De romanicorum theoriarum XVIII

Spec fic thoughts.

• Discovered, the frog ankles zledo have are actually also similar to the ones on a tarsier. Which…makes sense, tarsiers also being arboreal obligate hypercarnivores. Still it feels weird to find out evolution had the same idea for a cool alien you did (tell me a tarsier is not an alien, I dare you).
• Realized I was doing the elves' chief gods, in my setting, backwards. I had had them as the god of the branches and goddess of the roots, of the World Tree. But the elves, flowers of the World Tree, grow from the branches, so it makes more sense to have her as branch and him as root, when she's the elves' mother-goddess.
  
  One thing this might mean is elf females can have their branching tattoos on their foreheads instead of under their cheeks, for her branches instead of his roots. Before they both had the root ones and it felt weird for the guys, but I also felt weird with the guys having them on their foreheads. I for some reason feel it's okay for gals to have them on their foreheads (I think I just thought the guys would look cool with them on their cheeks).
  
  Ooh I might make it so married ones tattoo a copy of their spouse's tattoo, on whichever part of the face they don't have their own tattoo…
• Realized this coming up with the binary my snake-people use, but certainly useful for other contexts: binary can call numbers pair, quartet, octet, hexadectet, and duotrigestet (2, 4, 8, 16, 32), and then you go up to hexadectet duotrigestet (512).
  
  But since "duotrigestet duotrigestet" (thousand thousand, but actually myriad myriad since 32 is 2⁵) is stupid, then you go quadrate duotrigestet (1,024), from an old word for "squared". Then you have cubic duotrigestet (32,768), biquadrate ("square squared") duotrigestet (1,048,576), sursolid duotrigestet (33,554,432), bicubic duotrigestet (1,073,741,824), and second sursolid duotrigestet (34,359,738,368). Since 34 billion doesn't come up too often in fantasy I only need to take it that far.
  
  Similarly my gnomes' vigesimal can go "score twentyscore" for 8000, but then 160,000 is quadrate twentyscore, 64,000,000 is cubic twentyscore, 25,600,000,000 is biquadrate twentyscore, etc. I don't really need anything beyond that, since numbers above 25 billion don't come up much in fantasy.
• Going to change references to handhelds in my SF to "device". Because "handheld" is already starting to sound like saying "motoring" instead of "driving". And "smartphone" is dumb because they're already more computer than phone, and that trend is only going to continue—already referred to the phone as a part of the handheld, e.g. "his handheld's phone rang". (Come to think of it that should probably be "his handheld's phone notification sounded".)
• Kept trying to figure out how, exactly, zled lasers interact with their ring-grip—like does the ring just seamlessly grade into the "barrel", or does the cylinder stick out behind the ring? But then I decided, no, the ring is in the middle, behind the "barrel", like the ring-grip on the sword is, and it widens out from the lens to the same width as the ring. It looks a bit, in other words, like a symmetrical version of the top half of the Waking Vigil hand cannon in Destiny 2: Forsaken, with the grip around where the cylinder is.
  
  Of course, this raise the question of how the break-top reloading works. What I think I'll do is have the symmetry break down there, and have a hinge at the bottom that it breaks on, to insert new spring cartridges. Not sure how much of it will move when the thing breaks. Maybe change it to swing-out like most modern revolver cylinders? I think break-top is cooler, but I always sacrifice the Rule of Cool to plausibility and good design.
• Having a ring-shaped grip with the barrel centered also lets me have really bananas firearms for them, back when. Namely, the magazine loads into the ring-grip from the side, and is ring-shaped, with the cartridges perpendicular to it, similar to the pan magazine used in the Lewis gun, but with the cartridges facing out not in.
  
  One thing that would mean is that it's relatively simple to belt-feed almost any weapon, though your belts aren't going to be very efficient (dedicated belt-fed weapons would just have it load through like ours do).
  
  Also presumably means the difference between a revolver and a semi-auto was more academic, like clip vs. magazine to many of us. Had thought the semi-auto might also have the advantage revolvers do, that if a round won't fire you just advance to the next one. But I don't think the semi-auto fires directly from the magazine, you chamber each round separately.
• Still torn over the humans who have evil clerics, and whether to have them be witches in all but class. On the one hand a bunch of others call them witches; on the other all the other evil deities are very explicitly opposed to witchcraft. I had had the dark elves and dwarves have witches before I shifted it to evil druids and clerics (respectively). Could do something like the dark elves in Warhammer Fantasy, who hate Chaos worshipers but also summon daemons a lot.
  
  Another thing I decided is that rather than worshiping a pseudo-divine undead sage, the dark dwarves worship an outcast god. I had had the younger generation of dwarf gods (their parent gods are Earth and Fire) be different ways of working minerals with heat, namely Forge and Kiln. So I thought it might be neat to have the outcast one be their sibling Crematorium, who was tricked and seduced by the undeath-power. I have a bunch of benevolent death gods (technically the parent gods of most of my pantheons are also death gods), but I can have bad ones too.
• I mentioned wanting a "two-handed martial but one-handed exotic, 1d10 damage" hammer, for dwarves. Might have it weigh a whole ten pounds, which seems heavy but the waraxe is eight and the bastard sword is six, and they don't depend largely on their weight to do their job. Not sure what to call it; "war maul" comes to mind, though. Oh, ooh, or battlehammer, like Drizzt Do'Urden's friend.