De fabularum mirabilium VI

Fantasy thoughts. Two in a day, yo.

• Both Skyrim and Kingmaker have this trope where you go to a place—Avanchnzel and Labyrinthian in Skyrim, the Abandoned Hut the Stag Lord used to live in in Kingmaker—and a bunch of spectral apparitions re-enact the place's past, without a word of explanation as to why this happens. (I'll make an allowance for when you see Nyrissa's past in Kingmaker, because "it's Fairyland" is an adequate explanation. You could probably make the case that Nyrissa is showing you the Stag Lord's, too, but that's fudging the Author's Saving Throw for him.)
  
  In general it's just very lazy. Much better is the Resident Evil, finding journals everywhere, approach. You could easily find journals of Savos Aren's friends in Labyrinthian, the way you find those of the Nchuan-Zel expedition in Markarth; or those of Watches-the-Roots, From-Deepest-Fathoms, Breya, and Drennen in Avanchnzel; or the Stag Lord and his father. You even do find some scraps of the latter's journals. It's even easier if it's some kind of ancient thing—fill in the backstory in monumental bas reliefs as the characters explore a ruin. (You get a bit of that in Vordakai's tomb.)
  
  If you must do it in visions, have it be in a dream as they camp out near the ruins. Come on. (Also games should make "having to sleep" a thing again.)
• In George "Rape-Rape" Martin's continuing quest to do exactly everything wrong, his dragon-eggs have scales. You know, like how bird eggs have feathers. And shark eggs are covered in denticles. And Gila monster eggs are beaded. Right? I had thought it was one of the many stupidities of the show (like its "keyboard on demo-mode" opening theme), but nope, that's in the book. I really ought to have known; the prop people, like the costume people and David Peterson in his capacity as conlang people, actually do their jobs. It's the writing and music people who are phoning it in, and the former are constrained by the source material.
  
  It occurred to me, though, that I kinda want my dragon eggs to be something weird. I considered something like shark eggs (or rather egg-cases), but shark egg-cases are such weird shapes due to being laid underwater. But it occurred to me, what if my dragon eggs are transparent, like many mollusc eggs are, but with a hard shell made of a gem-mineral? D&D dragons, after all, eat gems, so they can probably also put gem-mineral shells around their eggs. Maybe color-coded, with the wholly transparent shells being ice-dragons, the ruby ones being the fire-dragons, etc. (I don't exactly have chromatic dragons, in my setting.)
• I realized that I can get a subjunctive into my Elven language by just adding a prefix to another prefix. And since my Elven verbs, like Tibetan ones, are marked for volitionality, the subjunctive-as-order can be readily distinguished from the subjunctive-as-wish. (I think the volitionality also gives something like a passive voice, which most ergative languages haven't got—though Mayan ones do. That's certainly one of its functions in Tibetan, the other main one being distinguishing something like "hear" from "listen" or "get X killed" from "kill X".)
• There was another silliness in Game of Thrones. (The show; I don't know about the book but I wouldn't be surprised given Martin was shocked how high a 500-foot wall is, when he saw it in the show. Meaning he never looked at a 500-foot building in a photo, and drew lines to see what it'd look like as a wall.) Anyway, the silliness in at least the show, is that (people have crunched the numbers) the only way a certain scene of shooting down dragons would work, given the depicted ranges, is if the ballistae had a "muzzle" velocity of 2000 meters per second.
  
  I did some digging. The bolts of the kind of siege-engine that shoots bolts typically weigh about 2.4 kilos. (They also usually have a "muzzle velocity" of 60-150 meters per second.) One of those, at 2000 meters per second, is a "muzzle energy" of 4.8 megajoules. Given recoil force is 10% of "muzzle energy", that means every bolt launched from the device subjects it to 480 kilojoules of recoil—the equivalent of 114.7 grams of TNT, or, basically, two hand-grenades, set off inside the ballista (or whatever), every single time it's used. The thing would explode into splinters with one shot.
  
  Incidentally, 150 meters per second is an energy of 27 kilojoules—almost exactly half again the muzzle-energy of a .50 BMG round.
• It occurs to me that a good way to explain the alignments, in D&D, is not so much "law vs. chaos" (a stupid idea unreflectively ganked from Moorcock) but "law vs. charter"—that is, whether the individual or society views things in terms of obligations, or in terms of rights. And then "good vs. evil" is simply whether they're going to use their rights or obligations, toward their proper ends, or abuse them, for their own gain. (Or respect others' rights and keep their obligations toward others, vs. ignoring others' rights or exploiting others' obligations.)
  
  Then ethical neutrality comes down to favoring neither rights and obligations (whether respected or exploited), but respecting or exploiting either as seems most prudent. Moral neutrality would be neither taking pains to respect rights or obligations, nor specifically exploiting or ignoring them—or possibly doing both in (roughly) equal measure.
• Ballistae actually aren't tension weapons at all—they aren't giant crossbows. They're torsion weapons. Their two arms are separate, each sitting in the middle of two big twisted springs, and their "bowstring" is just suspended between the arms to hold the projectile in place. Interestingly a lot of ballista variants (e.g. the scorpio and the onager—though apparently the onager is considered a kind of scorpio) often shot catapult stones, not bolts. Then there was the polybolos, a repeating ballista that also holds the distinction of being the first use of the chain-drive. (Though not quite the first repeating missile weapon, that honor going to the Chinese repeating crossbow, invented in the 4th century BC—its association with Zhuge Liang, 181-234 AD, notwithstanding—whereas the polybolos was 3rd century BC.) China actually did use giant crossbows—repeating ones, in fact—as artillery, though.
• Thinking I might change the settled rural culture's weapon familiarities from heavy pick, lance, and whip-as-martial to longsword, lance, and whip-as-martial. Though the heavy pick is a great cavalry weapon, in Pathfinder (for some dumb reason) it's not bludgeoning-or-piercing, it's only piercing. And the only thing the pick has going for it is a high critical multiplier.
  
  (Also the two main kinds of undead mook, zombies and skeletons, have their damage reduction defeated by slashing and bludgeoning, respectively; no undead mook loses its damage reduction to piercing, only rakshasas do, and they're not in my setting.)
  
  Might give the heavy pick to the nomadic horse culture, actually, since it's somewhat similar to Plains cultures' "war clubs" (which were really hammers), and replace the hooked lance. I'd had their main melee weapon be regular clubs and greatclubs, but those are simple weapons, so almost all of them will know how to use them anyway.
• I considered using the spiritualist emotional focuses (anger, dedication, despair, fear, hatred, jealousy, and zeal), from Occult Adventures, as the names of days of the week; the rationale for such odd weekdays being that the serpentfolk named them, as they named the months after the creature subtypes—I decided to have some of the barely-humanoid humanoids (serpentfolk, araneas, sahuagin) use psychic magic, instead of normal divine or arcane magic.
  
  But then I realized I can go with the energy types—acid, cold, electricity, fire, force, negative, positive, sonic—and just combine negative and positive into one day. Obviously they'd be named something other than "Acidday"; I'm thinking the English translations would be something like "Vitriol, Frost, Lightning, Flame, Distortion, Life, Ringing". But I'll probably translate them into my Common for my actual calendar, the way the Elder Scrolls setting does.