Playing with Fantasy XXXIV

Fantasy thoughts.

• Wrath of the Righteous is better gameplay-wise than Kingmaker, but not as fun. You get mounts, new races like dhampirs, and new classes like bloodrager and oracle, but several of your companions are scumbags, and/or almost impossible not to have die, and the whole last part of the midgame takes place in the Abyss, which is about as pleasant as it sounds.
  
  Also Nenio's companion questline is a pain in the ass (fortunately in between you do get some very funny interactions with her). On the other hand (I guess we have four), Arueshelae is the best romance in either game (both the other girls are psychopaths, and there are serious issues with all the female romance options in either game, besides Aru—the only other one as good as Aru is Tristian, and I don't play female characters).
• Decided my dwarven gods will be combined with my gnomish gods, which gives them nice long names as gnomes are wont to have. Or, mostly; I might have to rework a few in order to combine them. See, two of the dwarf gods are a married couple, two of the gnome gods are twins. Have to pick one or the other, it's not "that" kind of pantheon.
• Hmm. If Gigantopithecus (male) is 551 pounds and 9 feet 11 inches, to a male orangutan's 191 pounds and 4 feet 6 inches, then it follows that a human-based giant (male 152 pounds and 5 feet 8 inches, female 119 pounds and 5 feet 3 inches) would be 12 feet 6 inches tall for a male and 11 feet 7 inches for the female.
  
  Just taking the ratio of human weight to orangutan weight seems to make a creature much too light, although Gigantopithecus is a lot lighter for its weight than an orangutan. 438 pounds for a 12 foot 6 inch male and 343 pounds for an 11 foot 7 inch female comes to BMIs of 13.7 and 12.5. But then again, Gigantopithecus has a BMI of 27.4 to an orangutan's 46.
  
  What this presumably means is I can easily have a Large-sized ogre without having to worry much about the square-cube law, and then I can have Large fire giants (giant gnome-dwarves) and Huge frost and hill giants (giant elves and humans), by using pneumatic muscle.
• I really need to rework my giantish, though I think I'll keep the Zentraedi-based phonology and just improve the grammar. (Before it had isolating grammar, which is generally what I do when I'm feeling lazy.) Given Zentraedi proper seems to work like English (e.g. masa, "lord", is before names, while genitives come after what they modify as seen in emyulata mbwagh "alien emulator"), I might have Giantish work like Japanese. Which means I can form a lot of polite forms and stuff by compounding base roots with auxiliaries, e.g. the -imasu ending was originally a verb meaning "humbly travel to/from a place (and then do something)".
  
  Might also enhance my Draconic with plural marking like that in Dovahzul, but different. Namely, I might have it preface a pluralized noun with a vowel and geminate the first consonant, where Dovahzul pluralizes with geminated final consonant followed by e (e.g. the plural of mey "fool" is meyye). Might have the vowel in the plural prefix be an echo vowel of the stem one, though, or maybe one for some vowels and a different one for others, i.e. (a limited form of) vowel harmony. Might actually have pluralization optional and have it be applicable to proper nouns, where it actually means "and company", the way the (very optional) plural marker in Japanese does.
• My Austronesian-alignment ("symmetrical voice", though I would've called it "voice-split ergativity") Dwarven-Gnomish has a radically simplified version of that alignment. The direct case is the agent of intransitive verbs, the patient of passive-voice verbs, and the agent and patient of active-voice verbs (distinguished by word-order), with the indirect/oblique case as the agent of passive-voice verbs. (An old name for ergative alignment was "passive", and it really does help to think of a sentence as being in passive when composing it in an ergative language, like my Elven.)
  
  I think I'll do like many Polynesian languages and use active (accusative) voice for verbs of "perception, emotion, and communication", and then passive (ergative) voice for most other transitive verbs. The indirect case will also, I think, function as object-of-preposition (if you think of the ergative as "by [agent]" that's easy to keep consistent). I don't think I'll have ergative/passive voice imply definiteness, and accusative/active imply indefiniteness, like in Tagalog, though. Nor specificity like is a feature of some Polynesian languages, though that would—all proper nouns are specific by default—let me inflect proper nouns differently from common, like I wanna try in a conlang.
• It also occurs to me I can use the intransitive voice with two direct-case nouns, to mean a causative—as in English, when if you use an intransitive verb like "run" ("we ran him out of town") or "rain" ("they rained artillery fire on the town") it actually means "caused to run" or "caused to rain".
• Also thinking my Dwarven will use Hawaiian kinship (you may have noticed they're a bit Polynesian-y—I think I said, eons ago, that "dwarves as Polynesian, with mountains as islands" was a cool idea). What Hawaiian kinship means is that all relatives of your generation are siblings, all one generation older are parents, all one younger are children, etc.
  
  But, specifically (but apparently like many Polynesian languages), dwarven kinship marks relative age of same-generation relatives (all of whom are siblings). I.e. your cousin any number of times removed is your "brother" or "sister", but it specifies whether they are older "brother" or "sister", or younger.
  
  Another thing using Hawaiian kinship would mean is that instead of calling the friends of parents "uncle" or "aunt", you probably call them "mother" or "father". And, it occurs to me, where elves call the other gods of their divine parents' generation "aunt" and "uncle", except the goblins and dark elves who worship them call them "father" and "mother", the dwarves/gnomes would call them "father" and "mother", so the ogres/orcs and dark dwarves that replaced their divine parents use the same name for their respective deities as other dwarves.
• Since I consolidated dwarves and gnomes, I think I can just have them become inevitables (with looser alignment requirements) when they die, and then reassign the kami somewhere else. Maybe to giants.
  
  Decided to add osyluths and some other fiend as political officers of fiendish factions, and then shadow demons and belier devils, as another group of fiends, that possess people. Also have nabasu and vrolikai doing what they do.
  
  Still gotta figure out what to do overall with rakshasas, oni, sahkils, psychopomps, archons, asuras, aeons, qlippoths, and maybe couatls. One of them is becoming the spidery law-spirits, but which, I don't know yet.