Playing with Fantasy IV

Fantasy-game thoughts.

• Using a different set of estimates for the giant prehistoric wolverine Megalictis gives me a shoulder height of 4 feet 4 inches, quite respectable for something being ridden by 5-foot dwarves, and a body-length of 9 feet 11 inches. Decided they and the elves' cats are magical beasts, as smart as griffins or "worgs"; the wolverines, cats, and goblins' wolves can all speak a language I'm calling Bestial, and understand their masters' language, but can't speak it.
  
  The relationship those creatures have with their masters is basically "fictive kinship", specifically the humanoid becoming something like a parent to the "mount". Helps that Homotherium were probably gregarious, and that while wolverines aren't, they do often travel with their fathers for a number of years. Actually the most questionable are the "worgs", since I based them on amphicyonids rather than actual canids, but they are closer to canids than to ursids. Also "magical beast".
• Not gonna go with macuahuitl for the elves after all (yes, "macuahuitl"; in Classical Nahuatl, anyway, inanimates had no plural). Just giving them swords, hewing-spears, and bows, with the blades as leaves and the hilt or shaft as a stem of varying length. Decided that since all their weapons and armor have half the hardness of steel (being made of wood), it makes no sense to make them cost as much as mithral or even the "darkleaf" from the Arms and Equipment Guide, so I'm just having them cost as much as darkwood despite having the qualities of darkleaf (which, for weapons, means "only as good as darkwood" in the first place). Gnomes' mushroom equipment will be similar, since the Arms and Equipment Guide gave chitin weapons and armor half the weight of normal, and they don't have to fight giant bugs to get it; gnomes make a different set of equipment from their chitin, though (and grow special calcified mushrooms, for things like hard weapon-edges and studded "leather" studs).
  
  Was conflicted as to what to do with the dwarves; there aren't really any materials I can use as a basis for their volcanic-glass equipment, adamantine, especially as of 3.5 and Pathfinder, being crazy OP. Decided to just have it give the benefit that "dwarvencraft" items do, in Races of Stone, of doubling the benefit of masterwork items—and then give it the base price (half) and base weight (75%) that stone and obsidian do, without the "fragile" quality (and with hardness 8, rather than "half the hardness of the base weapon", since the base weapon, if metal, actually has hardness 10). Instead of the stoneplate and stone lamellar from Pathfinder, thought I'd use stoneplate and stonemail that are simply stone versions of plate and mail.
  
  I think the members of those races pay only 25% the normal price (base + masterwork + 10 gp per pound-before-weight-reduction for darkwood and chitin, ½ base + masterwork × 2 for dwarf), if they buy stuff at home and among their people—this was based on the prices of guns in campaigns where firearms are more common. (Dwarves also pay that for firearms, since those are their main ranged weapons. Gnomes prefer crossbows, I decided, and halflings like blowguns, because my halflings are swamp nomads.) They still pay full price if they don't want to schlepp all the way back home.
• Decided my goblins use falchions while my orcs use great-axes and great-clubs; the orcs' gear is stone, since they, like the ogres they're a branch of, are primitives (and are also mutant dwarves, with an affinity for stone but lacking the dwarfish ability to make stone weapons that aren't "fragile"). The hobgoblins also have a penchant for dual-wielding; where Pathfinder stats them as fighters, I statted them as rangers (partly because I made all my goblins more like bugbears in terms of their fondness for stealth, a ranger's forte rather than a fighter's).
  
  Made the main difference between goblins and hobgoblins just be scope and ambition—since hobgoblins don't have that Charisma penalty. They're both lawful (without bugbears, there's no need to have one goblin race for each ethical alignment), and that lawfulness means that they can form large bands, when each son of a chief starts his own family and becomes his father's vassal. Hobgoblins can then combine these bands into tribes, while goblins seldom do—and hobgoblins take goblins as vassals.
  
  The orcs, meanwhile, and ogres, are differentiated by the fact male orcs live with their females, while male ogres live somewhat apart from them—since female orcs are less able to defend themselves than female ogres, and male orcs eat less than male ogres. Both orcs and ogres kick their sons out at adulthood, to avoid that "kills father, takes over the harem of all the females but own mother" thing I've talked about with apes and lions. Sometimes after establishing their own harems the sons come back to be their father's vassals, but their fathers wisely don't completely trust them.
  
  Not a fan of the way ogres, and to a lesser extent orcs, are depicted in the Pathfinder rules and setting. Unnecessary Grimdark is puerile, and almost no Grimdark is necessary in a game, which people play for fun.
• Something I realized: in western games at least, I generally prefer settings with multiple entire pantheons to settings where an entire world has one pantheon. 3e and earlier Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are vastly preferable to Dragonlance, 4e and later D&D, or the Elder Scrolls setting. Though admittedly part of that is I dislike Dragonlance just in general, 4e and later were a cluster-flunk in every way, and Elder Scrolls, while less irritating than the Post-Colonial Studies 101 seen in Dragon Age, is still Comparative Religion 101.
  
  Then again, the exception to the rule would be games originating as tactical systems that later branched out to other genres, where people wear big shoulder armor. The Warhammer Fantasy setting has multiple pantheons and the Warcraft setting basically doesn't (though the Night Elves are basically the only people who worship Elune, they're not really the only ones who worship Cenarius), but Warcraft is far better. Maybe that's just because Sigmar, while less annoying than Talos, is nothing on the Light, which is the only successful CrystalDragonJesus I am aware of.
  
  No, Eru Ilúvatar doesn't count. He's pretty much just Jesus, or at least Ha-Shem, without the Crystal Dragon.
• One thing I thought would be cool, after having read The Jungle Book, is to have each of the animal-god initiation societies that teach the humans of my setting their class-skills, have poems about the Law for each animal's society. I decided the easiest one to do would be something approximating the Kalevala or Hiawatha, at least in terms of having trochaic meter (but looser with the number of feet). Nice thing is that that meter is so insistent that the poetry doesn't have to rhyme; rhyming poetry in a world where people don't speak English always rubs me the wrong way, if it's not written in a conlang like the Song of the Dragonborn. Poetry and song really are how pre-modern societies teach their laws, and even how they teach techniques—bāguàzhǎng, for instance, is recorded in a series of songs, because its original practitioners were mostly illiterate.
  
  Kinda want to have elves and dwarves also having such songs and poems, minus the totem societies of course, and in different poetical styles. Except not about teaching a "Law" like the ones in the Jungle Book so much as, say, explicating cosmology; they're far more advanced than the "Migration Era skipped straight to Renaissance" barbarians-in-plate-armor that the humans represent. Trouble is it's really hard to find meters as insistent as the Kalevala/Hiawatha one, that can carry un-rhymed, non-alliterative verse—especially because almost all post-antiquity European poetry is either rhymed or alliterative (and it's very hard to write the ancient varieties that aren't, in English—it's actually linguistically impossible to do some of them in French). I really don't do poetry, anyway (I know a bit about it but knowing about something and being able to do it are two different things).
• Seems like I'm the least excited about the new Zelda of anyone I know; I'm deeply skeptical about some of the choices they made, and some of the other choices just represent elements I always hate in games. In the former case, a main story you can miss parts of just sounds like "we hid your anxiety medication", to me. In the latter, item durability is, all by itself, a major factor (possibly the determining factor) in why I don't feel any need to actually play Oblivion beyond the little bit I have.
  
  And I don't play Zelda to be wowed by innovative game design; my favorite installments, Twilight Princess and Link to the Past, were absolutely typical games of their hardware generation, distinguished not by any unusual gameplay but by the fact they were The Legend of Zelda. Skyward Sword is one of my least favorites, though more because it has an almost unplayably slow middle section, and takes forever to get going, than because of the Wii remote—but the irritation of having to use the Wii remote reduces my patience for slow plotting.
  
  Still, "new Zelda". In a way I suppose I should resent that Nintendo has this kind of hold on me, but the fact remains they're doing the best work in fantasy since Tolkien.
• The best work in fantasy in English is also in games, namely Warcraft, although I actually "consume" Warcraft via tie-in novels—because MMO is my least favorite (or rather "most hated") type of game. And about those tie-in novels: say what you will, but not one of the ones available at my library failed to bring tears to my eyes at least once. Sure, there are some questionable aspects to the writing; people tapped for tie-in novels are often not actually writers, per se, in their own right (and when they try to become so—as seen with Margaret Weis and R. A. Salvatore—the results tend to be disastrous).
  
  But still, Warcraft has far and away the best setting, the best worldbuilding and mythopoeia, of any fantasy currently on offer, and they have managed to capture at least one aspect of medieval reality that none of the more prestigious fantasy writers seem to even know existed. Namely, "I am a warrior, but my son has a religious calling, so I don't know what to make of him", as seen in the fictional biography of Anduin Wrynn, son of Varian, and the actual biography of (among other people) Thomas Aquinas. We return to the Light being the best "non-copyright-infringing Christianity" in all of fantasy fiction.
• It occurs to me that oracles, cavaliers, and summoners might have a use as NPC classes. Like, for instance, my goblins belong to NPC classes (males are warriors, females are experts), so their priests are adepts. But my hobgoblins are in PC classes (males are rangers, females are alchemists), so it makes sense their priests would be oracles. (I might also have oracles as the common priests of human communities that aren't quite podunk enough for just an adept.)
  
  And the mostly-fallen evil human civilization, whose priests are witches, might also have summoners, in a relationship to their witch-priests somewhat analogous to the one between clerics and druids (the eidolon being the analogue of a druid's animal companion, in this comparison). That got me to thinking, they also probably have cavaliers serving a somewhat similar role to other cultures' paladins. Firstly because the anti-paladin is OP if you don't actively want to kill your PCs.
  
  But more to the point, the code of conduct, which forbids "willingly and altruistically" committing good acts and requires the anti-paladin to always place his own interests and desires above all else, means they are not going to be a feature of any civilization that likes existing—Megatron is regularly called an idiot for keeping Starscream around, but only the Kingdom of Idiots would have an entire class of Starscreams as a normal part of its normal cultural repertoire.
  
  Okay so Starscream is actually neutral evil not chaotic (Soundwave is lawful evil, because he's a monk). Point still stands.