Das Rollenspiel Vier

Fantasy RPG thoughts, mostly relating to my campaign.

• About the one mechanical difference between my stuff and official Pathfinder, aside from some changes to the races (I made gnomes electricity-resistant, since fungi apparently quite like electric current), is that in my thing, witches detect on the same line as evil clerics for spells like detect evil. (Realized, I don't have any evil gods with clerics, though I do have some neutral gods whose clerics can be evil.)
  
  In general, in my campaign, a cleric who wants to be the equivalent of an ordinary D&D "evil cleric" won't just switch deities and do an atonement: they'll retrain, using the rules in Ultimate Campaign, into a witch. (I would let them swap their ability scores entirely, since witches are Int-based and clerics Wis-based, treating each difference of ability-scores as if it were an ability-score increase.)
  
  I had had the snake people and tide things (sahuagin) have evil clerics, but then decided no, they have psychics with the faith discipline.
• I did also decide the planes are different (think I've said part of this before). I more or less left the Ethereal and Astral alone, but the Outer and Inner aren't there, and you get to the Shadow Plane via the Ethereal. Basically in my setting the Material Plane has layers, with the higher and lower layers being the ones the spirits of the dead, and "outsiders", live on. I think the (incorporeal) undead and fiends inhabit the Shadow Plane? And then if you go (down?) through enough layers you might get to the Negative Energy Plane, where the (un)death-entity resides, plotting to retake the cosmos from life.
  
  And then the celestials and good dead will be in a plane that's not unlike the First World/Plane of Faerie, minus the psychopathic immortals screwing everything up. The gods of my Pathfinder setting didn't create the worlds, they're just the firstborn thinking beings within it; those of them that decided to learn about and safeguard the cosmos they found themselves in became "gods", while those that decided to subjugate and modify it, and destroy it if they felt like it, became "fiends" and moved to a different set of planar layers. If you go "up" enough layers on that side, you get to the Positive Energy Plane.
  
  Don't think I have any one thing corresponding to the death-entity, in the Positive plane, but that's thematically interesting: evil is solitary, cold and dead, where good is multiplicitous, complex, and lively. The (un)death that has its ultimate form in the entity that inhabits the Negative Energy Plane has, as its opposite, not an equally singular entity, not even one that can take over other beings as the undeath-power can, but every living thing in the cosmos. Everything it has besides its Negative Energy "throne", the evil has to steal.
• Put in some work on my Pathfinder setting's writing systems. Decided the giantish would take inspiration from the Aligned continuity version of Cybertronian (which in turn seems to be based on the "ancient Autobot" writing from the first cartoon). At first I was going to just add a feature to each letter, relative to the letter before, and then just go down my list of sounds, so while the letters' shapes were systemized what sounds they are is random—like Ogham. Ogham is that way because it's not purely autochthonous (it's influenced by Roman, Greek, or even runic—it has sounds found in Proto-Germanic but not Primitive Irish, and works similar to cipher runes). So I was thinking Giantish was inspired by written Draconic, but not actually based on the Draconic script. But it was uninspiring; so I redid it, wound up with something much more like Cybertronian proper.
  
  As for the Draconic writing that was going to inspire giantish writing, it is, like Dovahzul's writing, similar to cuneiform and written with dragons' claws. But Dovahzul breaks a rule of cuneiform by having strokes that are more than 90° off from other strokes—in proper cuneiform there are vertical and horizontal strokes in one direction each, and one or two diagonal strokes whose angles are between the vertical and horizontal direction, plus a mark made with the end of the stylus. (The Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet breaks this rule in one sign by having an upward pointing diagonal stroke.) I keep the rule (but with curves not diagonals), but the vertical strokes go upward, not downward—dragon writing, originally used for territory marking, is designed to be scratched into an object that a dragon is perching on, but read by beings approaching it. It's easier to claw toward yourself than away.
• Gnomish, meanwhile, took some inspiration from the new version of "Gnommish" that Disney imposed on Artemis Fowl when they bought it. For once they were right; the original version of Gnommish was embarrassing, probably worse than the original version of Espruar(!). Only I didn't like the curved lines; instead, I went with diamond-shapes, twice as tall as they are wide. I also made a dark-dwarf version of my dwarven script, this one based on octagons instead of hexagons. I do not recommend octagons to the conlanger—conscripter?—they're all kinds of hassle that hexagons aren't.
• I had had my Common Tongue be a simplified form of the language of one of my human cultures, used for trade—and often known as "the trade language" or "trade [culture name]"—but I decided that it's actually derived from two of them. Its vocabulary varies by region; basically it's a dialect continuum that corresponds to one of the main ones at one end, and the other at its other end, but is always more comprehensible to foreigners to a region than the local language's "pure" form would be.
  
  It gets part of its cross-linguistic usability by taking a lot of terms from the language of the evil-Atlantean culture, much like how you can probably understand a Wikipedia article on something in chemistry, in almost any Western European language you know just a little of, since all their chemistry terms are from the same Greco-Roman sources ours are. (Evil-Atlantean had a lot of influence on their languages even though they hated that civilization, like how there are a bunch of Turkish-derived terms in Russian.)
  
  I also decided that the Common Tongue is often known as Plain Speech, which, aside from "common" and "plain" being rough synonyms, "plain" is also the translation of the name of a dialect continuum whose usability is increased by retaining elements of an older source.
• Someone arguing against the idea of alignments in D&D said that the "tells the DM what kind of game you want" function is better served by asking the players specifically what kind of game they want. Fine, true…but what about each and every NPC? Sure you should have these things worked out for the major ones, but every single monster? Seeing hobgoblins are lawful evil or orcs are chaotic evil tells the DM at a glance that hobgoblins will fight to the last man, but orcs will cut and run, ever man for himself, the second a battle starts going against them.
  
  In my thing the exception to orcs' chaotic evil behavior is orcs defending their homes, because being able to defend a territory and a harem is what makes an orc chief a chief, and every subordinate orc, the sons of a chief, would be protecting his mother (or at least fighting to guard her retreat) even if he has designs on his father's position. Also you need to be around to take advantage of your leader's falling in battle, though the guy most associated with that is neutral evil, not chaotic. No good usurping the leadership of your tribe if your whole tribe gets killed, after all.
• I'd really like to use the Words of Power system from Ultimate Magic, and I may actually make a script at some point with one logogram for each of the Words. But I sure as hell can't use it at the tabletop, because it's crazy complicated and basically just gives a "fluff" improvement. You know me; the only person who loves fluff more than me is Nakano Kuroto. But even I balk at trying to use the Words of Power system in an actual game—and my players would flat-out rebel, and I wouldn't blame them.
• Decided that humans make some equipment (rather than all their equipment) out of the bones of certain animal-intelligence magical beasts, like hydras, and the bone has the qualities of noqual. (Also decided gnomish fungus equipment has the quality of singing steel, which is basically mithral except for its speeding up bardic performance; and elven leaves are basically mithral with the quality of wyroot.) Also decided the dwarf equipment, made of a coralline alga, has the qualities of fire-forged steel for weapons and frost-forged steel for armor, rather than those of mithral, since "lighter" isn't really that important to dwarves. (Elves can also "wake up" their leaves to give them the quality of alchemical silver, while dwarves can do the same with their alga to give it the quality of cold iron.)
  
  I also think I'm shifting to the "innate bonuses" system, where all magic items in certain slots (belts, necklaces, cloaks, headbands) give the bonuses associated with belts of giant strength, incredible dexterity, or mighty constitution, amulets of natural armor, cloaks of resistance, and headbands of vast intelligence, inspired wisdom, or alluring charisma (also headbands of mental prowess and belts of physical perfection). I mostly did this so elves can have cloaks of elvenkind without penalizing their saves and dwarves can have belts of dwarvenkind beneficial bandoliers without sacrificing ability boosts, but I also thought of a cool flavor-y thing with humans: amulets of their gods, based on the talismans in Occult Adventures, that basically every human of a PC class will wear.