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.