Small Life Update

Trying to get back into working on my SF along with my fantasy/TTRPG stuff. It needs significant rewriting.

It's a little hard to get back into working on SF, though, when all your fictional setting's dystopian aspects are now things people are talking about on the news…

Playing with Fantasy XXXVII

Icosahedral RPG thoughts.

• Decided to change how my humanoids scale to each other. Now elves are twice the height of dwarf-gnomes and humans are twice the height of halflings—I made human males 6 feet and females 5 feet 6 inches, which is likely how we'd be if we had 0th-level purify food and drink in the hands of everyone's village priest and nobody who grew up in the Depression dragging down the averages. Then the elf males are 6 feet 6 inches and the females 6 feet 3 inches. So we have halflings at 3 feet and 2 feet 9 inches, and dwarves at 3 feet 3 inches and 3 feet 1 inch.
  
  Also decided to make hobgoblin males the same size as elf males, and goblin ones half that height (so, same height as dwarf-gnomes, but skinnier). But then I increased the height difference between their sexes: female hobgoblins are only as tall as human females, and female goblins as halfling females. Then I decided to make bugbears half again the height of hobgoblins, which had the interesting effect of making almost all of them, including most of the females, Large. (Thinking if random generation makes a female bugbear Medium, you reroll her as a hobgoblin female, including rerolling her height.)
  
  For orcs and ogres I decided to make the females the height of female dwarf-gnomes, and the males twice their height, or the same height as female elves. Then I made the ogres half again the height of the orcs, like bugbears and hobgoblins—this had the interesting effect of not only making male ogers shorter than bugbear males, but also of making female ogres Medium, in fact notably shorter than male orcs, which I think they stat as.
• Also decided that the evil human state that makes half-elves, half-orcs, and half-ogres, through magical hybridization, doesn't make female half-ogres. And it only keeps around male ones that are Large, to be super-heavy infantry, and female half-orcs that are Small, to use as sappers. Presumably they can give them alchemical treatments to encourage or discourage growth, and only cull the ones that are complete failures for their engineered purpose despite the alchemical assistance. But also, it's an evil regime, treating slave-soldiers as disposable before they ever see battle is on-brand.
• Decided how I'm going to have something in my campaign take inspiration from Shadow House: doppelgangers. Each doppelganger is raised as an aristocrat with a stable of humanoids, like the Shadows' "living dolls", that they learn to take the shape of. Maybe the weakest, poorest, or otherwise lowest-status dopplers only have one humanoid to model themselves after, and the higher their status the more humanoid models they get and the faster their shapeshifting abilities improve.
  
  Thinking humanoids who have some inkling that doppelgangers do this, sometimes rumor the stable of humanoids to be a harem, but (unlike what's described in the Pathfinder Bestiary), I think my doppelgangers are essentially sexless, occasionally taking each other as consorts to bear heirs (mutually, since mine are hermaphroditic) on a purely pragmatic basis. (It is the absolute nadir of worldbuilding for beings that didn't evolve with anything like your mating system to have anything like your sexuality.)
• Thinking my setting's humans will also have a race that are to them as orcs are to dwarf-gnomes and goblins are to elves: morlocks. And then there be a Gollum-y halfling version. Of course the human equivalent of dark elves and dark dwarves is the evil Atlantean/thalassocratic Valyrian state—and its dark-folk, gillman, and tiefling-dhampir-"genasi" offspring. Not sure if the morlock/gollum guys will be yet further degenerated members of those evil races, or maybe offshoots of the protagonist culture, driven underground and utterly debased—the ancestors of ogres and goblins were dwarves and elves (respectively) who lost a bunch of conflicts to the dark elves and dwarves, and turned to dark gods, outcast members of their respective pantheons, for help. Is there a dark human deity that the morlock/gollums had recourse to? Wouldn't you like to know.
  
  Don't think I'll actually use the stats of morlocks as presented in the Pathfinder rules; also there is no particular stat-base for a gollum (though you can just apply the "young creature" template to morlocks to get a small one, I suppose). Might look for the common element of goblins and ogres and then do those things to humans to produce the stat-base for the degenerate subterranean version. Also occurs to me that the "ancestor-touched morlock" template makes a good basis for ogres who do not have the penalty to Charisma; that or I might just have ogres and orcs only take a penalty to two of their intellectual ability scores and let them have bard priests (I prefer not giving my "savage humanoid" races full caster priests).
• However, this still leaves me wondering what the Samuel Langhorn Hell trolls are. Maybe they're the same thing as ogres/orcs, since dwarves are also gnomes? Maybe call the orc-sized ones "drow" (or "trow"?) and the ogre-sized "trolls", since those are the same word?
  
  But then what to do about the regeneration? Maybe have them have some kind of template that just gets troll rend and regeneration but take away the fire and acid resistance they share with dwarves/gnomes? Or maybe they all lose that resistance, maybe as a result of their god's alienation from the Earth and Fire gods, but in exchange they get the regeneration, and acid and fire defeat it because of the gods.
  
  Hmm. Does that mean I should give half-orcs half the regen of their ancestors? That could work. Or maybe they don't get the regen but instead have the fire and acid resistance of their dwarf-gnome ancestors. Nah. Let 'em burn.
• Decided the other continent's main civilization, the hydrocratic Púkel-men, uses druidism as their main priesthood—and also their main source of names. With all the domains and subdomains druids are capable of having (including archetypes), that gives a fair number of first elements; the second element is the things other than domains (companion, familiar, herbalism, etc.) that a druid can use with nature bond.
• Kinda going back and forth on maybe giving my elves and dwarves light sensitivity, since they have 120-foot darkvision and, I decided, also low-light vision. On the one hand, svirfneblin don't have it, and they're treated as an ordinary PC race in Pathfinder, no level adjustments (though not PFS legal). On the other hand I do think it would make the most sense.
  
  Hey, dazzled is only a -1 penalty to attacks and visual Perception. I considered maybe having them use eye-veils or tinted lenses or kohl, but what I can find of statting those has worse effects than dazzled does. (I also considered football player-style eyeblack, which from what I can tell would remove the attack-roll penalty but not the Perception one.)
• Still working on my Draconic. Definitely going to try to get some inspiration from the Banished alphabet (which is probably just Brute, as the "Covenant" alphabet is just Elite). Thinking I'll do like Tolkien's Sarati script and have the vowels be small marks to the right or left, on one side if they're before the consonant and on the other side after.