Playing with Fantasy XXXII

Thoughts concerning icosahedral amusements.

• I realized how to represent the effect of wearing a helmet, thanks to the Hard-Headed feat line. Namely, if you don't wear one, you (Hard-Headed) have a -2 to saves against being staggered or stunned, and (Dented Helm and Cloven Helm) have a -2 to your AC against critical hit confirmation rolls. Now, I think, you can still keep those feats around—having them means you just get a bonus over and above just having a helmet.
• One theory about the question mark is that it's originally a cursive (lowercase) Q over an O, from quaestio (question). I don't know how sound that theory is in the real world (the Wikipedia article on "question mark" doesn't mention it), but I decided that my main human script's question mark, exclamation mark, and period would derive from the first and last letters of the words for "question", "exclamation", and "statement" (more or less).
  
  Decided the other human language that uses a form of the same script does something similar but with just the first letter, with like a dot over and above it, or a line through it, or something. And then the last human script, on the other continent, uses a trio of dots pointing up, for questions, and one pointing down for statements (it doesn't have an exclamation mark, because most scripts don't—maybe they eventually borrow one from the other scripts, the way Arabic and the East Asian scripts borrowed the question and exclamation marks from Roman).
  
  Not sure what to do with Elven, Dwarven, or Gnomish. Elven and Gnomish usually use verb-infixes to mark interrogatives, but there are also pitch questions—like how in Japanese you normally have the -ka ending on an interrogative-mood verb, but you can also just say "[Word]?" Considering having my Elven derive its question mark from the infix (or rather, two question marks from its two infixes, one used for polar questions and the other for nonpolar).
• Was thinking my Dwarven might have articles, and definiteness obligatorily marked on all common nouns—maybe the definite divided into proximal and distal demonstratives. I considered it so there could be something (definiteness) that verbal adjectives could agree with their "head" on in the unmarked nominative, but it also let me give Dwarven a feature of Chukchi, namely inflecting proper nouns differently from common ones. Which is a trait I had been meaning to use in a conlang.
  
  However instead I decided to bite the bullet and have my Dwarven use Austronesian alignment, and thus I now use the old accusative for the direct case and the old dative for the indirect (the genitives, volitional and nonvolitional, remain the same). So now there's case agreement on the "nominative", because the direct case is marked. Thinking only the oblique case will mark on proper nouns, though, which still lets me inflect them differently (and you mark adjectives for them with the direct suffix).
  
  I also decided to give my Dwarven seven genders: masculine, feminine, common, neuter, and then divide each of the ones other than neuter into animate and personal. Unfortunately I can't think of a way to name the genders "Doc, Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Dopey, Bashful, Sneezy", but that would of course be the ideal if you had seven genders in Dwarven.
• Crunched the numbers: if elves have eyeballs the same size as humans (they probably have bigger ones), 24 millimeters in diameter, they have a surface area of 1839.84 square millimeters. Taking just the outer half of that, you get 919.92 square millimeters. Now, rod cells can pack at densities up to 150,000 per square millimeter, which means the front half of the eye can fit 137,988,000 of them. Rod cells are also 100 microns long.
  
  So if an elf has the entire outer surface of their eyeball (or a nictitating membrane that closes over the eye) covered in special rod-cells, that form a fractal antenna for passive radar, they effectively have a length of 13.8 kilometers. Which, given an "electrically small" antenna is the wavelength over 2π, means they can receive wavelengths up to 86.708 kilometers. That's low in the VLF radio band, 3457.5 Hz, which is used in geoscience and so could form the basis of passive-radar darkvision.
  
  Hmm. If we gave elves eyes only slightly larger, say 35 millimeters like a tiger's, 35 millimeters in diameter, you get a surface area of 3848.45 square millimeters, half of which is 1924.225, and thus can pack 288,633,750 of them onto the surface, for an effective length of the fractal antenna of 28.9 kilometers, and a possible wavelength as high as 181.6 kilometers, a frequency of 1650.8 Hz—pretty much dead-center of the ultra low frequency band.
• Bows, I decided, should not be divided into "long" or "short", nor "composite" and "non-composite", but into "hunting" (stats of regular shortbow) and "war" (stats of composite longbow, including the minimum strength requirement). Because warbows had draw weights upwards of 100 pounds; 200 pounds was not unknown, and some required assistance to string them. In terms of how it's used, though not how it's made and stored, an English longbow has much more in common with a Mongol bow than either does with pretty much any hunting bow (and you honestly can't pick between a well-made example of either type for power).
  
  And then we could give specifically composite versions of bows the "horse bow" advantage, when being used mounted. Namely, no attack penalty when used on a mount making a double-move, only -4 when mount runs, rather than -4 and -8; the Mounted Archery feat would then reduce the penalty from a running mount even further, to -2, which is normally the benefit of Improved Mounted Archery, which feat would presumably remove the penalty entirely. (You think, of course, of mounted archery as a military technique, but lots of animals are best hunted while mounted, too—buffalo, for example.) Maybe have composite versions cost 50% more.
  
  No idea what the hell I'll have elves' "Wabenaki" double bows do. Maybe just make them regular bows but made of two leaves ("elven twoleaf bow"?) and therefore collapsible by folding the leaves together, allowing it to count as "easily concealed" for purposes of Sleight of Hand? Maybe with a dagger's +2 bonus for the shortbow/hunting version? Yeah I think I'll go with that. They're already basically made of darkwood, so they weigh half as much and count as masterwork.
• Yeah I'm just gonna have special-material stuff that equates to mithral, add to the price of weapons the way darkwood does, masterwork plus an amount per-pound. Given mithral has 50% higher hardness than steel, the metallic version will come to masterwork +15 gp per pound. Maybe, since my mithral-equivalent is also applicable to things that could be made of darkleaf cloth, which is twice as good as wood, masterwork +20 gp per pound? (Darkleaf cloth is mostly used to substitute for armor materials, and my armors cost, instead, what mithral does, because it gives all of mithral's benefits even to nonmetallic armor.)
• Discovered a very weird fish, the bichir (the ch is like sh), from Africa, that has lungs and can live on land for extended periods of time. Sound normal? It's not a lungfish. It's not even a lobe-finned fish. It's an extremely basal ray-finned fish, and may be the closest fish still extant to the common ancestor of all bony fish. It has really weird, simple lungs, and a unique method for filling them with air (along with "buccal pumping" i.e. gulping with the mouth), namely it exhales by pulling the scales on its chest inward to exhale, and creating negative pressure when that's released, pulling in more air. They're the only vertebrate with lungs but no trachea.
  
  Anyway I think I'll base my sahuagin on them, which is cooler because ray-finned fish are more "normal fish", and also makes sense with the association with nagas since one group of bichirs are called "snakefish", guess why. The only question is whether to have them have serpentine lower torsos, like Warcraft nagas, since bichirs generally only have particularly developed pectoral fins. (I'm inclining to no, though.) I briefly considered maybe having them also be the serpentfolk, but I'm leaning toward no, since my nagas (which are actually proteans, stat-wise) are snake-y almost by definition. Maybe they also appear as eels, morays (which aren't really eels), caecilians, and other serpentine critters.
• Semi-relatedly I think my gillmen will breathe through their ears, underwater, since the gill arches became part of the ears (among other things) in tetrapods, and the ear also connects to the respiratory system by the Eustachian tube. Of course they also have increased sensitivity to vibrations when underwater, to make up for the fact their ears are doing something else.