Mélange VIII

Random thoughts, only 5/8ths about icosahedral amusements. None of them reference Dune because I hate Dune (much like the Warhammer 40,000 setting it heavily influenced, it's better as a source of memes than actually engaged with seriously).

• Realized probably the simplest way to turn kytons into goblin ancestor-gods, which I'm calling "barghests", is to swap out a few powers here and there (because they're pure fear, not torture) and then apply, basically, the lycanthrope template, but with my version of worgs as the "base animal". I actually have to swap a lot fewer things than one would think, because kytons run almost as much on fear as on pain, and many of their mutilation-y things will still fly given how much influence from Predator my goblins have.
• Arcane is good. Really, really good. My brother has the bizarre idea that Silco having a cause, the independence of Zaun, makes him better than the other gang leaders of the Lanes, who operate purely from self-interest. But the other gang-leaders didn't spread Shimmer around or come very close to a losing war with Piltover largely out of nationalistic pride.
  
  In the immortal words of Daeran Arendae, violence in a good cause is indeed different: it's much more bloody, and is done with pinkies out.
  
  If I had another complaint, it would be that "Get Jinxed" plays at one point (albeit diagetically, when Jinx is listening to the radio while working—"you're listening to your own image song? don't be that guy"), but "Here Comes Vi" never does. Shameful, shameful oversight. Admittedly she isn't a Piltover enforcer yet, maybe that's it?
• Golly bob howdy but Pathfinder is weirdly light on items for storing and preserving food, and cooking it. I mean you can use a cauldron of brewing in camp as well as in the alchemy lab, but other than that? I don't think there are any magical storehouses or anything.
  
  I also think there need to be more low-level magical traps, let your rogues earn their keep earlier on. I mean, since a summon monster VI trap is CR 7, isn't a summon monster I trap CR 2? And maybe summon minor monster as CR 1? 1d3 fiendish-template animals sounds like a CR 1 hazard to me.
• Ghostbusters Afterlife is a fitting conclusion to the franchise. The two main kids are extremely believable as Egon's grandchildren (the girl especially is adorable—not just her looks and mannerisms but how her shirt is often buttoned wrong), and everything else is good to excellent. (It does have the weakness of being much more interesting before the big ghost stuff starts happening, but that was also true of the original.)
  
  Critics have mostly panned it in the stupidest manner imaginable, seemingly to punish it for being what the fans wanted, because the critics wanted the 2016 one to be well-received. Which was never going to happen; you can't try to reboot one of the tightest-written movies ever made as a piece of crappy improv, no matter what 1986 Fundamentalist "everything in pop culture is satanic" moral payload you attach to try to shame people into liking it.
  
  Sorry but the 2016 one was fourth-rate improv consisting very largely of fart jokes, extended painfully-stupid dancing sequences, and a running gag where the protagonist is obnoxious to a Chinese-takeout delivery guy. Can't imagine why people didn't like it.
• The seven deadly sins are drastically overdone, in fiction. Decided instead that my setting's blasphemous warlockery will run off the Four Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance: perversion (the sin of Sodom), betrayal (denial of wages to workers), oppression (of widows and orphans), and murder. Of course, a game-setting is more PG-13, so the main form perversion takes (aside from the decadent witch culture having some sibling marriages) is cannibalism—sexual appetites aren't the only ones that can be perverted. Helps the royal caste of the modern thalassocratic Valyrians are dhampirs.
  
  Also decided that the non-fiend evil gods basically want to use the witch-power of the fiends against fiends, like using the One Ring against Sauron, or using Stasis against the Darkness (huh funny how one of those examples understands what a bad idea it is, Eris). They mostly take the form of murder (i.e. human[oid] sacrifice), although the ogres and orcs are tyrants and cannibals and the dark elves and dwarves are tyrants. (Both go in for a certain amount of backstabbing but you can't encourage that and still maintain a society, any more than you can permit most versions of perversion.)
• Decided that the elves' panthers age relative to lions as elves age relative to humans: maturity 2/3 later (elves in my setting are adults at 25 to humans' 15), then age 12 times slower. Which means that, as lions are adults at 3 years, the panthers are at 5; lions get to be middle-aged at 8, so the panthers reach it at 96.
  
  From there though we apply the game-rule aging system where "venerable" is twice middle age (70 for humans, who hit it at 35), so 192 for the panthers. Then "old" is halfway between the two, 144 for the panthers. Lions only live about 19 years in the wild, which makes the panthers' maximum lifespan 228 years.
• Thinking I'll redo my Draconic alphabet, since the old one was pretty much just Persian cuneiform upside-down and with the phonological values assigned at random. Thinking I'll take some cues from the Covenant alphabet, but with the strokes inside the triangles rather than as the triangle. But also from how Ugaritic is actually a cuneiform version of Phoenician (e.g. all the signs that incorporate an O shape, the ones that in Greek or Latin are O, Θ, or Q, replace the O shape with a <-type thing).
  
  Specifically how I think I'll have it work (I need to figure out all the nitty-gritty still) is take letters like something in a standard alphabet, convert them to cuneiform-esque shapes, and then convert those cuneiform-esque shapes to triangles. Specifically upward-pointing ones: Draconic is written bottom to top, by a dragon perched above whatever hard surface they're scratching letters into (hence the cuneiform, they're claw marks).
• HBO Max has a bunch of DC stuff, and while the fourth season of Young Justice is even more painfully terrible than the third, at least there's a bunch of movies. I particularly like Superman/Batman: Apocalypse and Superman Unbound—I really like Supergirl when she's not being desecrated by the CW (and by current DC writers, of course). Also the fight in Apocalypse with Wonder Woman and Barda against the Female Furies, is one of the best fights in all of animation.
  
  There's also The Batman, in many ways the most underrated DC show (and it's pretty highly regarded, just not highly-regarded enough given it's close to as good as Batman the Animated Series). I wonder why Krypton isn't on there, though, unless it's a licensing issue with Syfy or Universal—tell me the thing with Sig-El's grandfather's Fortress of Solitude, and the camera pulls out to show the El crest, and the Superman theme plays, doesn't stir you deep inside.

Playing with Fantasy Λʹ

Thoughts, back on my constantly-RPG bullshit again. This is numbered with the Greek numeral for 30 so as to avoid "XXX".

• Decided to break down divine casters this way: clerics still come from dwarves, but now so do druids; oracles come from gnomes; witches come from elves. Humans still acquired all three late, having only had ancestor-worship adepts for most of their history. Decided the prevalence of witches among the black-magic empire (so I don't have to rewrite as many things) was because they were more influenced by elves than by dwarves or gnomes, magic-wise. Think I might have witches count as divine casters in terms of stuff like scrolls, but not for armor purposes.
• Decided that my Elven, which used to mark nouns and pronouns for ergative, oblique (in practice often genitive), and reflexive cases, will instead use two different pronoun stems for absolutive (formerly unmarked) and ergative, combine the two for reflexive, and do the oblique by just putting prepositions on the pronoun (like "of" for the genitive). Nouns are marked for case just by position, agent before patient before verb (same as Tibetan and Basque).
  
  I was going to use the absolutive, since I was thinking of it as an "object" case, including "of a preposition", but apparently it's actually usually the ergative that's used as the prepositional case if a language doesn't have a separate one (helps to think of the ergative as being "by [noun]", and then every other preposition just replaces the "by"). You do not want different prepositions to take different cases; I have trauma flashbacks to high-school German just thinking about it.
• Giving my elves and dwarves 120-foot darkvision and spell-like abilities, like drow and duergar; the dwarves get the derro spell-like abilities (ghost sound, daze, darkness, but once a day each, and not sound burst) instead of the duergar ones (enlarge person and invisibility, once a day each). I'm also giving elves 11 + character level spell resistance and dwarves 6 + level, along with letting them have the Healthy trait that replaces the Hardy trait (there's an option in the core rules for dwarves to replace Hardy with 5 + level SR).
  
  They also get resistance 5 to cold (elves) or fire (dwarves), which is only worth 1 point in the Race Builder, but in the rules for elves it replaces Elven Immunities, which is worth 2, so I give elves the 11 + level SR which costs 1 point more than 6 + level. 11 + level isn't that OP; a caster 1 level higher than you, or 1 level lower with Spell Penetration, can overcome your SR by just rolling a 10. And I took away all the elves' and gnomes' racial bonuses to saves against stuff like enchantments and illusions—plus SR doesn't work on most witch hexes unless it specifies they're spell-like abilities.
  
  Gnomes are less nocturnal, and so have only 60-foot darkvision (plus electricity resist 5, the standard gnome spell-like abilities, and 11 + level spell resistance, same as svirfneblin). The elves and dwarves are from the moons, where the nights are 15 days long, and on the far side you can never get "moonlight" from the planet overhead being in daylight (but since the day is also 15 days long, no light sensitivity). Gnomes are from the planet. I basically restrict low-light vision (which elves and gnomes have in the core rules) to real animals and things based on them, like catfolk and gnolls.
• Thinking I might call witches, in the "dark magic" sense rather than the "quasi-divine primary-caster class" (because now witches in that sense can be any divine casters, while witches in the class sense are elven priests), "warlocks". Firstly because it literally means "oathbreaker", and second because the warlock class, introduced in Let's Send 75% of Our Playerbase to Pathfinder or 1e 4e, is the most hateful thing in 5e to people of decent good sense.
  
  Warlock is a douchebag-bait class (though Critical Role makes all of 5e straight-up catnip to that demographic no matter what class they wind up playing), balanced by people who went to the Riot Games school of design, that absolutely runs off the "15-minute adventuring day". Alternatively I might call the bad ones "defilers", which does of course raise the question of whether the good ones are "preservers".
• My hunt for a dwarven hammer comparable to the waraxe (which is a gnome weapon in my setting) and bastard sword, leads me to use the sphinx hammer, I think used by the Egyptian dwarves of Osirion, on Golarion, but with the "one-handed with Exotic Weapon Proficiency, two-handed martial" thing instead of being able to throw it. Still not sure what to call it—leaning toward "battlehammer". "Hammer of arms" seems to sometimes be used for a particularly large warhammer, also—think I've seen it used as a translation (possibly by machine?) of the Warhammer Titan's name, in Attack on Titan.
  
  My dark dwarves, on the other hand—distinguishable from the others only in their weapon familiarities, stat-wise—use (light and heavy) picks instead of hammers. Where the other dwarves make weapons from a coralline algae, the dark dwarves make them from the chitin of giant spiders. Thinking they'll also make crossbows from chitin, instead of firearms like other dwarves use—though come to think of it you could probably make a decent-ish barrel from the leg exoskeleton of a giant arthropod, given how strengthened it would have to be at that size.
• Decided that my elves' hunting god, who is the poisonous resin that protects the World Tree, will get Calistria's stuff, in elven contexts—his sacred animal is a toxic moth with venomous caterpillars, and those are easy to swap in for wasps. He'll also get most of Desna's butterfly-themed stuff. (Look, I'm a Spelljammer player, elves and Lepidoptera go together.)
  
  I had had the elves make textiles from fibers of their sacred trees, and I think they still make some, but a lot of their stuff, now, is going to be made from silk collected from the abandoned cocoons of his sacred moths. There are actually three different other kinds of silk, from three other moths.
  
  Haven't figured out what gods of my setting will get most of the other stuff from Golarion (as far as I know, if it's on the Archives of Nethys it's OGL, once you change the names; they're on the PFSRD site under the disguised names), though of course each pantheon's war god gets most of the Gorum stuff.
• Minagho in Wrath of the Righteous made me realize the obvious path to doing multiple levels of "seducer fiend" (succubi and incubi, minus the pretense those are two different things). Namely, succubi as "common" ones and lilitu as "greater" ones. Decided to make cambions into the basis for a "lesser" one, too.
  
  Think, though, that I'll replace the lilitu's husk stuff with the deimavigga/apostate devil's evangelization, indomitable oration, and ohrwurm powers. Think I'll also replace the cambion's sinfrenzy with the raktavarna rakshasa's "master's eyes" ability, minus the part about being a familiar.

Mélange VII

Random thoughts, only about half of them about RPGs!

• Been playing Wrath of the Righteous a lot. The elf witch, Ember, is, unfortunately, a child (specifically a 91-year-old sixth grader), but Arueshalae, the reformed succubus, is romanceable. The part when you're in the lab of the Architect of the Worldwound and see your companions' innermost dreams, and you discover Ember just wants to play with other kids, was, um…not okay, guys, I needed that heart for other purposes.
  
  It's kinda neat how not only does Ember bring out my fatherly impulses, but even brings out the older-brotherly inclinations of Daeran Arendae, the neutral evil narcissist hedonist. In her first companion quest he starts to make a joke about her having to apologize to a demon lord for her purehearted tears shattering his unholy altar, and then he stops and says, "No, never mind, not even I can joke about this. Ember! Some people don't deserve apologies even if you hurt them!"
• My brother said, and he's quite correct, that Star Wars Visions is better than basically everything Disney has ever done with the franchise, even the good things. The band one, the black and white one, and the Astro Boy one are just mediocre, but the other six are genuinely good—a ratio almost unthinkable in Disney Star Wars or in anime based on western properties (cf. The Animatrix and Halo Legends). I dunno, maybe the two kinds of badness cancel out. I particularly like the first of the two Trigger ones, with the twins. Though the best Star Wars thing involving Sith twins will always be that one trailer for a SW:TOR expansion.
  
  The subtitles are pretty questionable, though, since they're the closed-captioning of the English dub. Like for example how in "Lop and Ochō" they don't mention that he's not just "Boss Yasaburō" but is specifically referred to by the term that usually describes yakuza bosses, and that the duty their clan has inherited along with their lightsaber is jingi—the name for the yakuza code. (Neighborhood yakuza, like "neighborhood gangs" all over the world, are a lot less evil than big-time yakuza. Basically this is a classic yakuza-movie plot where a neighborhood gang is being forced to capitulate to a bigger one, and comes into conflict with them when their more amoral, profit-driven ways threaten the security that neighborhood gangs exist to protect.)
• An interesting idea Wrath brings up that I immediately realized I had to incorporate in my own stuff: paladins' fear immunity means they are also immune to PTSD. They can still worry about things—Seelah is very insecure after what happens with the League of the Inspiring Cart—but presumably in a fundamentally different way from people who still feel fear.
  
  It also unavoidably made me think of the Adeptus Astartes: "They are my Space Marines and they shall know no fear." But Iomedae the Inheritor is worthier of the service of such beings than the Corpse on the Golden Throne. (Although Aroden was basically him. I've talked about the "ascended human" form of non-infringing Jesus, and why it doesn't work.)
• The new Netflix He-Man—not Masters of the Universe: Revelation, the one with "He-Man" actually in the title and actually made by people who don't hate fans of the franchise—is really good. Mostly because it's made to entertain kids and parents rather than to win the approval of twenty-somethings from Portland who spend too much time on Twitter.
  
  The thing in this iteration where Adam shares the Power of Grayskull (the Masters of the Universe always seemed like a bunch of randos in both prior versions, so the old-school fans' complaint there is mostly groundless) was interesting, coming out as it does at the same time as Wrath, in which your character shares mythic power with his companions.
• Strong Legend of Zelda vibes in Wrath. If you take the Azata mythic path, or even just help the Desnans escape the paranoid inquisitor (who, as the game says, has pretty good excuses for being paranoid), you learn a song from Desna.
  
  When you sing it for Aruashelae in the Drezen prison, she sings it too, then the soundtrack takes it up non-diagetically. Which is right out of Ocarina of Time. (Also Arueshalae's voice actress kinda sounds like Cortana does in Halo 3, when she's been imprisoned and tortured by the Gravemind.)
• I'm pretty sure that Rifftrax, not seasons 11 and 12, is the real heir of MST3K. I didn't like that show just to see movies get riffed on, I liked it because I like Kevin and Mike and Bill. Also you get Mary Jo and Bridget doing some of them, and Trace and Frank in at least one.
• My current playthrough of Wrath I'm an elf bloodrager (with one level in eldritch scion magus) who worships Calistria, goddess of lust and revenge. He's chaotic good, and I'm pursuing the Azata mythic path (because baby dragon companion, because ore no yome musume da), but it's interesting how they actually make things different depending on your deity. E.g. you can swear revenge on Minagho in Calistria's name, after she beats you the first time, and then when you fight again in Drezen if you bring it up, a wasp (Calistria's animal) crawls down your arm, a sign she favors your vengeance, and your party gets surrounded by swarms of wasps that attack anyone who gets close.
  
  In Kingmaker I liked to play elf paladins of Sarenrae, goddess of redemption, so the contrast between that and a Calistrian is interesting—the duality of man elf. In Wrath there's a cool scene where Sosiel, the cleric of Shelyn, discovers that a necromancer who reanimated other Shelyn worshipers was a guy his temple took in while he was wounded. It was all a plot to turn him against Shelyn's worship, because she doesn't allow killing defeated enemies. So I told him it's not worth breaking his vows, and killed the necromancer myself—the Eternal Rose might forbid it, but the Savored Sting don't care. Just in general the Owlcat Pathfinder games give you genuine opportunities for real roleplaying that I've never seen in any computer game before.
• Strongly considering reworking my setting's spellcasters, making clerics originate with humans, druids with dwarves, oracles with gnomes…and witches with elves. Since witch is a divine caster, ish, that casts off Intelligence. Unfortunately a lot of my naming comes from the assumption dwarves have clerics and elves have druids (fortunately only the surnames in both cases), and the courtesy-names used by the elite of the thalassocratic Valyrian society are derived from witch-patron themes and possible witch bonds (familiars, mirror-witch mirror, etc.). I also have a lot of "fluff" about specifically witches. But I can redo that in terms of the "witchcraft", possibly renamed, being any evil divine caster, give them witches, druids, clerics, and oracles. About the one difficulty is that then I still have the dark elves, goblins, ogres, and dark dwarves hating witches despite being evil, but I can still make it work, the way that plenty of cultures that practiced human sacrifice still tabooed stuff like cannibalism.
  
  The one major issue is that I should rethink at least some of the characters in the stories set in my setting, in terms of their class affiliation. Not all the thalassocratic Valyrian people's priests need to be witches, now; I could for example replace a gravewalker witch character with an undead lord cleric (but I won't, because the gravewalker's creepy doll is super important to the scene). I think I will replace another witch with a blight druid, though. Basically now I think their priesthoods will all be corruptions of the other races' ones, and their evil witches be based on elves' good ones (I imagine elves have a lot of positive-energy hex channelers…and dwarves get their channeling primarily from paladins). Maybe I'll change "witchcraft" to "blasphemy"? That's what witchcraft in the anthropological sense basically is, after all. Come to think of it, not calling it "witchcraft" would have the advantage, when I actually publish, of not running afoul of the fools who don't know "witch" never doesn't mean evil, in the real world.

Playing with Fantasy XXIX

FRPG thoughts.

• Realized I can actually give my talking-beast accent thing to the cat-, hyena-, and yak-people that the thalassocratic Valyrians made, rather than having them speak (and be named in) Giantish. Which works out better because now I have five languages derived from that one, four languages in the other (landlubber Númenorean) group, for a total of nine languages native to the continent. (Really I should work out multiple dialects of the four landlubber-Númenorean languages, too, though.)
• Thinking the hydrocratic Drúedain will have daughter-languages that change the quality of consonants based on vowel-length of the root, resulting in short vowels in all words (like it might change voiced to unvoiced or stops to fricatives, I dunno). Or I might have it change long vowels to something tonal—Spanish changed the Latin long vowel into stress, after all.
  
  Also should probably come up with different dialects for the Dothraki-type people. Maybe have initial biliterals change to a single consonant with a different vowel quality (long, maybe, or palatalized?). And, either in a different dialect or concurrent with that (maybe both, for three different languages) reduce the final-consonant inventory and have the other ones change to tones.
• Decided that "hide" armor actually means "boiled leather version of half-plate", and "leather" armor means "something like buckskins or a buff coat, made of rawhide" (hey it's only one point better than padded). (And there is no studded leather—or maybe they use something like some Pacific Northwest cultures, where they reinforce buckskin/rawhide with little medallions?)
  
  Boiled leather is not like a lot of people think of it being: it has roughly the consistency of, like, a Rubbermaid trash can. There actually isn't a reason fantasy characters can't have the "motorcycle leathers" armor that sticklers complain about, but it did in fact not historically exist till far later.
  
  If you don't like the look of boiled-leather plate armor for a druid character, and I kinda don't either, there's always horn lamellar. The actual best-attested horn armors I can find are either scale or a Filipino thing that uses brass mail to connect plates of buffalo horn, similar to Japanese "tatami" armor. There's also wooden lamellar that you'd probably stat the same as the horn stuff, very thematically fitting for druid-types.
• I'm kinda an idiot sometimes. I had had my Elven be number invariable except on pronouns. Just recently, though, I realized I can just stick an -i on the end of noun-stems. I think it'll stay where it is when the case-suffixes are added, which basically makes the case-suffix preceded by a Y sound. (I think plural -i plus a case-suffix starting in -i will yield a long I, though, instead of a -yi-.
  
  This might complicate things for the talking cats they ride, of course, who replace dental and alveolar sounds with palatalized labial and velar ones due to the shape of their tongues. I suppose I can just transcribe it as -Cyi, or -Cyí in the case of the aforementioned case-suffix staring in I. (Given Elven writes palatals with i, yi and yí would be written ii and ií, in their script.)
  
  I'd had a similar problem with the hyenas my gnomes ride, since Gnomish already has palatalized consonants; I made it so the combination of two palatals results in CryV. Of course, one of the palatals is ry, and they could already geminate r—so yes, rrry is entirely possible. Who doesn't like trigeminate consonants?
• Hmm. Actually what if, instead of -i, the Elven plural is an echo-vowel of the noun-stem? Noun-stems' final vowels (which derive from verb inflections) are already repeated in the inflectional suffix, but currently it's always short. What if I had that suffix's echo-vowel be long in the plural? Of course the absolutive (my Elven is ergative) has no suffix, but what if it has a long vowel, not followed by a consonant suffix, in the plural? That'll work. Maybe you can put an "open" echo-vowel after the singular, too, to emphasize there only being one of something?
  
  Briefly worried that this would mean I'd have to change all my elven surnames to have long final vowels, because surnames in many languages imply a plural ("the descendants of so-and-so", for example) but the elven ones are "of X grove". Groves might be groups of trees, but they're singular groups. I was worried this would mean I had to change something about my Goblin language, a form of Elven, but then I remembered it lost vowel-length, and uses reduplicated determiners derived from pronouns, to mark its plurals.
• If I had to find one flaw in the Pathfinder rules, it's that there is no rule support for being able to dive in the way of an attack that's going to hit someone else, unless you burn two feats to get Bodyguard and In Harm's Way (and Bodyguard has Combat Reflexes as a prereq, so you're actually burning three). Personally I would house-rule it that you can't do it as an attack of opportunity, but have to waste a standard action, like you do to aid another if you don't have Bodyguard. But that's a house rule; the default ruleset contains no such provision.
• There isn't a Charisma witch-archetype in Pathfinder proper other than the seducer from Legacy of the First World, but that's more than a little awkward for mixed company—particularly the seducer's kiss and garden of delights abilities—and better suited for an NPC. (It's one thing if the antagonist always has their significant other charging into battle for them, quite another if one of the PCs does.)
  
  Wrath of the Righteous comes to the rescue here, with the stigmatized witch archetype, which casts from Charisma, and loses its patron, but acquires an oracle's curse. (I don't know if it has an oracle's mystery, too, to make up for the lack of patron spells?) No word on if they're spontaneous or prepared casters (most Charisma casters are spontaneous, of course).
• Very irksome that there are the aforementioned Charisma witches, Charisma druids, Intelligence and Wisdom sorcerers, Charisma maguses, Wisdom and Intelligence bards, and Intelligence inquisitors, but no Intelligence clerics, druids, or oracles.
  
  I mean I guess it just means elven priests are in the same predicament as dwarven wizards, and better off than dwarven oracles or sorcerers (other than the aforementioned empyreal sorcerers), but it's still irksome that there's a druid offshoot that specially advantages gnomes but not elves.
  
  I guess it makes sense for gnomes to be a little more magical than elves, since gnomes are at a significant disadvantage in a physical fight (sure, there's a Constitution advantage, but that doesn't help much when you can be physically picked up and moved, due to the CMB and CMD penalties).
• Decided that my setting's vampires die like vetalas, mostly because turning into a flock of bats (like a moroi), a cloud of fog (like a nosferatu), or a pile of dust (like a jiang-shi), or having to possess an object while it recovers (like a psychic vampire) is dumb and annoying to work with. Gotta figure out which other abilities they have, though—obviously the vetala's possession abilities aren't ideal (even with the revised possession rules from Occult Adventures). Maybe the children of the night ability of a moroi and the spider climb ability of a nosferatu? Yeah I like that. They also still get a nosferatu's swarm shape, they just don't turn into a swarm when brought down to 0 hit points.

Playing with Fantasy XXVIII

Second post in the month.

• Hmm. Might just say the bugbears have no "warg" big enough to carry them, and instead, just get pulled around in chariots. Maybe their wives drive them? In Greece and I think India, the warrior would be driven around, seated, while the driver stood. Whichever of you drives, or if you drive with one hand while attacking with the other, you wouldn't want to stand in a chariot, as an 8½ foot person. Large-sized wargs are significantly stronger than horses, even advanced simple-template heavy horses (which is not what would pull most chariots, anyway).
  
  I decided to construct my "wargs" from the ground up, using the hyena stats as a base, then changing the type to magical beast and applying the advanced simple template. Then for the big one I also apply the giant simple template. For the cats the elves ride I did both the same steps, but to the cheetah—since they're based on Homotherium and it was seriously a "sabertooth cheetah", down to having reduced wrist mobility (cheetahs hold things between their front paws more like a dog does, e.g. with a bone, not like a cat or leopard would).
• Might even have the dwarves stop riding things, and just either use vehicles, walk, or, in the case of in warfare, take up a position and bombard an enemy with artillery, rather than bothering about cavalry(-analogues). Yeah I kinda like that: between being super technologically advanced, and being dwarves, they have nothing in between "take a train (or other vehicle)" and "walk".
  
  The only problem, of course, is I really like all my nonhumans having the thing they ride do their agriculture. So maybe, instead, they ride bears? Bears are the largest fossorial (burrowing) animal, after all. There's a good candidate, the cursorial prehistoric bear lineage, the hemicyoninae—which as the name ("half-dogs") suggests, were built like dogs; I had considered them for the ogres but they work better for dwarves. Specifically, Dinocyon, which was just under 8 feet long and weighed about a quarter of a metric ton—easily fudge-able into something that can be ridden.
  
  Think I'll just have the ogres and orcs run everywhere. They still have dwarf endurance, after all.
• Incidentally, apparently there is an evolutionary link between burrowing and group living, in mammals, as can be seen from rodents (e.g. prairie dogs—which are actually, basically, chipmunks) and meerkats (a kind of mongoose). So it makes perfect sense that dwarves would be lawful, i.e. group oriented. Also apparently short, powerful limbs is one of the six common traits of fully burrowing-specialized mammals, identified at the turn of the 20th century. Though to be full-fledged burrow-sepcialists, dwarves would need small ears (doable) and to be blind (not so doable, but darkvision makes that one moot).
• Wrote an adventure where the PCs find portions of journals, to piece together what's been happening. The easy way is just to find sections of the journal, but, who would do that? You don't let your journal of your descent into madness get scattered all around all willy-nilly.
  
  So instead, they find the journals themselves, but each section is in code, and they have to find the keys to each section's code, scattered around. Still meters out the paces of revelations, but is much more believable from a "why would it be that way, if it weren't in a game?" standpoint.
• Anyone else see the problem with the fact the Pathfinder kingdom rules have no vacancy penalty for the "heir" role? Because…Stability is a score for kingdoms. Not having an heir has historically been just a little detrimental to stability (and not only in hereditary systems; a clear line of succession is a vital thing in any government).
• Realized that Druidic is yet another language subsumed into the glossolalia-language spoken by the outsiders and aberrations in my setting, the one I call Primordial (I might change it to Primeval, since Primordial means something else in 5e). The way I think it might work is that mortals, at least, can only understand the Primordial of those whose alignment is within one step of theirs, or whose elemental affinity is not incompatible with theirs. So only fellow treehuggers can understand Druidic.
  
  Oddly, this basically brings back "alignment languages" from OD&D and 1e AD&D. I mean think about it, nothing else really makes any sense for that; the idea Gygax seemed to be going for was a sort of alignment-specific argot, which makes no sense when you forget your old one upon changing alignment. Much more plausible that you can gabble glossolalia at each other and interpret it. (If I ever publish this stuff formally, people are gonna think I'm a Pentecostal, the way you can tell Tracy Hickman is LDS from countless aspects of Dragonlance.)
• Someone just revealed the most terrifying thing in the history of humanity: where before, D&D players were trying to recreate fantasy books or movies, and then for a while fantasy video games, now they're trying to recreate Critical Role. Which…aside from sounding like Frankfurt Marxist analysis of tabletop gaming…is basically every problem in tabletop gaming that began after 1984 (there were other problems introduced before that, but 1984 is the year the first Dragonlance modules came out—overall I like what it did to the hobby but every change has a downside).

Playing with Fantasy XXVII

Fantasy game thoughts. Try to get two this month so I average out to one a month.

• Think I'll just have my dark elves ride the same cats as the other elves, instead of Simbakubwa-based crocottae. And I think I'll go back to goblins riding a Carnivoran, too, instead of hyaenodonts, but instead of the amphicyonids they were riding before, I think they'll ride percrocutids, like Dinocrocuta (or rather like Percrocuta, but then also scaled up so hobgoblins and bugbears can ride them). Might give the voice-mimicry ability of crocottae to the things the goblins ride, since wargs ("worgs") are described as mimicking voices, in several D&D/Pathfinder sources. (Presumably the crocotta of legend, based on the striped hyena, was said to mimic voice because of the laughing.)
  
  Not sure I'll keep the orcs riding pigs (or entelodonts or mesonychids). I do like the idea, because Twilight Princess, but riding an artiodactyl when everyone else rides carnivorans makes them the odd one out. Maybe I'll have the orcs ride hemicyonid bears, since the dwarves ride giant wolverines and they're both caniforms. The dark dwarves (which are not duergar) do not ride the wolverines; they ride giant spiders. Elves' cats are chaotic neutral and thus more likely to just go with whatever, while dwarves' wolverines are lawful neutral, i.e. sticklers. Maybe just have the ogres walk everywhere, with their dwarf endurance? Yeah that could work.
  
  Not sure what my evil gnomes ride. Maybe edgelord versions of the other gnomes' hyenas? They're true neutral, so they could go along with their two-legged friends just like the panthers.
• If we base the beastie the goblins ride on Percrocuta—5 feet long, 3 feet at the shoulder, 205 pounds—and use the height ratios of the three goblin races (rounding up or down as needed), we get a hobgoblin mount that's 8 feet long, 5 feet at the shoulder, and (taking the cube of the dimensional difference) weighs 900 pounds. But applying the bugbear one gives us a mount that's only 11 feet 6 inches long, 7 feet at the shoulder, and weighs 2,555 pounds—which is only a Large creature. However, because it's freaking enormous, you could apply the Advanced template, like you do to make a warhorse out of a regular horse. (This means bugbears, themselves Large, have to burn a feat to get Undersized Mount, but it's worth it.)
• My dark elves no longer practice blood-sacrifice of speaking creatures ("human sacrifice" with a slightly broader target category). Decided it was a bit too witchy; in the real world there are plenty of human-sacrificing cultures that do not go all the way into witchery (the Nahuatl city-states that semi-forced Cortes into conflict with Tenochtitlan practiced human sacrifice too, just on a much smaller scale and without cannibalism), but in fantasy it's better to keep the themes distinct.
  
  Basically the dark elves now keep to the level of evil found in ancient civilizations like Rome and Sparta, with pragmatic murders like eugenic infanticide and constant honor-killing, but with a taboo on human sacrifice. Of course, part of their pragmatic murder is massacring communities that manage to fight back against their slave-raids, to cow others; they also perform experiments on intelligent beings. (Other than goblins or other elves, whom they always kill rather than capturing.)
• A recent Wizards of the Coast customer survey had, to ensure that they actually surveyed customers (imagine preferring that!), a very basic rules question ("What is advantage?"). And a bunch of Twitterati went ballistic at the "gatekeeping", because even knowing the basic rules is an imposition, I guess. Remember, this is after they simplified the d20 rules because Mike Mearls thinks women are stupid, but apparently DnD now attracts people, gender unspecified, who are actually even stupider than Mearls assumed, and think that that's a problem for everyone else.
• Holy mackerel but the cavalier Order of the Blossom is OP. You get a sneak attack while being a heavily armored cavalier with a martial class attack bonus, which not only means your sneak attack is more likely to hit, but also that your sneak attack can be stacked with Vital Strike at 6th level—you don't have to wait till an odd level because cavaliers get a bonus feat at 6th.
  
  And then, because that wasn't horrifying enough, you also get a bonus to Bluff checks equal to half your cavalier level. You use Bluff (which is modified by Charisma, which many cavalier abilities run off of) to feint. Which denies enemies their Dex bonus against you till your next action. "Enemy denied Dex bonus" is all that is required to sneak attack.
  
  Rogues can often sneak attack every round or every other round, but they generally need an ally to be helping them flank, and are a "glass cannon" if they get into an even fight. Order of the Blossom members can likely sneak attack every other round solo, and have d10 hit dice and heavy armor.
• So I decided that my elves' inquisitors are mostly living grimoire archetype from Horror Adventures, mostly because Int instead of Wis is an advantage for them.
  
  But that archetype uses a holy text. I had originally conceived my religions as not having those much—they're not as common in real-world religions as a Protestant culture would understandably assume, let alone as important—and they'd have to be somewhat different for a people whose gods are their actual still-living ancestors. But living grimoires beat people with steel bibles, like Alice in Shadow Hearts. So.
  
  I eventually decided that, rather than a revelation like Judeo-Christian scripture or a combination mystical vision and philosophical tract, like Buddhist and Gnostic scripture, it'll be in the format of memoir (equivalent of a real-world mythology, but the mythic creature is right there reminiscing about stuff), and one of those books of advice, like the Handbook that Dhuoda of Septimania wrote for her son William (equivalent of the moral precepts a real-world holy book would set forth).
• Decided the hydrocratic Púkel-men, who looked like Australian Aborigines with brown hair and eyes and medium-brown skin, will instead have blond hair and green eyes, because brown eyes and hair is basically actual Aborigines. Also the Dothraki-esque speaker barbarians from that same continent, I decided, are Dravidian-looking but with red hair and blue eyes.
• Kinda cheesed Kingmaker makes you pretty much have to be lawful good, if you're not going to lose Kesten or Jhod during the Season of Bloom. The reason being that I really want to be a blight druid, and get to use the bleed power of the Death domain (not normally available to non-evil clerics or inquisitors).
  
  I really hope they make that a viable choice in Wrath of the Righteous. That and the elf-witch better be romanceable, and to dudes. There was no romanceable full elf last time, and it was a travesty. (It's also a travesty that there was no romanceable halfling or gnome—the big people were still romanceable for halfling or gnome PCs.)

Playing with Fantasy XXVI

Icosahedral FRPG thoughts.

• It turns out it's not too far-fetched for my darkvision to be passive radar, because echidnas have electrolocation in air, though we're not sure how sensitive it is. It's at least a fig-leaf to hide passive radar using background radio-noise, with cells in the surface of eyeballs as antennas and a detection range of only 60 to 120 feet.
• My setting calls its artificial hybrids, which includes the half-elves and half-orcs and also the nagaji, catfolk, and gnolls, "flaskborn". I also decided that the first batch (the animal hybrids) were made by a witch who bestowed them on her country's government during a big civil war. Which civil war she may or may not have had a hand in starting.
  
  Of course, eventually, after her animal-hybrid troops won the war, she used her influence, and the government's trust in her, as an opening to assassinate their ruler and seize power for herself. She was the founder of the thalassocratic Valyrians being a witch-empire (before that they were just a typical ancient empire, so still pretty evil).
  
  Her apprentice eventually assassinated her and seized power for himself. Occupational hazard of being a witch-lord, just ask Darth Plagueis (and his apprentice…Sidious).
• Wyverns having pangolin tail scales but modified to deliver venom is actually unnecessarily bizarre, given that there is such a thing as a lionfish. They have venomous spines, containing multiple grooves and venom-producing tissues. Wyverns can just have tails tipped with those, but modified scales (like those on a horntoad but arranged like on a lionfish), not fin-rays.
• Decided that rather than dominate person, vampires in my setting have the abilities of siren songs: captivate, fascinate, obsession, and slumber. Since this is a bit weaker than dominate person, it becomes a gaze attack that affects anyone within a 30-foot cone in front of the vampire’s facing.
  
  Think it lasts as long as dominate person does, namely one day per level but with an extra saving throw each day that the caster doesn't spend at least one round concentrating to maintain the effect. The subject also gets another save if someone casts protection from evil (all vampires being evil, and all).
• There are no rules for how often vampires have to feed, in Pathfinder. Decided that in my setting, they have to feed as often as living people have to eat.
  
  But instead of taking nonlethal damage directly, when they don't feed, they take that damage to their maximum hit points (with hit points above that level becoming, effectively, temporary hit points with an unspecified time limit), reducing for example how much they can be healed by negative energy.
  
  They have to feed to remove the cap—think feeding still gives them temporary hit points, but also raises the cap by the same amount, until it equals their real maximum hit points.
• Watching—then reading—Shadow House, one of about fifteen worth-a-second-look anime this season (usually there are like two) makes me think I should maybe bring fey back into my Pathfinder setting. Maybe as something like emotional/psychic effluvia produced by the elves, dwarves, and gnomes.
  
  But then I recall that for most purposes, my elves fill the slot of big fey (fae), and my gnomes the slot of small ones. They're not exactly as bad as some of the fey in a standard setting, like mites or boogiemen, but they definitely fill the "may not really give a shit what happens to other beings" thing, at least when young and irresponsible (they consider "lead travelers to get lost in the woods" to be their equivalent of "killed someone in a duel over winks at a barmaid" that human young people get up to).
  
  Might have some particular fey creatures that aren't redundant with elves and gnomes, though—possibly including mites or boogiemen. (Redcaps, though, are the gnome version of dark elves—makes more sense to use them than spriggans, whose gigantifying is a headache.)
• I actually have a perfectly sound reason for my elves and dwarves to have darkvision and cold or fire resistance. They're from the moons. Meaning their environment spends half of every month in darkness, and has permanently frozen poles and baking tropics. See, moons have no seasons. Their climates are extreme in a way that people from a planet can't imagine; only the fact that most moons are vacuum makes this non-obvious—Titan has barely any seasons, beyond slightly clearer skies around the equinoxes and hydrocarbon rain in the northern hemisphere winter. Though I don't know how much warmer it is at its equator than at its poles. That could just be Saturn's location, though.
  
  I have no idea how I justify gnomes having darkvision, or really, electricity resistance (other than that they're fungus-themed and fungi really like electricity). But then, dwarves are subterranean, so their fire resistance and darkvision might actually have more to do with that than with their climate. Certainly they all have the same skin color, while elves have several, including multiple pigments—high elves and what goblins used to be have blue (structural coloring only), wood have green (with yellow carotenoids) and dark elves have purple (red anthocyanins), and gnomes, who use melanin (in their skin but not their hair), have roughly the same range as humans, mostly the browner end.
• I realized I left out antipaladins, in my setting's population estimates. I also decided that my nonhumans do have commoners, among their NPC-classs children, but with an archetype called "apprentice" that can cast one fewer 0th-level spell per day (and knows one fewer) than the 1st-level caster of its class. (Don't think I'll have apprentice alchemists, since they don't have 0th-level spells extracts.)
  
  One thing this means is that the population numbers are bigger. Another is that I need to figure out what percent of the human population are the Thalassocratic Valyrians' surviving city-states (they have three)—certainly most of the witches and antipaladins are, but would it make sense to have a high proportion of the population be clergy? I suppose it might in a theocracy, though—40% of Saudi subjects, for example, consider themselves Wahhabis (though what percent of that is imams is a different question).

Playing with Fantasy XXV

More Pathfinder thoughts.

• Worked out my setting's vampires, mixing and matching aspects of Pathfinder's moroi, nosferatu, jiang shi, vetalas, and psychic vampires. One thing it did was make me realize how much of an advantage the "template" system is, for making things like vampires. You just create a normal character and then apply the template; it was like falling off a log.
• Decided my setting does not include the Harrow deck, as such, though it probably can use the various associated class-archetypes. Tarot, see, is simply not a mystical thing; it's a version of bridge. You can use that for divination, as you can use lots, animal entrails, the flight of birds, or tea leaves, but there's nothing inherently supernatural about any of those things.
  
  The version in my setting will still have each card represented as a combination of an ability score and an alignment, but not named like in the Harrow; basically the abilities are the suits and the alignments are the pip-value, from 1 to 9 (with lawful good as highest and chaotic evil as lowest). The game itself, though, is more like some of the games played with hanafuda.
  
  Soldiers in my setting keep dice and cards among their lucky charms, because getting bored is a jinx, for soldiers: they start wishing something would happen.
• It kinda weird to anyone else that it took till Pathfinder, three reworks into the d20 Fantasy rules, and indeed six years into its run (June 2015, after the debut of the Core Rulebook in August 2009) with the release of Occult Adventures, for there to be definitive rules for possession, despite there being the concept of "being possessed" within the game back to the beginning? They also released a new spell to govern the process, just called possession, replacig the clunky legacy spell magic jar.
• Decided how my elves' bows work: they're two long leaves from their sacred tree, with the fascicle sheath (the thing that holds pine needles together) as the riser. You bend them back opposite their usual direction, to string the bow. One thing this means is that the bow can be stored more easily, since when unstrung it's only half as long, a bit shorter than a longsword.
  
  If it were just a single bow, you can just have a bowcase built into your quiver—a 6 foot bow would be 3 feet folded up, and the average elf in my setting is also 6 feet, and thus has a draw-length (which is roughly the same as the length of an arrow, minus its head) of about 29 inches. But their bows are really two bows, four leaves, one pair half as long, so it might have to be carried slung over the back like a rifle—except they disconnect the fascicle-sheaths of the two bows, and fold them together, so it fits in the bowcase. (Might call it a four-leaf bow, in fact.)
  
  Incidentally, a "reflex" composite bow turns into a weird hoop about a foot in diameter, when unstrung.
• In Pathfinder, a Colossal dragon's claws each do 4d6 points of damage, or the same as the damage dealt by a Large boulder falling at least 30 feet.
  
  A Large object is 8–16 feet in at least one dimension; assuming a roughly spherical boulder, we get a volume of 268 cubic feet, for the 8 foot one. Given the density of feldspar, the most common rock, 2.56 grams per cubic centimeter, that results in a mass of 19,434 kilograms. After a 30-foot fall, that's a kinetic energy of 1,741,468.91 joules—and thanks to the 30 feet thing (joules are newton-meters), we can change that conveniently to a force of 190,449.36 newtons, or 42,814.72 pounds force.
  
  The dragon's bite does 4d8, which results in an average damage two-sevenths higher than that of the claw (not counting the fact the bite gets half-again the Strength bonus and the claw only gets the full one), for a bite force of 55,047.50 pounds—compared to the T. rex's bite force of 12,000 to 14,000 and the Megalodon's of 24,400 to 41,000.
• I gotta say, the central conceit of the Pathfinder core setting is kinda neat. Namely, the "Age of Lost Omens" where, after Aroden failed to return to lead humanity to a golden age (having vanished somehow), no more major prophecies have come true in the ensuing 113 years. That's a really cool idea.
• In my own setting I'm averse to the concept, inherited from Hesiod by way of Augustine, that you can divide history into "Ages"; while the inhabitants of my setting do speak of "ages", they use a Romance-language definition, equivalent to "century" in English (or some other big, regular-sized chunk of time; my elves' "ages" are 1728 years, the dozenal equivalent of a millennium).
  
  The closest I get is that the various cultures base their dating systems on events like the (main) humans covenanting with the animal-gods or the elves and dwarves coming to the planet from the moons, or (in the case of the thalassocratic Valyrians and hydrocratic Púkel-men) the founding of their empires.
  
  The two human empires also describe eras in terms of their dynasties, which are numbered, but also often referred to by their capital, among the thalassocratic Valyrians, and ruling clan, among the hydrocratic Púkel-men.
• I have eight human cultures in my main setting. There's the urban, settled rural, and nomadic branches of the main protagonist culture(-complex), whose languages are based on Adûnaic, and then the nomadic seagoing descendants of the thalassocratic Valyrians, the halflings (a branch of the thalassocratic Valyrians engineered to be small, as a sort of "toy"-breed novelty), and then the successor-states to the thalassocratic Valyria, one aquatic (as gillmen), one subterranean (as dark folk), and one ruled by dhampirs, tieflings, and what D&D proper calls genasi.
  
  There are actually multiple offshoots of each—nineteen nations of the urban main culture, eleven of the settled rural, and seven of the nomadic, plus four of the halflings. A lot of those have their own dialects (though you also get things like Austria and Bavaria sharing one group of dialects), but for simplicity I treat each major group as only speaking one. I also have a dialect for each of the three successor-states of the thalassocratic Valyrian empire, each of which modifies its grammar in certain ways. It just now occurred to me to have the sea-nomad descendants of the thalassocratic Valyrians have 81 clans or tribes, say one for each Craft, Perform, and Profession subskill listed in the Core Rulebook, like how Romanian Roma (Gypsy) subgroups are named according to their traditional profession.
  
  I really need to come up with cultures for the other continent. Maybe I'll divide the nomadic "barbarians" into a couple different groups, and perform some sound-changes on their language. Hmm. Maybe also a single big division in the hydrocratic Púkel-men culture, analogous to something like Northern and Southern Chinese? Maybe a tripartite one, there are a lot of those, too.

A Note About Blogger

Blogger has decided that we should receive no notifications at all of new comments, but have to actually check the comment section. So I have months of comments I've missed.

Sorry about that, I'll be better about checking it regularly in future.

Playing with Fantasy XXIV

Fantasy RPG thoughts.

• One of course wants to have, along with the mundane airships detailed in Ultimate Combat, flying ships that are controlled by a chair that eats your day's spells and imparts a fly speed of 150 feet per round times one-third to one-half your spellcaster level. But that would be sadly illegal. Instead, I decided that the elves and the spider people use ornithopters and entomopters, respectively (elves feather theirs with their leaves, spider people make the wing-membranes from silk). And the ships have magic engines, used by spellcasters, but instead of eating your day's spellcasting, they're attuned to like a leyline, as described in Occult Adventures, and they provide the variable bonus to drive checks (Spellcraft or Fly, whichever is higher) instead of caster level.
  
  The "evil Atlanteans" are the users of the steam airships, which I think are still controlled by the kind of "leyline engine" that controls the ornithopters and entomopters. And then I decided that dwarves, who I was going to also have using ornithopters, instead eschew flying, and instead use subterrenes ("drill tanks", except with tunnel borers rather than drills strictly so-called) or submarines, also powered by "leyline engines"—not sure exactly what they'll look like. Submarines with those engines are also what the snake people will use, instead of flying ships. And then I was wondering what the gnomes should use; I considered some kind of Leonardo-esque "air screw" helicopter, using their sacred fungi to make the "screw", but—read on.
  
  I think the elf ones will be "crowships" and the spider-people entomopters will be "darnerships" (i.e. they're dragonflies, though I won't actually use the deckplan of the somewhat iconic all-purpose spelljamming ship). I don't know what the dwarf ones will be shaped like (I'm leaning toward the one vehicle being usable as both subterrene and submarine, so maybe something like "snailship"?), but the snake submarines will be "sharkships". But there are no helicopter animals, so I decided actually gnomes should use flying boats (not submarines though) that mimic flying squid (which may actually be able to really fly—albeit not very strongly—by undulating their bodies like dolphins, to "flap"), which I'm going to call "teuthopters".
• All of which raised a quandary: what is your parachute, on one of those? An actual parachute? A glider of some sort? A set of wings of flying (which really ought to be called a cloak thereof, it's a cape that changes into wings)? A ring of feather falling? (Probably that one.) The spell won't cut it, it generally wears off well before you hit the ground, if you assume a paratrooper-style 2000-foot jump height—even a 20th level caster will still leave you 800 feet in the air when feather fall wears off. (Cruising altitude for an airship, if we take Zeppelins as a model, is only 650 feet, which you still need to be at least 10th level to fall from at 60 feet per round and a 1-round-per-level duration.)
• Decided that instead of Tainish from Unsounded and Hardic et al. from Earthsea, the languages on the other continent, in my setting, will draw inspiration from Dothraki and what little we see of Ghân-buri-Ghân's language, Drúadanic. Just like how my main continent has the protagonists speak the Tolkien-derived one (Adûnaic) and the vile and hated enemy speaking the Game of Thrones-derived one (no disrespect intended to David Peterson; he didn't create the Valyrians or Dothraki, he just did the best he could to give those caricature-cultures halfway decent conlangs), the Egypt-y ones are the ones who speak the Tolkien-based one. (Yes, both the civilized and the "barbarians" speak languages associated with "barbarians". On the other continent the Adûnaic-based language was originally that of peoples despised by the evil Atlanteans as "barbarians", even though it's based on the language of another setting's Atlantis/Rome-analogue just as Valyrian is.)
  
  One thing this meant is that I had to slightly rework the script I worked out for them, which was fine actually. Since the Drúadanic-based language has a very limited sound-palette, too limited to let the Dothraki-based one be written conveniently in a script for it, I instead went with the script having been devised by scholars for writing both, like the 'Phags-pa script in Yuan China, though based on older scripts used only for their own (and incorporating, I think, ancient logograms that the older form of their script ultimately descends from but that it's a real pain in the ass to actually work out). I also gave them a numeral system, with different rules from the alphabetic characters, an important thing to do when you make the numerals for a con-script. (Usually. The this-side-of-the-world cultures just use their first nine letters for 1–9 and a space for 0—I think they write numerals inside a circle or something—because originally they used Greek- or Hebrew-style numerals, and then just adapted them to positional use.)
• I also worked out my giants' numerals and redid my gnomes' system. All four of my nonhuman numeral systems, Dwarven, Elven, Giantish, and Gnomish, were originally based in some way on the body-part they used for counting (Elven and Dwarven dozenal on the individual knuckles of each finger, Giantish octal on the spaces between fingers, Gnomish vigesimal on fingers and toes). Which I highly recommend as a shortcut to making constructed numerals, but it still bugs me that they have characters for "10" (whichever that means in their numerical base), that they don't use now they have zero.
  
  See, the Elven and Dwarven numerals have a regular pattern for 1–3, 4–6, 7–9, and then write ten and eleven—digits A and B—in a way that clearly indicates the next number should, though representing the numerical base and thus "10", be the digit C. Giants write 1–4 regularly, and 5–7, and then you wish you didn't have to write 8 as "10"; gnomes have a regular way to write 1–5, 6–A, B–F, and G–J, and you wish you could use the obvious symbol for K instead of writing it "10".
  
  This would bother me less except that my other-side-of-the-world numerals have a pattern for 1–3, 4–6, and 7–9, so there's no leftover regularity that makes "10" feel unnatural. Because where the other races modified a pre-positional numeral system to writing positional numbers, the civilization over there, whose script was purpose-built and semi-artificial, were free to come up with their numerals wholesale. I have worldbuilding reasons for all the other scripts' numerals being irregular, but it still bugs me.
• So the actual name for "ley lines" as a mystical thing—the concept has more legitimacy as a part of fengshui than as part of Alfred Watkins's pseudoscience—is lóngmài, literally "dragon vein" (the same as the ryūmyaku that Xingese alkahestry is powered by, in Fullmetal Alchemist). I submit that "wyrmlode" is the cool fantasy-sounding English (and from purely English roots) version. ("Lode" is a bit too modern, here, but "wyrmedder"—the second element being the aboriginal English word for "vein", still extant in some dialects—sounds too weird.)
  
  I decided that in my setting, dragons give their name to the phenomenon because they live primarily by tapping into it, like fleas, and only eat other creatures for nutrients, like butterflies eating mud or tears. Which explains a number of things about dragons, like their obsession with their lairs (maybe heaping up a hoard in a nexus of these energies, is the dragon equivalent of rearing a standing stone there?), and also how you can keep a 24-ton dragon alive on the same diet as something like a 5-ton tyrannosaur.
  
  A lot of dragons' adaptations (notably not their breath weapon) are, thus, intended for fighting other dragons away from the territory where they get their geomantic topomantic energies. (I kinda want to call the "wyrmlode" nexuses "alkahest fields", using the Fullmetal Alchemist translation of dan 丹 to render dantian 丹田—I guess I could also say "cinnabar fields"—which usually refers to yogas chakras, the equivalent of such a nexus in the body's qi, rather than that of a landscape, but is also used for the fengshui equivalent. "As above, so below", as the guy Ed and Al's dad is named after would say.)
• I had had the "ley line guardian" witch-archetype known, in-universe, as "rhumbline" witches, since the main witches of my setting are the thalassocratic Valyrian/evil Atlantean maritime empire. But I guess it actually makes more sense to just have them be called "wyrmlode" witches. Maybe they practice sorcerer-like (but Intelligence- rather than Charisma-based) spellcasting through watching and copying dragons, which is where my sorcerer "bloodlines" come from (hence I call them "lineages" instead).
• I found a random wordlist generator, an online thing called Awkwords. I had used this old freeware app called Langmaker (no relation I know of with the defunct wiki), but that only works on Windows XP and earlier (it might still work on 7?) I used it to make my Elven, Dwarven, and "formerly Tainish now Drúadan Egyptian" sign-languages. But I was feeling out-of-sorts, having already made all the languages for my setting ("Alexander wept, for he had no more worlds to conquer"); that was a part of why I redid both the languages on the other continent (though I had been dissatisfied with them for a while.
  
  I also decided to work out a language for the arthropod-people made by the spider-outsiders, like the one used by the snake-, lizard-, and fish-people the snake-outsiders made; I had had them using a weird pronunciation of my Sylvan (in my setting, a language used in common by talking beasts), but now they have their own. Unfortunately it's not directly mappable onto Undercommon from the standard list in the Linguistics skill like that is. (But hey there are a bunch of slots freed up by my combining all the outsider and elemental languages, plus Aklo, into "Primordial".)
  
  Hmm. Maybe have the talking beasts use a mispronounced version of their humanoid riders' languages? That would be more thematically appropriate, since the talking beasts are all the children of the older "litters" of the nonhumans' gods, and thus regard their humanoid counterparts as their spiritual aunts and uncles. Then I can give Sylvan to the bugs. Yeah might go with that, though it'll be a lot of work.
• Partly out of the desire to play with the new toy, I also decided that I might do my Primordial language as an actual language after all; just babbling glossolalia and using asemic writing as the script is cool and thematically appropriate and not at all fulfilling to me as a conlanger. And the artist must ultimately please himself.
  
  So I generated a very short wordlist, made only of semantic primes (then I added semantic molecules, because having to refer to everything by primes would be a pain in the ass); I still have read magic convert magical writings composed in Primordial into something readable, but by changing the writing—which is pure ideograms, not logograms—into the natural semantic metalanguage of your own lexicon.
  
  I might actually generate a full-sized lexicon for it. Or maybe I'll go straight back to the glossolalia and asemic script, and put the time and work I might have put into developing Primordial into a "real" language (but one that's thematically not as consistent or as interesting from a worldbuilding standpoint) into developing my bug-Sylvan and "talking animal" dialects of my humanoid languages.

Playing with Fantasy XXIII

• I had had the gnomes making mead and the dwarves making kumis, but there were a number of problems. First, of course, the dwarves doing it was predicated on wolverine milk being as high in lactose as mink milk is, but—aside from how the dwarves' giant wolverines are speaking creatures, and buying some lady's breast milk is kinda weird (though paid wetnurses are a thing in many cultures)—minks are tiny and have an insanely fast metabolism. Bear-sized wolverines probably would not need all that lactose; bear milk has incredibly low lactose, like 0.5%. (Horse milk is 6%.)
  
  Second is that it's probably hard to be a nomadic beekeeper, and most gnome agriculture is done by (the hyenas who accompany) gnome caravans. Whereas dwarves are settled people, and thus they (and their wolverines) can do beekeeping fairly easily. (I don't know if wolverines are immune to beestings, but honey badgers and skunks are.) Plus the gnomes have their big caravan wagons (think Mongol yurt wagons) drawn by muskoxen, which are also the main livestock gnomes eat and milk. Muskox milk can, depending on feed, go as high as 5% lactose, which is probably enough to make kumis from.
• I know I said monks are nearly useless; honestly I'm starting to feel that way about rangers, too. I mean maybe if your GM goes out of their way to provide a lot of favored-enemy and tracking gameplay, and you could probably do something with animal companions (the other version of hunter's bond is useful but kinda lackluster). I suppose it's more "might be a lot of fun to play, if your GM is on the ball and makes the campaign rewarding" than "actually useless". Maybe I'm just petulant about them needing your GM to be on the ball to be a rewarding play experience.
• Did some research on how you heat an inn. One way is to have the chimneys of the common room (which is where most people sleep) and kitchen, if it has a separate one, open onto rooms on the second floor, and heat them that way. Another is to have braziers with hot embers from the kitchen and common-room fires in the private rooms, and heat them like that. If you're going to have rooms away from the common room or kitchen with fireplaces, your inn is going to have more chimneys; most likely you'd still have the fireplaces in adjoining corners so four rooms can share one chimney.
  
  Was not able to find out this kind of thing about caravanserais, because all the search results were for resort ones that have central heating now. Someone said people stayed warm by sleeping with their animals, but I don't actually think that shows up in any of the historical accounts of caravanserai, and I can't imagine high-class travelers doing that. My guess would actually be the "brazier in each room" method; thinking mine might also have the "shared chimney fireplaces" thing (maybe every two rooms not every four, given most caravanserai floorplans).
• Apparently part of why D&D 5e is so simplified (not to say "dumbed down") is because one of the chief designers, Mike Mearls, says women can't understand complex rules and lore. He phrased it as complex rules and lore being used to "gatekeep" women from the hobby, but the implication is the same, the "soft bigotry of low expectations". Besides, dude, I know several women who learned on 2nd Edition, and 3e/3.5e isn't within a parsec of that complex (not to say "obtuse").
• So the dying and coming back mechanic in Elder Scrolls Online is cancer. Especially since the "Vestige" is semi-undead, meaning that there is no reason they can't be as easily rezzed as Guardians. But I was thinking about how you'd handle players dying if you actually cared, when the player characters aren't immortal undead. You can't very well make resurrection that cheap and easy.
  
  But then it occurred to me, MonHan. When you die in Monster Hunter, those little cat guys rush in, put you on a cart, and drag you off to where you are presumably resuscitated. So in an MMO, you could just have something that teleports you to some central location (like the Hunter's Guild), and they patch you up and then return you to the fight. And their doing that is the respawn timer.
• Not in my campaign, where hybrid "races" are all "ampule babies", but in a more standard one, you might rule that elves and gnomes can have children (I'd say Medium sized, though much smaller than an elf—not being Small means they can still carry more than a gnome—with +2 Dex, -2 Str, and maybe player's choice of +2 to Charisma or Intelligence), and maybe humans and halflings (something like Medium but not very big, with -2 Str, +2 Dex, and player's choice of +2 to one other ability). Not sure about any other combinations, though.
• I apparently haven't talked about it here, but I worked out what kind of bow-draw my various societies use. The thalassocratic Valyrian/evil Atlantis culture uses the Mediterranean draw or the three-under draw (associated respectively with the Turks—the ancient Mediterranean used the pinch draw—and the English, can't imagine why an evil empire would have similarities to them), the steppe nomads on the main continent and the settled empire on the other continent use the Japanese draw, and the settled people on the main continent use the Mongolian draw. The nomadic "barbarian" culture on the other continent uses the pinch draw, because their bows are a hunting-tool not a weapon (they prefer javelins and axes for war). Elves use the Hungarian draw.
  
  The Mediterranean draw is where you draw the bowstring with your index, middle, and ring fingers, with the arrow between index and middle. Three-under is the same except all three fingers are under the arrow. The Japanese draw is where you draw the bowstring with your thumb, and your drawing hand's palm is parallel with the bow; the Mongolian draw is where you draw the string with your thumb and your drawing hand's palm is parallel with the ground. The pinch draw is where you don't draw the bowstring, you draw the arrow, and requires enormous strength to do with a war-bow (which can be more than twice as strong as hunting bows). And the Hungarian draw is like the Mediterranean draw except you only use the index and middle finger, not the ring one.
• Also worked out the benefit to using a parent-child bow: It functions as a composite bow but the minimum Strength to use it without penalty is treated as lower, I'll say by 2 points. Or maybe your Strength is treated as 2 higher, including for the sake of getting the damage bonus? But that second thing looks kinda broken. "You don't need the same Strength to use it but you need that Strength to get the bonus" seems fairer.
• Was reading a thing about how the Mongols' mainly eating preserved food while on the move allowed them to move very stealthily, because they didn't make campfires. Which it occurs to me is part of why you would not want to mess with my elves: both they and their mounts have darkvision and cold resistance. Their mounts can also keep them coordinated within about 5 miles, via roaring, which can include words because they can talk (they do it in code so even someone who speaks Sylvan won't be able to eavesdrop). The same goes for my goblins, except their mounts howl.
  
  Not quite as good but my dwarves and ogres (which includes orcs) can do something similar, taking the same precautions against cold that the Mongols had to, but able to move through the hottest parts of the day without stopping, and still able to attack at night with no trouble. They also aren't slowed down by anything they're carrying (my ogres have the same "slow and steady" movement as dwarves), even though they're slightly slower than other humanoids. They do both have the disadvantage that their mounts can't roar or howl, though.