Playing with Fantasy XXXVI

Icosahedral RPG thoughts.

• Decided to consolidate my humans' Fox god and Wildcat god. Fox was less suited to stealth ever since I made him a maned wolf (called a "steppe fox" in the setting) instead, and Wildcat can be goddess of love, poetry, and stealth instead of love, poetry, and fire—He-Bear makes more sense as a smithing god anyway. ("Wildcat" in this context actually means "leopard-sized sabertooth like Megantereon".)
• Now I'm debating if I should break up my setting's year into 73 five-day weeks (quintans), with each day named for a mammal god, but then what do I do with the leap day, have it be separate or have it create a cycle like our week? Or I could do seven-day weeks by adding in the bird gods, and have roughly the same system as the real world for matching them to the rest of the calendar. (Or I could have them always match up by having the last day or two—52×7 is 364—be out of the reckoning. Oerth only has 364-day years.)
  
  Also decided my setting has six zodiac signs, which are created by the portion of the sky between the moons, since their trojan orbit means they are always 60° apart, i.e. one-sixth of the sky. The relation of sunrise (which is what zodiacs come from) and the moon is much more complicated, but I don't think it has to be. I named the signs after the six spiritualist spirits (which are also mythic paths), which also means the warlocks can use the evil versions from Horror Adventures.
• My setting's elves now live 24 times as long as humans (up to 2,640, average of 2,208), and dwarves/gnomes 20 times (up to 2,200, average of 1,840). I decided I was being too diffident about having them live thousands of years; my elves were already living half their current ages, 12 times as long as humans, and I figured why not go whole-hog for both the more "faerie-ish" races?
  
  I keep toying with having something like the Bleaching, except where that inflicts aging ahead of schedule (Golarion gnomes who avoid the Bleaching still live the ages listed in the Core Rulebook—which are the ones also listed in the 3e Player's Handbook), this would be more like they only age if it affects them. But immortality is a very different thing from great longevity, and a millennium or two is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
• Good God but numeral systems, in constructed scripts, are hard. Coming up with one for my dwarf-gnomes; wanna use symbols based on hands and feet, since they have base-20 numerals from counting on their feet too, but doing that at all efficiently is hard. Kinda have a handle on it though.
  
  Still struggling with my Draconic, though I think looking at the Banished script was a move in the right direction. Of course that's meant to be shown on digital displays (one assumes Predator was an inspiration, hardly the first time in Halo history), but you can analogize to claw-carving.
• Decided to give alchemists 0th-level formulas, which I'm now calling "tinctures". Thinking I'll give them the witch list, but add purify food and drink as well as putrefy (no existing list includes both, that I know of). The way it works fluff-wise is you prep a certain number of minor effects that can be activated using almost anything that's nearby, since alchemist "spells" are really a special version of potion, that they drink. (They need to spend a discovery to let their formulas work for anyone else, which among other things renders "mass" versions of spells useless till you do that.)
  
  Also considering giving paladins and rangers 0th-level spells. There's a class, mediums, that get 0th-level spells at 1st level despite only getting their first 1st-level spell at 4th level, like those two do. Based on the difference between other spontaneous vs. prepared casters, it seems like they would get one fewer spell per day than a medium has spells known (alchemists get as many as maguses). Thinking the paladins get the 0th-level ones of clerics, and rangers of druids.
• Giving serious thought to doing the thing where all casters work like arcanists: prepared casters who prep as many spells per day as a spontaneous caster of their type knows, and then treating those prepped spells as if they were the spells known of a spontaneous caster. One thing this would mean is that the paladins and rangers just naturally get the spell allotment of mediums, completely. Another is that maguses work like bards (or, I think, inquisitors?).
  
  Then it would just make it a flavor-text difference between sorcerer and wizard spellcasting: sorcerers cast from having observed or directly undergone magic, wizards from having studied it. Presumably the way sorcerers prep their spells in the morning is by meditating on these experiences. This also might give a good difference between oracles and clerics: clerics pray for their spells, and oracles receive them as direct infusion of their spells into them.
  
  I do think alchemists will stay as purely prepared, though, since they have to brew their formulas (now including tinctures) beforehand.
• Also kinda toying with making divine casters have the hit dice and attack progression of arcane casters, but that one might be ill-advised because I don't have any divine-caster players at the moment.
• Apparently Wizards' resurrection of Spelljammer is incredibly perfunctory—rumor has it they had a five-member design team and a seven-member marketing team. Allegedly the section on ship-to-ship combat threw out turning and maneuverability rules and weapon arcs; now your ship can automatically attack anything in its range.
  
  As far as I can tell, the Rule Zero Fallacy ("this rule is not broken because I can houserule a fix", following from Rule Zero of RPGs, "GM has final say") has now become Wizards' official ruling on all possible adjudication questions, including when they actually put out the official treatment ("treatment") for something.