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.)