and maybe dwarves occasionally do something similar, except with half the penalty (-1 rather than -2), and probably applied to their own social rolls. Your eyes glowing and your body hair turning to leaves, or flames and smoke erupting from your eyes, whenever you're agitated, is probably a matter of some social delicacy. (Presumably the penalty applies in reverse, to Intimidate checks.)
• I decided to base all my races' size-dimorphism on animals. Elves and dwarves have males 15% heavier and about 5% taller, which is the mass-ratio, and its cube-root, for foxes and wolves. Gnomes have males and females almost the same size, because male and female beavers (monogamous rodents!) are very close in size.
  
  Goblins and ogres (which includes orcs) are polygamist. So, goblins (and hobgoblins), I based on cats (since they're mutant elves and elves are foxes), with males 30% heavier and 11% taller (the ratio seen in a lot of species, e.g. snow leopards). Ogres I based on apes, males twice as heavy and 21% taller, though there isn't a direct tie to dwarves (whose ratios are based on wolves). One thing this means is female ogres are actually Medium-sized, not Large (though they're at the big end).
  
  Decided to keep females larger, for the dark elves (who, aside from matriarchy, don't look or act much like drow, since they worship a mistletoe parasitizing the World Tree and revere thrushes instead of spiders). Turns out tanuki have the opposite dimorphism ratio from foxes, so used them. For the dark dwarves (who are mostly duergar, except for coloring, with some elements of derro), I used dingoes, since they're a sleazy wolf subspecies. (Oddly, though coyotes are gross, they are apparently more consistently monogamous than wolves are.)
• Decided that elves using axes was weird to no purpose, so now they're back to using bows and swords (although the bastard sword is a martial weapon, for them, so they can use it one-handed at leisure). Also decided to have gnomes use axes, since they're forest-dwellers. This leaves dwarves using picks and hammers, since they're subterranean smiths.
  
  Also gave the elves' leaf-armor an overhaul; now their more heavily-armored warriors wear scale armor made of dark-leaf, from the Arms and Equipment Guide (the alchemically-treated leaves of the darkwood tree). Lighter-armored elves, instead of wearing leather, wear wood and bark armor, from the same book...but it's half as heavy and has two points lower armor-check penalty, because it's made of darkwood. Based gnomes' equipment, made from mushrooms, on "chitin" armor (since that's what mushrooms are made of), but applied to more than just heavy armor (and not as expensive). My dark elves, who are pirates, now wear masterwork shark-skin armor. And gave the orcs and ogres stone weapons.
  
  I also went back to using coins instead of trade-beads, though they're triangular and have holes in them for threading them on cash-strings. My players found learning a new currency system more trouble than it was worth, even though it was just a re-skin of the old one.