Playing with Fantasy XXXIII

Icosahedral fantastication thoughts.

• Thinking I'll give dwarves back the Hardy racial trait, since several feat lines require it.
• I had lost vowel-length in Dwarven, owing to the desire to keep it orthographically simple, which is why I did away with plural forms, but I can actually use acute accents. See, I had had my old one, with long vowels, mark them with circumflexes, but now, with umlauts added, I can't do that—umlauts don't combine elegantly with circumflexes. (And Ŷ is weirdsville, even if I weren't exclusively using Y for consonants, and good luck putting a circumflex on Ø.) But I can do Ű and Ő, because they exist in Hungarian (and are frankly the most elegant method of writing those two sounds as long).
  
  Currently /y/ and /ø/, written ü and ö respectively, represent the common gender, of my Dwarven, because they're at the point of articulation of masculine /i/ and /e/ (written i and e, respectively) but are rounded like feminine /o/ and /u/ (written o and u). (The close vowels are animate, while the close-mid ones are personal.) Then I have neuter be with /a/, written a. I figure lengthening those will do just fine for plural (before I'd had long vowels in verb stems represent imperfect/frequentative and short represent perfect/momentaneous, but I decided not to bother with aspect in Dwarven).
  
  Also decided to go with not really either of my dwarven or gnomish script, but rework to make a new script. Still mostly hexagon based.
• Apparently in Tagalog, at least, there is a distinction between the indirect and oblique cases (whoever named them should be slapped), with the indirect being the ergative in patient-focus verbs and the accusative in agent-focus ones, and the oblique being the dative and locative. In some other languages, though, the indirect and oblique are one case and the direct is another (I think they usually have genitives, too). Which is how my Dwarven does it. (I also call my voices active, middle, and passive, when really they should be agent-focus, intransitive, and patient-focus.)
• I think, using a version of arcanist casting, you can have prepared casters prep a spell for each spell-per-day slot, but then have flexibility about how many of each they use (i.e. they prep one spell for each slot, but can spend any of their slots to cast any of the spells they've prepared, like super versatile spontaneous casters). Arcanists proper can only prepare as many spells in a day as sorcerers of their level would know, which among other things means they only get spells when their character level is twice the spell's level, as opposed to prepared casters' twice the level minus one. You can still have prepared casters do clerics' or druids' spontaneous casting, by the expedient of not having to prep cure wounds or summon nature's ally spells beforehand.
  
  Similarly specialist wizards have to use two of their flexible slots to cast spells from their opposition school, and spells can be prepped as being a slot higher, or metamagic can be applied on the fly as a full-round action like for sorcerers. Hmm, maybe let sorcerers apply metamagic on the fly by burning higher-level slots? That might be a bit broken though.
  
  I do kinda feel like just giving spontaneous casters the undercasting of psychic magic (which is also not used by PCs in my setting, just like hybrid classes) is probably not enough to make up the difference, but then again, wizards don't get special powers at 3rd, 9th, 15th, and 20th level, they only get them at 1st and 8th; clerics don't get nearly as many benefits from their domains as oracles get from their mysteries (and even their curses). Plus sorcerers get extra class skills and, while they get one fewer bonus feat than wizards, they get a lot more leeway in what it is, assuming they pick their bloodline appropriately. Oracles are honestly probably OP as it is but maybe give sorcerers the bloodline mutations at the appropriate level without their having to give up powers and bonus feats?
• Decided to change my dwarf/gnome ethnicities so the ones that live underground have lavender or pink hair, and the ones on the surface have violet or crimson hair, and both have violet or crimson eyes. Then I think the subterranean ones will have yellow skin, and the surface ones orange, from carotenoid pigments in place of melanin (subterranean dwarves need it less).
  
  My orcs and ogres, meanwhile, are green, due to having a blue pigment along with a yellow one (several blue pigments are used in UV-blocking by some fungi and red algae, though in the latter they more commonly appear purple). They have bright red hair and eyes, which presumably comes from betalain (the pigment that gives the red coloring to beets and fly agaric).
• Also changing my giants so the ones based on elves and humans are Huge, and the ones based on dwarf-gnomes are Large, thus making each two size-categories larger than its base race. The frost and wood giants based on elves can use some stats from taiga and maybe jungle giants, while the hill giants and cyclopes based on humans will use taiga giants and great cyclopes (but with the mental and magical characteristics of the smaller giants).
• The gillmen and dark folk now have native-outsider ruling classes, like the other surviving thalassocratic Valyrians with their tieflings and elementals (and dhampirs, but that's not outsiders). Gillmen have (primarily evil) tritons, who in my setting are a mingling of mortal essence with that of aquatic fiends; and dark folk have fetchlings.
  
  Also the gillmen and tritons have 40 mm eyeballs, like a harbor seal (minus the blubber, a harbor seal is about the same size as a human). But where (I decided) elves have wider faces, to accommodate having bigger eyeballs (which makes them look younger, long skulls being a gerontomorphy), the aquatic mutant humans just have bulging eyes.
• My dwarves will actually use both hammers and axes; I think I'll have it so they're proficient with battleaxes and warhammers, treat dwarven waraxes and sphinx hammers as martial weapons, and also live in a society with the "commonplace guns" level of availability. (Maybe they'll also be proficient in pistols, even if their class doesn't have martial proficiency?)
• Maybe have halflings get a +2 to Wisdom, not Charisma? Or actually stat them as Small humans, with +2 Dex, -2 Str, and then +2 to any one ability score. Yeah that could work—you could waste your variable score on giving yourself no Strength penalty, for example.
  
  That's roughly what the Small version of a tiefling is, after all—just the size adjustments added onto the normal tiefling (if your tiefling subcategory includes a Dex bonus or a Str bonus, a Small version might be more than a little OP, frankly, since you're either as strong as a human at Small size or else you get +4 Dex).