Playing with Fantasy XXXIX

I have returned!

A bunch of stuff in life ("if you call that living") interfered, but, RE: my last post before my hiatus, Wizards backed the hell down again, so coming up with my own RPG, while still cooking (might figure out how to make an isometric RPG, à la the Pathfinder CRPGs or Divinity II, based on it), is going on the back burner for a bit.

• Did some digging: Homo floresiensis, the "Indonesian hobbit", has a skull volume only 40% that of Homo erectus, despite having by all indications identical cognition. Which comes to each dimension being 74 percent as large. So while my halflings, dwarves, and goblins are half the height of humans and elves (or close, read on), their heads are three-quarters, making those dimensions half again as big, relative to the rest of their bodies.
  
  Only, instead of exactly half, my Small races are 56 percent as tall, with the other two dimensions 74% of the big ones. The exactly half ones were just too small—a full-grown dwarf woman was the average height of a human at two and a half, and the men as three-year-olds. Halflings were worse off, with the men as tall as the average child of two and a half, and the women in the 25th percentile for girls who just turned two. Whereas at 56 percent, the male dwarf is as tall as a boy of five and a half, and the female dwarf, a girl of four and three-quarters; the male halfling is as tall as a boy of four; only the female halfling is as short as a girl of three.
  
  Decided that dwarf-gnomes have, apart from those dimensional differences, the same build as elves, and halflings the same as (an H. floresiensis-esque version of) humans, rather than dwarf-gnomes being like small half-elves (which is how gnomes' canon Pathfinder build shakes out, BMI-wise). Oddly, 56%×74%×74% works out to almost the same BMI for the little people as for the Medium ones, so I said screw it, I ain't looking to reinvent the wheel, and give them the same one as their big equivalent.
• I had worked out a while ago that goblin and hobgoblin women were the height of human and halfling ones, but with elf or dwarf builds, while the men were elf- and dwarf-height (increased size-difference between the sexes is typical in polygynous mating systems). It only just now came to me, though, that the orcs can have dwarf-sized females, and human-sized males with elf-like builds. And then I have the ogres be (1 ÷ 56%) 79% taller than orcs, for males 10 feet 9 inches tall and females the same size as elven ones. The bugbears are the inverse of halfway between elf and goblin, i.e.—1 ÷ 78%—28% taller, which averages 8 feet 4 inches for the males and 7 feet for the females, who I think I'll go back to statting as hobgoblins except for height.
• Related to goblins and size, I discovered that if I take the doglike cursorial bear Hemicyon sansaniensis, and make it as massive as the high estimate for the giant shortfaced bear, 1600 kilograms, it becomes over 18 feet long: or, Huge, meaning a Large bugbear can ride it! So the grim-hounds can be bears now, rather than hyenas. (The ones the smaller goblins ride are going to be appropriately scaled from the giant ones, rather than being based on any specific hemicyonine species.)
• Thinking I'll have positive-energy healing be reversing entropy, while negative-energy healing steals organization from the surroundings and concentrates it on the undead. And then fast healing and regeneration, none of which is positive energy and only some of which is the healing subtype of conjuration spells, will be more ordinary "speed up metabolic processes (maybe using magic to power it so you don't have to eat a hundred pounds of food)".
  
  I guess I'll have the "stealing organization" thing work kinda like Ichiko's luck in Binbōgami ga!, sucked out of the life around the undead creature, where positive energy is negative entropy (which is technically the case even in physics terms). Though, since negative energy healing does not also usually damage the living (and positive or negative energy in general doesn't damage unliving materials), maybe instead it will all come from the organization of the cosmos itself, rather than directly from life.
  
  Or, simpler, I'll just have evil priests get organization from human(oid) sacrifices, and it be stored up in them that way. Maybe good priests store up anti-entropy by good works.
• Celestials with bird wings, fiends with bat wings, elementals with pterosaur wings: so far so good. But spider spirits with insect wings? Anathema, especially since the fairy-like azatas that dead elves become already have insect (moth, specifically) wings. So instead I think the spider spirits (norns) will balloon, with silk. And then the snake spirits will fly roughly like a cross between a flying fish and a galloping crocodile? (Crocs run on land with a more mammal-like gait.)
  
  Azatas have bug moth wings, and ascended-dead dwarves, which are inevitables, have mechanical wings. Think agathions (ascended humans) will only have wings if they're the bird kind, and the kyton-barghests that dead goblins become will use chains to get around? (Or become wolves, and run.) And then the rakshasas that dead ogres and orcs become will either not fly, or just float. Not sure which dead dark elves or dwarves become; leaning toward asuras and sahkils, though which is which is up for grabs.
• Along with everyone casting like an arcanist now, my witches and oracles will both work like shamans, except with oracle spells per day. One thing is that both act like shamans of the Life spirit, and can channel at first level same as clerics; there's still a benefit to taking the Life mystery, for oracles, though, because it means that you can use positive energy while being evil. The oracles don't get hexes, though, they get their oracle revelations at the usual time, and the witches don't get spirit powers, they just get hexes (including at 1st level).
  
  Kinda think I will have witch familiars take the spirit-animal powers, though, since most shaman spirits (though based on oracle mysteries) map pretty close to witch-patron themes—spirit-magic spontaneous casting is redundant with everyone casting like arcanists now, of course, but treating those as spells the witch has always prepared is probably a good idea (that's also how I handle clerics' spontaneous healing—which they now share with oracles). Maybe including wandering hex? And then I guess it wouldn't be too far-fetched to let oracles use wandering spirit.
• I've mentioned my setting's cities have outsiders bound to them, as a tutelary spirit but also something like the Superintendant AIs in Halo. But I realized, the way to model that? You apply the dread lord template, with their settlement as their cursed domain, but with some tweaks for the non-evil ones.
  
  I think what kind of outsider a settlement is tied to might be based (along with alignment) on the max level of spellcasting possible there? Like you have an outsider patron with the same CR as a full caster who can perform your settlement's max level of spells. Which would of course mean no patron higher than CR 15 or 16, since no settlement has 9th level spells available for sale.
• A tip for people who like the robustness of the tactical rules in a real, for-grownups RPG like Pathfinder: you can get a cheap flatscreen TV, say around 42 inches, hook a laptop up to it with an HDMI, and use it to project a dungeon-map as a changeable game table. Probably cover the screen with some kind of film, of course, and you probably wanna use plastic miniatures rather than metal. But compared to the cost of full-color poster printing, a TV probably pays for itself in half a dozen maps or so.
• Decided my elves and dwarves have partly structural-colored hair. Elves have white sparkly hair, like snow, in light, but in shadow it's green or blue or purple; dwarves have black hair but in light it turns metallic bright pink, violet, or red, like hummingbird feathers. Had had the dwarves' pigment be melanin like in fungi, but they're also red algae, so instead it's flavonoid pigments, several of which are very dark. (The elves are also flavonoids.)

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 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.

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).

Come On, Shorty

Decided to consolidate dwarves and gnomes into one race, in my setting. They're redundant with each other; Paracelsus, who came up with gnomes as his earth "elementals", also called them pygmaeus—what that means to a Swiss German is left as an exercise for the student. Also as is pointed out in the TV Tropes article OurGnomesAreWeirder, the gnome in D&D is the dwarf from European folklore, the dwarf is the dwarf from Tolkien (usually via Warhammer, I would add). This also gives me a roughly human-sized "fairy" humanoid and a small one, like humans and halflings, without trying to wedge in the "human sized but weirdly proportioned" fifth wheel.

Decided to give them dwarf magic resistance (6 + HD), energy resistance 5 to both fire and acid, 120 ft. darkvision, and stonecunning, and the spell-like abilities I'd previously given dwarves, but also gnomes' ability score adjustments, obsessive trait, and keen senses. They have dwarves' weapon familiarity (hammers not axes, handguns, firearms are martial weapons), but use both the gnomes' mushrooms (particularly for armor) and the dwarves volcanic-pool algae (particularly for weapons). The rationale of that is that, while elves' gods are both the one tree, the dwarves' gods are fire and earth, two things that are more separate. Also dwarves make more stuff (although I guess this kinda makes the dwarves a lichen, a super rare rhodophyte-basidiomycete one). Maybe the dwarves can also make their algae weapons into the copper that harms neutral-aligned outsiders.

Decided they use largely dwarven language, which has the interesting effect of making all four of my protagonist cultures (elves, dwarves, inland Númenor, hydrocratic Púkel-men), except for halflings (who are an offshoot of the thalassocratic Valyrians), use a language inspired by Tolkien. I decided to take out plural forms and aspect distinctions in the verbal stems that both nouns and inflected verbs derive from, and just have three main verb paradigms: active/agent focus, passive/patient focus, middle/intransitive (in Austronesian alignment the important question is which noun that relates to the verb is in the direct case and which in the oblique one, and intransitive verbs only have a direct-case noun). Still haven't figured out which of their alphabets they'll use, Dwarven or Gnomish.

The gnomes were from the planet, but the dwarves that I consolidated gnomes into (and vice-versa) still come from one of the moons, which means I might have humanity have just grown up naturally, on the planet, unobserved by the more advanced lunar races because you can't see cavemen from orbit.

Not sure what to do about their coloration. Probably yellow structural coloring, in their skin, with phycoerythrin turning them various shades of orange, red, or pink. I thought I might have to give up on white dwarves and purple-haired gnomes but there are rhodophyte algae in basically every shade of red and magenta, up to dark lavender-violet with no red at all.

I struggled with what to do with orcs and ogres, if they should all be much bigger than their dwarf ancestors, but I hit on this: female orcs are gnome-sized (male and female gnomes are the same size), then male orcs are as much bigger than them as male mandrills are compared to females. Then female ogres are the same size as male orcs, and male ogres are mandrill male-to-female larger than them. This gives me Small orc females (whose stats become +2 to Strength and Dexterity and -2 to all mental stats), Medium male orcs and female ogres (which latter have the stats of orcs), and Large male ogres.

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.

Measure, and Number, and Weight II

So I think zled units will be generic terms, instead of untranslated words. (If that bothers you, go look up what "meter" means.) Since they're based on multiples of 12 and various powers of 10 of the Planck units, they can be divided into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, eighths, tenths, and twelfths and still be even numbers of the base units.

For length, thought I'd just call the 6.350 centimeter, 1.2 billion Bohr-radius unit a "stretch" (and volume just be "cubic stretches"). Their mass unit, 120 million Planck masses or 2.6117 kilos, will just be a "ladings". And their time unit, unlike the others not based on a natural unit, will be…hmm. "Periods" seems most obvious for the hour-analogue, actually the equivalent instead of a Chinese double-hour because it's 1/12th of a Lhãsai day. Then "subperiods" for 1/120th of that, and "subsubperiod" for 1/120th of that, 1/14,400th of the period, and 1/172,800th of the day. Which makes it roughly half a second, ignoring the difference in length between Lhãsai's day and Earth's.

Let's see, then. What if we express speeds in, instead of meters per second, stretches per subsubperiod? Which comes to about 1/8th of a meter per second. Which in turn comes to about a quarter of a meter per second per second, because you apply the difference of time units squared. And imparting such an acceleration to a weight of one lading results in a "force" of 0.618863217 newtons. Then if we move that force over one stretch we get an "energy" of about 0.0393 joules (or about 245,277,675.123 GeV, i.e. 245.278 PeV, or about a quarter of a EeV—there are some surprisingly small units out there in science-land). And then that is equivalent to a "power" of 0.0759131869 watts, sustained for one subsubperiod.

Hmm. Maybe just call them "units (length, volume, mass, time, acceleration, force, energy, power)"? Or, given how Zbin-Ãld works, "long unit" and "heavy unit", and then "period, subperiod, subsubperiod"? Yeah I like that. Then the derived units, though, are "units of (acceleration, force, energy, power)"? Area and volume of course being "square/cubed long units", of course.

Playing with Fantasy XXXI

Back on my fantasy RPG bullshit.

• Decided that the underwater city of the thalassocratic Valyrians, who became gillmen, will also have a race of native outsiders, namely tritons but not good (they have aquatic-fiend patrons); the underground one, whose normal inhabitants are dark folk, have a fetchling ruling class. Though instead of owbs they have shadow demons as their main outsider patrons.
• My fiends usually wrap their wings around themselves like clothes, one bat wing as a skirt and the other as a shirt (maybe the males wear both as a skirt), even though they're only anatomically correct if they want to be (or maybe they flash you when they fly, or materialize clothes over the relevant body-parts before spreading their wings). Also think the aforementioned aquatic fiends have a patagium (flying/gliding membrane) attached to their tails, like fish-eating bats, though they use it for swimming instead of catching fish.
  
  Think on the other hand my celestials (bird wings) and elementals (pterosaur wings) will wear apron-like shirts, like the ones used as women's undershirts in China and Vietnam. I don't think my proteans/nagas have wings, but they might grow gliding membranes like flying snakes or fins like flying fish (they also made the sahuagin, after all, and have eel traits too). Dunno what to do with the spidery law-outsiders; maybe ballooning like money spiders. Those two kinds of outsider are not particularly humanlike.
• Not sure what to call the law-spiders. I incline to ōgumo, i.e. "great spiders", another name of the tsuchigumo. There's actually a shocking dearth of spiders in mythology, as a class—there's a bunch of specific spider gods, like Anansi and his equivalents in Africa, Iktomi in Siouan cultures, and too many Spider Grandmothers to count in other Native American cultures, and individual semi-mortals like Arachne, but races of spider creatures are actually bizarrely rare.
  
  In-setting the proteans/naga are called neither, but just "snake gods", with the serpentfolk as "snake people" and nagaji as "snake children", or maybe "serpentborn" to signify their partially human ancestry. (They're hybrids of snake people with humans, accomplished by the same alchemical genetic engineering as makes the half-elves and half-orcs of my setting.) I can't find a base for a hybrid aranea, here the law-spider counterparts of serpentfolk, so I guess they never made one.
• My setting's cairn wights are basically human inugami. An inugami is a yōkai created as an artificial guardian deity by burying a dog up to the neck and letting it starve within view of its food bowl; they guard their master's property loyally but bear dangerous resentments (can't imagine why) and their protection can easily become a curse. My cairn wights are made from soldiers buried to the neck within view of an eating area and allowed to starve while watching others eat.
• I really hate the "elves as dying race with low fertility" thing. My elves have a two-thirds longer reproductive cycle than humans—menarche at about 21 with good nutrition instead of 12½, ovulating an average of every 48 days instead of 29, average gestation of 467 days instead of 280—but their reproductive lifespan is twelve times as long. If they ever have to outbreed you, they can.
  
  Same goes for dwarves, who have the same reproductive cycle as humans but six times the reproductive lifespan, and gnomes, whose cycle is one-third longer—menarche at 17, ovulating every 39 days, gestation of 373 days—but have nine times the reproductive lifespan. They just mostly live in conditions where extra children are not an advantage, which always reduces birthrates even without modern contraception.
• Realized I should revise my height-weight tables. Turns out the government standard that pretends the same BMI range is healthy for both men and women (granting BMI itself is all that useful), is hokum; the real ranges are 20.7–26.4 for males and 19.1–25.8 for females (females have more fat and less muscle, meaning they're less dense). So now my humans average 5 foot 9 inches and 160 pounds for males and 5 foot 4 inches and 130 pounds for females (yeah I'm rounding a little).
  
  For the nonhumans I based the relative weights on canids, with humans as golden jackals, dwarves as Borophagus, and elves as corsac foxes. (I tried humans as coyotes and elves as red foxes or black-backed jackals, but the differences weren't big enough.) Based on how much all three would weigh at 80 centimeters long (not counting tail), and then applying those mass ratios to a 5 foot 9 person, then giving the same BMI to a person of the average height of elves and dwarves (6 feet and 5 feet, both sexes, respectively), I get elves who weigh 120 pounds and dwarves who weigh 270. Then I took the common canid ratio of females 85 percent as heavy as males, and got female elves who weight 100 pounds and female dwarves who weigh 230. Gnomes are halfway between human and elf builds, which results in a gnome male of 3 feet 8 inches weighing 55 pounds, and a female the same height weighing 45.
  
  One interesting side effect of this is most dwarves cannot even lift each other, let alone carry each other, and dwarves probably don't roll around much in their sleep. Certainly married ones probably learn not to, fairly early on in the marriage. (Elves weigh so much less than humans of their height because they have much more fast-twitch muscle than slow-twitch, and also have smaller guts, being generalist hypercarnivores like wolves.)
• My dwarves' special material, I realized, makes more sense if it's just seaweed grown in volcanic pools, instead of coralline algae. You take the leaves and shape them into plates, much like elven armor, but the seaweed can make bigger plates so dwarves wear plate armor instead of lamellar. I also think their hammers will be made of a bunch of the leaves curled up and pressed together.
  
  It also occurred to me that, since I don't have demons, daemons, or devils, but just fiends, who vary with regard to law and chaos, that I should just have cold iron be what hurts chaotic ones, alchemical silver be what hurts lawful ones, and "mountain copper" (orichalcum) be what hurts neutral ones.
• Thinking I'll just have the dwarf stuff be like mithral, the way the elf and gnome stuff is—certainly that would make it more valuable as a trade commodity than stuff that makes your weapons and armor heavier for very little tactical advantage (sure dwarves don't slow down when carrying heavy loads, but no potential customers get the slow and steady trait).
  
  Weapons made from the elves' leaves have the special quality of wyroot, and armor from gnomes' mushrooms have the special quality of singing steel. Armor made from the dwarves' seaweed will just have the special quality of spiresteel. And weapons made from the humans' far rarer stuff, made from the bones of things like hydras, have the special quality of cryptstone.

Mélange VIII

Random thoughts, only 5/8ths about icosahedral amusements. None of them reference Dune because I hate Dune (much like the Warhammer 40,000 setting it heavily influenced, it's better as a source of memes than actually engaged with seriously).

• Realized probably the simplest way to turn kytons into goblin ancestor-gods, which I'm calling "barghests", is to swap out a few powers here and there (because they're pure fear, not torture) and then apply, basically, the lycanthrope template, but with my version of worgs as the "base animal". I actually have to swap a lot fewer things than one would think, because kytons run almost as much on fear as on pain, and many of their mutilation-y things will still fly given how much influence from Predator my goblins have.
• Arcane is good. Really, really good. My brother has the bizarre idea that Silco having a cause, the independence of Zaun, makes him better than the other gang leaders of the Lanes, who operate purely from self-interest. But the other gang-leaders didn't spread Shimmer around or come very close to a losing war with Piltover largely out of nationalistic pride.
  
  In the immortal words of Daeran Arendae, violence in a good cause is indeed different: it's much more bloody, and is done with pinkies out.
  
  If I had another complaint, it would be that "Get Jinxed" plays at one point (albeit diagetically, when Jinx is listening to the radio while working—"you're listening to your own image song? don't be that guy"), but "Here Comes Vi" never does. Shameful, shameful oversight. Admittedly she isn't a Piltover enforcer yet, maybe that's it?
• Golly bob howdy but Pathfinder is weirdly light on items for storing and preserving food, and cooking it. I mean you can use a cauldron of brewing in camp as well as in the alchemy lab, but other than that? I don't think there are any magical storehouses or anything.
  
  I also think there need to be more low-level magical traps, let your rogues earn their keep earlier on. I mean, since a summon monster VI trap is CR 7, isn't a summon monster I trap CR 2? And maybe summon minor monster as CR 1? 1d3 fiendish-template animals sounds like a CR 1 hazard to me.
• Ghostbusters Afterlife is a fitting conclusion to the franchise. The two main kids are extremely believable as Egon's grandchildren (the girl especially is adorable—not just her looks and mannerisms but how her shirt is often buttoned wrong), and everything else is good to excellent. (It does have the weakness of being much more interesting before the big ghost stuff starts happening, but that was also true of the original.)
  
  Critics have mostly panned it in the stupidest manner imaginable, seemingly to punish it for being what the fans wanted, because the critics wanted the 2016 one to be well-received. Which was never going to happen; you can't try to reboot one of the tightest-written movies ever made as a piece of crappy improv, no matter what 1986 Fundamentalist "everything in pop culture is satanic" moral payload you attach to try to shame people into liking it.
  
  Sorry but the 2016 one was fourth-rate improv consisting very largely of fart jokes, extended painfully-stupid dancing sequences, and a running gag where the protagonist is obnoxious to a Chinese-takeout delivery guy. Can't imagine why people didn't like it.
• The seven deadly sins are drastically overdone, in fiction. Decided instead that my setting's blasphemous warlockery will run off the Four Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance: perversion (the sin of Sodom), betrayal (denial of wages to workers), oppression (of widows and orphans), and murder. Of course, a game-setting is more PG-13, so the main form perversion takes (aside from the decadent witch culture having some sibling marriages) is cannibalism—sexual appetites aren't the only ones that can be perverted. Helps the royal caste of the modern thalassocratic Valyrians are dhampirs.
  
  Also decided that the non-fiend evil gods basically want to use the witch-power of the fiends against fiends, like using the One Ring against Sauron, or using Stasis against the Darkness (huh funny how one of those examples understands what a bad idea it is, Eris). They mostly take the form of murder (i.e. human[oid] sacrifice), although the ogres and orcs are tyrants and cannibals and the dark elves and dwarves are tyrants. (Both go in for a certain amount of backstabbing but you can't encourage that and still maintain a society, any more than you can permit most versions of perversion.)
• Decided that the elves' panthers age relative to lions as elves age relative to humans: maturity 2/3 later (elves in my setting are adults at 25 to humans' 15), then age 12 times slower. Which means that, as lions are adults at 3 years, the panthers are at 5; lions get to be middle-aged at 8, so the panthers reach it at 96.
  
  From there though we apply the game-rule aging system where "venerable" is twice middle age (70 for humans, who hit it at 35), so 192 for the panthers. Then "old" is halfway between the two, 144 for the panthers. Lions only live about 19 years in the wild, which makes the panthers' maximum lifespan 228 years.
• Thinking I'll redo my Draconic alphabet, since the old one was pretty much just Persian cuneiform upside-down and with the phonological values assigned at random. Thinking I'll take some cues from the Covenant alphabet, but with the strokes inside the triangles rather than as the triangle. But also from how Ugaritic is actually a cuneiform version of Phoenician (e.g. all the signs that incorporate an O shape, the ones that in Greek or Latin are O, Θ, or Q, replace the O shape with a <-type thing).
  
  Specifically how I think I'll have it work (I need to figure out all the nitty-gritty still) is take letters like something in a standard alphabet, convert them to cuneiform-esque shapes, and then convert those cuneiform-esque shapes to triangles. Specifically upward-pointing ones: Draconic is written bottom to top, by a dragon perched above whatever hard surface they're scratching letters into (hence the cuneiform, they're claw marks).
• HBO Max has a bunch of DC stuff, and while the fourth season of Young Justice is even more painfully terrible than the third, at least there's a bunch of movies. I particularly like Superman/Batman: Apocalypse and Superman Unbound—I really like Supergirl when she's not being desecrated by the CW (and by current DC writers, of course). Also the fight in Apocalypse with Wonder Woman and Barda against the Female Furies, is one of the best fights in all of animation.
  
  There's also The Batman, in many ways the most underrated DC show (and it's pretty highly regarded, just not highly-regarded enough given it's close to as good as Batman the Animated Series). I wonder why Krypton isn't on there, though, unless it's a licensing issue with Syfy or Universal—tell me the thing with Sig-El's grandfather's Fortress of Solitude, and the camera pulls out to show the El crest, and the Superman theme plays, doesn't stir you deep inside.

Playing with Fantasy Λʹ

Thoughts, back on my constantly-RPG bullshit again. This is numbered with the Greek numeral for 30 so as to avoid "XXX".

• Decided to break down divine casters this way: clerics still come from dwarves, but now so do druids; oracles come from gnomes; witches come from elves. Humans still acquired all three late, having only had ancestor-worship adepts for most of their history. Decided the prevalence of witches among the black-magic empire (so I don't have to rewrite as many things) was because they were more influenced by elves than by dwarves or gnomes, magic-wise. Think I might have witches count as divine casters in terms of stuff like scrolls, but not for armor purposes.
• Decided that my Elven, which used to mark nouns and pronouns for ergative, oblique (in practice often genitive), and reflexive cases, will instead use two different pronoun stems for absolutive (formerly unmarked) and ergative, combine the two for reflexive, and do the oblique by just putting prepositions on the pronoun (like "of" for the genitive). Nouns are marked for case just by position, agent before patient before verb (same as Tibetan and Basque).
  
  I was going to use the absolutive, since I was thinking of it as an "object" case, including "of a preposition", but apparently it's actually usually the ergative that's used as the prepositional case if a language doesn't have a separate one (helps to think of the ergative as being "by [noun]", and then every other preposition just replaces the "by"). You do not want different prepositions to take different cases; I have trauma flashbacks to high-school German just thinking about it.
• Giving my elves and dwarves 120-foot darkvision and spell-like abilities, like drow and duergar; the dwarves get the derro spell-like abilities (ghost sound, daze, darkness, but once a day each, and not sound burst) instead of the duergar ones (enlarge person and invisibility, once a day each). I'm also giving elves 11 + character level spell resistance and dwarves 6 + level, along with letting them have the Healthy trait that replaces the Hardy trait (there's an option in the core rules for dwarves to replace Hardy with 5 + level SR).
  
  They also get resistance 5 to cold (elves) or fire (dwarves), which is only worth 1 point in the Race Builder, but in the rules for elves it replaces Elven Immunities, which is worth 2, so I give elves the 11 + level SR which costs 1 point more than 6 + level. 11 + level isn't that OP; a caster 1 level higher than you, or 1 level lower with Spell Penetration, can overcome your SR by just rolling a 10. And I took away all the elves' and gnomes' racial bonuses to saves against stuff like enchantments and illusions—plus SR doesn't work on most witch hexes unless it specifies they're spell-like abilities.
  
  Gnomes are less nocturnal, and so have only 60-foot darkvision (plus electricity resist 5, the standard gnome spell-like abilities, and 11 + level spell resistance, same as svirfneblin). The elves and dwarves are from the moons, where the nights are 15 days long, and on the far side you can never get "moonlight" from the planet overhead being in daylight (but since the day is also 15 days long, no light sensitivity). Gnomes are from the planet. I basically restrict low-light vision (which elves and gnomes have in the core rules) to real animals and things based on them, like catfolk and gnolls.
• Thinking I might call witches, in the "dark magic" sense rather than the "quasi-divine primary-caster class" (because now witches in that sense can be any divine casters, while witches in the class sense are elven priests), "warlocks". Firstly because it literally means "oathbreaker", and second because the warlock class, introduced in Let's Send 75% of Our Playerbase to Pathfinder or 1e 4e, is the most hateful thing in 5e to people of decent good sense.
  
  Warlock is a douchebag-bait class (though Critical Role makes all of 5e straight-up catnip to that demographic no matter what class they wind up playing), balanced by people who went to the Riot Games school of design, that absolutely runs off the "15-minute adventuring day". Alternatively I might call the bad ones "defilers", which does of course raise the question of whether the good ones are "preservers".
• My hunt for a dwarven hammer comparable to the waraxe (which is a gnome weapon in my setting) and bastard sword, leads me to use the sphinx hammer, I think used by the Egyptian dwarves of Osirion, on Golarion, but with the "one-handed with Exotic Weapon Proficiency, two-handed martial" thing instead of being able to throw it. Still not sure what to call it—leaning toward "battlehammer". "Hammer of arms" seems to sometimes be used for a particularly large warhammer, also—think I've seen it used as a translation (possibly by machine?) of the Warhammer Titan's name, in Attack on Titan.
  
  My dark dwarves, on the other hand—distinguishable from the others only in their weapon familiarities, stat-wise—use (light and heavy) picks instead of hammers. Where the other dwarves make weapons from a coralline algae, the dark dwarves make them from the chitin of giant spiders. Thinking they'll also make crossbows from chitin, instead of firearms like other dwarves use—though come to think of it you could probably make a decent-ish barrel from the leg exoskeleton of a giant arthropod, given how strengthened it would have to be at that size.
• Decided that my elves' hunting god, who is the poisonous resin that protects the World Tree, will get Calistria's stuff, in elven contexts—his sacred animal is a toxic moth with venomous caterpillars, and those are easy to swap in for wasps. He'll also get most of Desna's butterfly-themed stuff. (Look, I'm a Spelljammer player, elves and Lepidoptera go together.)
  
  I had had the elves make textiles from fibers of their sacred trees, and I think they still make some, but a lot of their stuff, now, is going to be made from silk collected from the abandoned cocoons of his sacred moths. There are actually three different other kinds of silk, from three other moths.
  
  Haven't figured out what gods of my setting will get most of the other stuff from Golarion (as far as I know, if it's on the Archives of Nethys it's OGL, once you change the names; they're on the PFSRD site under the disguised names), though of course each pantheon's war god gets most of the Gorum stuff.
• Minagho in Wrath of the Righteous made me realize the obvious path to doing multiple levels of "seducer fiend" (succubi and incubi, minus the pretense those are two different things). Namely, succubi as "common" ones and lilitu as "greater" ones. Decided to make cambions into the basis for a "lesser" one, too.
  
  Think, though, that I'll replace the lilitu's husk stuff with the deimavigga/apostate devil's evangelization, indomitable oration, and ohrwurm powers. Think I'll also replace the cambion's sinfrenzy with the raktavarna rakshasa's "master's eyes" ability, minus the part about being a familiar.

Mélange VII

Random thoughts, only about half of them about RPGs!

• Been playing Wrath of the Righteous a lot. The elf witch, Ember, is, unfortunately, a child (specifically a 91-year-old sixth grader), but Arueshalae, the reformed succubus, is romanceable. The part when you're in the lab of the Architect of the Worldwound and see your companions' innermost dreams, and you discover Ember just wants to play with other kids, was, um…not okay, guys, I needed that heart for other purposes.
  
  It's kinda neat how not only does Ember bring out my fatherly impulses, but even brings out the older-brotherly inclinations of Daeran Arendae, the neutral evil narcissist hedonist. In her first companion quest he starts to make a joke about her having to apologize to a demon lord for her purehearted tears shattering his unholy altar, and then he stops and says, "No, never mind, not even I can joke about this. Ember! Some people don't deserve apologies even if you hurt them!"
• My brother said, and he's quite correct, that Star Wars Visions is better than basically everything Disney has ever done with the franchise, even the good things. The band one, the black and white one, and the Astro Boy one are just mediocre, but the other six are genuinely good—a ratio almost unthinkable in Disney Star Wars or in anime based on western properties (cf. The Animatrix and Halo Legends). I dunno, maybe the two kinds of badness cancel out. I particularly like the first of the two Trigger ones, with the twins. Though the best Star Wars thing involving Sith twins will always be that one trailer for a SW:TOR expansion.
  
  The subtitles are pretty questionable, though, since they're the closed-captioning of the English dub. Like for example how in "Lop and Ochō" they don't mention that he's not just "Boss Yasaburō" but is specifically referred to by the term that usually describes yakuza bosses, and that the duty their clan has inherited along with their lightsaber is jingi—the name for the yakuza code. (Neighborhood yakuza, like "neighborhood gangs" all over the world, are a lot less evil than big-time yakuza. Basically this is a classic yakuza-movie plot where a neighborhood gang is being forced to capitulate to a bigger one, and comes into conflict with them when their more amoral, profit-driven ways threaten the security that neighborhood gangs exist to protect.)
• An interesting idea Wrath brings up that I immediately realized I had to incorporate in my own stuff: paladins' fear immunity means they are also immune to PTSD. They can still worry about things—Seelah is very insecure after what happens with the League of the Inspiring Cart—but presumably in a fundamentally different way from people who still feel fear.
  
  It also unavoidably made me think of the Adeptus Astartes: "They are my Space Marines and they shall know no fear." But Iomedae the Inheritor is worthier of the service of such beings than the Corpse on the Golden Throne. (Although Aroden was basically him. I've talked about the "ascended human" form of non-infringing Jesus, and why it doesn't work.)
• The new Netflix He-Man—not Masters of the Universe: Revelation, the one with "He-Man" actually in the title and actually made by people who don't hate fans of the franchise—is really good. Mostly because it's made to entertain kids and parents rather than to win the approval of twenty-somethings from Portland who spend too much time on Twitter.
  
  The thing in this iteration where Adam shares the Power of Grayskull (the Masters of the Universe always seemed like a bunch of randos in both prior versions, so the old-school fans' complaint there is mostly groundless) was interesting, coming out as it does at the same time as Wrath, in which your character shares mythic power with his companions.
• Strong Legend of Zelda vibes in Wrath. If you take the Azata mythic path, or even just help the Desnans escape the paranoid inquisitor (who, as the game says, has pretty good excuses for being paranoid), you learn a song from Desna.
  
  When you sing it for Aruashelae in the Drezen prison, she sings it too, then the soundtrack takes it up non-diagetically. Which is right out of Ocarina of Time. (Also Arueshalae's voice actress kinda sounds like Cortana does in Halo 3, when she's been imprisoned and tortured by the Gravemind.)
• I'm pretty sure that Rifftrax, not seasons 11 and 12, is the real heir of MST3K. I didn't like that show just to see movies get riffed on, I liked it because I like Kevin and Mike and Bill. Also you get Mary Jo and Bridget doing some of them, and Trace and Frank in at least one.
• My current playthrough of Wrath I'm an elf bloodrager (with one level in eldritch scion magus) who worships Calistria, goddess of lust and revenge. He's chaotic good, and I'm pursuing the Azata mythic path (because baby dragon companion, because ore no yome musume da), but it's interesting how they actually make things different depending on your deity. E.g. you can swear revenge on Minagho in Calistria's name, after she beats you the first time, and then when you fight again in Drezen if you bring it up, a wasp (Calistria's animal) crawls down your arm, a sign she favors your vengeance, and your party gets surrounded by swarms of wasps that attack anyone who gets close.
  
  In Kingmaker I liked to play elf paladins of Sarenrae, goddess of redemption, so the contrast between that and a Calistrian is interesting—the duality of man elf. In Wrath there's a cool scene where Sosiel, the cleric of Shelyn, discovers that a necromancer who reanimated other Shelyn worshipers was a guy his temple took in while he was wounded. It was all a plot to turn him against Shelyn's worship, because she doesn't allow killing defeated enemies. So I told him it's not worth breaking his vows, and killed the necromancer myself—the Eternal Rose might forbid it, but the Savored Sting don't care. Just in general the Owlcat Pathfinder games give you genuine opportunities for real roleplaying that I've never seen in any computer game before.
• Strongly considering reworking my setting's spellcasters, making clerics originate with humans, druids with dwarves, oracles with gnomes…and witches with elves. Since witch is a divine caster, ish, that casts off Intelligence. Unfortunately a lot of my naming comes from the assumption dwarves have clerics and elves have druids (fortunately only the surnames in both cases), and the courtesy-names used by the elite of the thalassocratic Valyrian society are derived from witch-patron themes and possible witch bonds (familiars, mirror-witch mirror, etc.). I also have a lot of "fluff" about specifically witches. But I can redo that in terms of the "witchcraft", possibly renamed, being any evil divine caster, give them witches, druids, clerics, and oracles. About the one difficulty is that then I still have the dark elves, goblins, ogres, and dark dwarves hating witches despite being evil, but I can still make it work, the way that plenty of cultures that practiced human sacrifice still tabooed stuff like cannibalism.
  
  The one major issue is that I should rethink at least some of the characters in the stories set in my setting, in terms of their class affiliation. Not all the thalassocratic Valyrian people's priests need to be witches, now; I could for example replace a gravewalker witch character with an undead lord cleric (but I won't, because the gravewalker's creepy doll is super important to the scene). I think I will replace another witch with a blight druid, though. Basically now I think their priesthoods will all be corruptions of the other races' ones, and their evil witches be based on elves' good ones (I imagine elves have a lot of positive-energy hex channelers…and dwarves get their channeling primarily from paladins). Maybe I'll change "witchcraft" to "blasphemy"? That's what witchcraft in the anthropological sense basically is, after all. Come to think of it, not calling it "witchcraft" would have the advantage, when I actually publish, of not running afoul of the fools who don't know "witch" never doesn't mean evil, in the real world.

Playing with Fantasy XXIX

FRPG thoughts.

• Realized I can actually give my talking-beast accent thing to the cat-, hyena-, and yak-people that the thalassocratic Valyrians made, rather than having them speak (and be named in) Giantish. Which works out better because now I have five languages derived from that one, four languages in the other (landlubber Númenorean) group, for a total of nine languages native to the continent. (Really I should work out multiple dialects of the four landlubber-Númenorean languages, too, though.)
• Thinking the hydrocratic Drúedain will have daughter-languages that change the quality of consonants based on vowel-length of the root, resulting in short vowels in all words (like it might change voiced to unvoiced or stops to fricatives, I dunno). Or I might have it change long vowels to something tonal—Spanish changed the Latin long vowel into stress, after all.
  
  Also should probably come up with different dialects for the Dothraki-type people. Maybe have initial biliterals change to a single consonant with a different vowel quality (long, maybe, or palatalized?). And, either in a different dialect or concurrent with that (maybe both, for three different languages) reduce the final-consonant inventory and have the other ones change to tones.
• Decided that "hide" armor actually means "boiled leather version of half-plate", and "leather" armor means "something like buckskins or a buff coat, made of rawhide" (hey it's only one point better than padded). (And there is no studded leather—or maybe they use something like some Pacific Northwest cultures, where they reinforce buckskin/rawhide with little medallions?)
  
  Boiled leather is not like a lot of people think of it being: it has roughly the consistency of, like, a Rubbermaid trash can. There actually isn't a reason fantasy characters can't have the "motorcycle leathers" armor that sticklers complain about, but it did in fact not historically exist till far later.
  
  If you don't like the look of boiled-leather plate armor for a druid character, and I kinda don't either, there's always horn lamellar. The actual best-attested horn armors I can find are either scale or a Filipino thing that uses brass mail to connect plates of buffalo horn, similar to Japanese "tatami" armor. There's also wooden lamellar that you'd probably stat the same as the horn stuff, very thematically fitting for druid-types.
• I'm kinda an idiot sometimes. I had had my Elven be number invariable except on pronouns. Just recently, though, I realized I can just stick an -i on the end of noun-stems. I think it'll stay where it is when the case-suffixes are added, which basically makes the case-suffix preceded by a Y sound. (I think plural -i plus a case-suffix starting in -i will yield a long I, though, instead of a -yi-.
  
  This might complicate things for the talking cats they ride, of course, who replace dental and alveolar sounds with palatalized labial and velar ones due to the shape of their tongues. I suppose I can just transcribe it as -Cyi, or -Cyí in the case of the aforementioned case-suffix staring in I. (Given Elven writes palatals with i, yi and yí would be written ii and ií, in their script.)
  
  I'd had a similar problem with the hyenas my gnomes ride, since Gnomish already has palatalized consonants; I made it so the combination of two palatals results in CryV. Of course, one of the palatals is ry, and they could already geminate r—so yes, rrry is entirely possible. Who doesn't like trigeminate consonants?
• Hmm. Actually what if, instead of -i, the Elven plural is an echo-vowel of the noun-stem? Noun-stems' final vowels (which derive from verb inflections) are already repeated in the inflectional suffix, but currently it's always short. What if I had that suffix's echo-vowel be long in the plural? Of course the absolutive (my Elven is ergative) has no suffix, but what if it has a long vowel, not followed by a consonant suffix, in the plural? That'll work. Maybe you can put an "open" echo-vowel after the singular, too, to emphasize there only being one of something?
  
  Briefly worried that this would mean I'd have to change all my elven surnames to have long final vowels, because surnames in many languages imply a plural ("the descendants of so-and-so", for example) but the elven ones are "of X grove". Groves might be groups of trees, but they're singular groups. I was worried this would mean I had to change something about my Goblin language, a form of Elven, but then I remembered it lost vowel-length, and uses reduplicated determiners derived from pronouns, to mark its plurals.
• If I had to find one flaw in the Pathfinder rules, it's that there is no rule support for being able to dive in the way of an attack that's going to hit someone else, unless you burn two feats to get Bodyguard and In Harm's Way (and Bodyguard has Combat Reflexes as a prereq, so you're actually burning three). Personally I would house-rule it that you can't do it as an attack of opportunity, but have to waste a standard action, like you do to aid another if you don't have Bodyguard. But that's a house rule; the default ruleset contains no such provision.
• There isn't a Charisma witch-archetype in Pathfinder proper other than the seducer from Legacy of the First World, but that's more than a little awkward for mixed company—particularly the seducer's kiss and garden of delights abilities—and better suited for an NPC. (It's one thing if the antagonist always has their significant other charging into battle for them, quite another if one of the PCs does.)
  
  Wrath of the Righteous comes to the rescue here, with the stigmatized witch archetype, which casts from Charisma, and loses its patron, but acquires an oracle's curse. (I don't know if it has an oracle's mystery, too, to make up for the lack of patron spells?) No word on if they're spontaneous or prepared casters (most Charisma casters are spontaneous, of course).
• Very irksome that there are the aforementioned Charisma witches, Charisma druids, Intelligence and Wisdom sorcerers, Charisma maguses, Wisdom and Intelligence bards, and Intelligence inquisitors, but no Intelligence clerics, druids, or oracles.
  
  I mean I guess it just means elven priests are in the same predicament as dwarven wizards, and better off than dwarven oracles or sorcerers (other than the aforementioned empyreal sorcerers), but it's still irksome that there's a druid offshoot that specially advantages gnomes but not elves.
  
  I guess it makes sense for gnomes to be a little more magical than elves, since gnomes are at a significant disadvantage in a physical fight (sure, there's a Constitution advantage, but that doesn't help much when you can be physically picked up and moved, due to the CMB and CMD penalties).
• Decided that my setting's vampires die like vetalas, mostly because turning into a flock of bats (like a moroi), a cloud of fog (like a nosferatu), or a pile of dust (like a jiang-shi), or having to possess an object while it recovers (like a psychic vampire) is dumb and annoying to work with. Gotta figure out which other abilities they have, though—obviously the vetala's possession abilities aren't ideal (even with the revised possession rules from Occult Adventures). Maybe the children of the night ability of a moroi and the spider climb ability of a nosferatu? Yeah I like that. They also still get a nosferatu's swarm shape, they just don't turn into a swarm when brought down to 0 hit points.

Playing with Fantasy XXVIII

Second post in the month.

• Hmm. Might just say the bugbears have no "warg" big enough to carry them, and instead, just get pulled around in chariots. Maybe their wives drive them? In Greece and I think India, the warrior would be driven around, seated, while the driver stood. Whichever of you drives, or if you drive with one hand while attacking with the other, you wouldn't want to stand in a chariot, as an 8½ foot person. Large-sized wargs are significantly stronger than horses, even advanced simple-template heavy horses (which is not what would pull most chariots, anyway).
  
  I decided to construct my "wargs" from the ground up, using the hyena stats as a base, then changing the type to magical beast and applying the advanced simple template. Then for the big one I also apply the giant simple template. For the cats the elves ride I did both the same steps, but to the cheetah—since they're based on Homotherium and it was seriously a "sabertooth cheetah", down to having reduced wrist mobility (cheetahs hold things between their front paws more like a dog does, e.g. with a bone, not like a cat or leopard would).
• Might even have the dwarves stop riding things, and just either use vehicles, walk, or, in the case of in warfare, take up a position and bombard an enemy with artillery, rather than bothering about cavalry(-analogues). Yeah I kinda like that: between being super technologically advanced, and being dwarves, they have nothing in between "take a train (or other vehicle)" and "walk".
  
  The only problem, of course, is I really like all my nonhumans having the thing they ride do their agriculture. So maybe, instead, they ride bears? Bears are the largest fossorial (burrowing) animal, after all. There's a good candidate, the cursorial prehistoric bear lineage, the hemicyoninae—which as the name ("half-dogs") suggests, were built like dogs; I had considered them for the ogres but they work better for dwarves. Specifically, Dinocyon, which was just under 8 feet long and weighed about a quarter of a metric ton—easily fudge-able into something that can be ridden.
  
  Think I'll just have the ogres and orcs run everywhere. They still have dwarf endurance, after all.
• Incidentally, apparently there is an evolutionary link between burrowing and group living, in mammals, as can be seen from rodents (e.g. prairie dogs—which are actually, basically, chipmunks) and meerkats (a kind of mongoose). So it makes perfect sense that dwarves would be lawful, i.e. group oriented. Also apparently short, powerful limbs is one of the six common traits of fully burrowing-specialized mammals, identified at the turn of the 20th century. Though to be full-fledged burrow-sepcialists, dwarves would need small ears (doable) and to be blind (not so doable, but darkvision makes that one moot).
• Wrote an adventure where the PCs find portions of journals, to piece together what's been happening. The easy way is just to find sections of the journal, but, who would do that? You don't let your journal of your descent into madness get scattered all around all willy-nilly.
  
  So instead, they find the journals themselves, but each section is in code, and they have to find the keys to each section's code, scattered around. Still meters out the paces of revelations, but is much more believable from a "why would it be that way, if it weren't in a game?" standpoint.
• Anyone else see the problem with the fact the Pathfinder kingdom rules have no vacancy penalty for the "heir" role? Because…Stability is a score for kingdoms. Not having an heir has historically been just a little detrimental to stability (and not only in hereditary systems; a clear line of succession is a vital thing in any government).
• Realized that Druidic is yet another language subsumed into the glossolalia-language spoken by the outsiders and aberrations in my setting, the one I call Primordial (I might change it to Primeval, since Primordial means something else in 5e). The way I think it might work is that mortals, at least, can only understand the Primordial of those whose alignment is within one step of theirs, or whose elemental affinity is not incompatible with theirs. So only fellow treehuggers can understand Druidic.
  
  Oddly, this basically brings back "alignment languages" from OD&D and 1e AD&D. I mean think about it, nothing else really makes any sense for that; the idea Gygax seemed to be going for was a sort of alignment-specific argot, which makes no sense when you forget your old one upon changing alignment. Much more plausible that you can gabble glossolalia at each other and interpret it. (If I ever publish this stuff formally, people are gonna think I'm a Pentecostal, the way you can tell Tracy Hickman is LDS from countless aspects of Dragonlance.)
• Someone just revealed the most terrifying thing in the history of humanity: where before, D&D players were trying to recreate fantasy books or movies, and then for a while fantasy video games, now they're trying to recreate Critical Role. Which…aside from sounding like Frankfurt Marxist analysis of tabletop gaming…is basically every problem in tabletop gaming that began after 1984 (there were other problems introduced before that, but 1984 is the year the first Dragonlance modules came out—overall I like what it did to the hobby but every change has a downside).

Playing with Fantasy XXV

More Pathfinder thoughts.

• Worked out my setting's vampires, mixing and matching aspects of Pathfinder's moroi, nosferatu, jiang shi, vetalas, and psychic vampires. One thing it did was make me realize how much of an advantage the "template" system is, for making things like vampires. You just create a normal character and then apply the template; it was like falling off a log.
• Decided my setting does not include the Harrow deck, as such, though it probably can use the various associated class-archetypes. Tarot, see, is simply not a mystical thing; it's a version of bridge. You can use that for divination, as you can use lots, animal entrails, the flight of birds, or tea leaves, but there's nothing inherently supernatural about any of those things.
  
  The version in my setting will still have each card represented as a combination of an ability score and an alignment, but not named like in the Harrow; basically the abilities are the suits and the alignments are the pip-value, from 1 to 9 (with lawful good as highest and chaotic evil as lowest). The game itself, though, is more like some of the games played with hanafuda.
  
  Soldiers in my setting keep dice and cards among their lucky charms, because getting bored is a jinx, for soldiers: they start wishing something would happen.
• It kinda weird to anyone else that it took till Pathfinder, three reworks into the d20 Fantasy rules, and indeed six years into its run (June 2015, after the debut of the Core Rulebook in August 2009) with the release of Occult Adventures, for there to be definitive rules for possession, despite there being the concept of "being possessed" within the game back to the beginning? They also released a new spell to govern the process, just called possession, replacig the clunky legacy spell magic jar.
• Decided how my elves' bows work: they're two long leaves from their sacred tree, with the fascicle sheath (the thing that holds pine needles together) as the riser. You bend them back opposite their usual direction, to string the bow. One thing this means is that the bow can be stored more easily, since when unstrung it's only half as long, a bit shorter than a longsword.
  
  If it were just a single bow, you can just have a bowcase built into your quiver—a 6 foot bow would be 3 feet folded up, and the average elf in my setting is also 6 feet, and thus has a draw-length (which is roughly the same as the length of an arrow, minus its head) of about 29 inches. But their bows are really two bows, four leaves, one pair half as long, so it might have to be carried slung over the back like a rifle—except they disconnect the fascicle-sheaths of the two bows, and fold them together, so it fits in the bowcase. (Might call it a four-leaf bow, in fact.)
  
  Incidentally, a "reflex" composite bow turns into a weird hoop about a foot in diameter, when unstrung.
• In Pathfinder, a Colossal dragon's claws each do 4d6 points of damage, or the same as the damage dealt by a Large boulder falling at least 30 feet.
  
  A Large object is 8–16 feet in at least one dimension; assuming a roughly spherical boulder, we get a volume of 268 cubic feet, for the 8 foot one. Given the density of feldspar, the most common rock, 2.56 grams per cubic centimeter, that results in a mass of 19,434 kilograms. After a 30-foot fall, that's a kinetic energy of 1,741,468.91 joules—and thanks to the 30 feet thing (joules are newton-meters), we can change that conveniently to a force of 190,449.36 newtons, or 42,814.72 pounds force.
  
  The dragon's bite does 4d8, which results in an average damage two-sevenths higher than that of the claw (not counting the fact the bite gets half-again the Strength bonus and the claw only gets the full one), for a bite force of 55,047.50 pounds—compared to the T. rex's bite force of 12,000 to 14,000 and the Megalodon's of 24,400 to 41,000.
• I gotta say, the central conceit of the Pathfinder core setting is kinda neat. Namely, the "Age of Lost Omens" where, after Aroden failed to return to lead humanity to a golden age (having vanished somehow), no more major prophecies have come true in the ensuing 113 years. That's a really cool idea.
• In my own setting I'm averse to the concept, inherited from Hesiod by way of Augustine, that you can divide history into "Ages"; while the inhabitants of my setting do speak of "ages", they use a Romance-language definition, equivalent to "century" in English (or some other big, regular-sized chunk of time; my elves' "ages" are 1728 years, the dozenal equivalent of a millennium).
  
  The closest I get is that the various cultures base their dating systems on events like the (main) humans covenanting with the animal-gods or the elves and dwarves coming to the planet from the moons, or (in the case of the thalassocratic Valyrians and hydrocratic Púkel-men) the founding of their empires.
  
  The two human empires also describe eras in terms of their dynasties, which are numbered, but also often referred to by their capital, among the thalassocratic Valyrians, and ruling clan, among the hydrocratic Púkel-men.
• I have eight human cultures in my main setting. There's the urban, settled rural, and nomadic branches of the main protagonist culture(-complex), whose languages are based on Adûnaic, and then the nomadic seagoing descendants of the thalassocratic Valyrians, the halflings (a branch of the thalassocratic Valyrians engineered to be small, as a sort of "toy"-breed novelty), and then the successor-states to the thalassocratic Valyria, one aquatic (as gillmen), one subterranean (as dark folk), and one ruled by dhampirs, tieflings, and what D&D proper calls genasi.
  
  There are actually multiple offshoots of each—nineteen nations of the urban main culture, eleven of the settled rural, and seven of the nomadic, plus four of the halflings. A lot of those have their own dialects (though you also get things like Austria and Bavaria sharing one group of dialects), but for simplicity I treat each major group as only speaking one. I also have a dialect for each of the three successor-states of the thalassocratic Valyrian empire, each of which modifies its grammar in certain ways. It just now occurred to me to have the sea-nomad descendants of the thalassocratic Valyrians have 81 clans or tribes, say one for each Craft, Perform, and Profession subskill listed in the Core Rulebook, like how Romanian Roma (Gypsy) subgroups are named according to their traditional profession.
  
  I really need to come up with cultures for the other continent. Maybe I'll divide the nomadic "barbarians" into a couple different groups, and perform some sound-changes on their language. Hmm. Maybe also a single big division in the hydrocratic Púkel-men culture, analogous to something like Northern and Southern Chinese? Maybe a tripartite one, there are a lot of those, too.

Playing with Fantasy XXIV

Fantasy RPG thoughts.

• One of course wants to have, along with the mundane airships detailed in Ultimate Combat, flying ships that are controlled by a chair that eats your day's spells and imparts a fly speed of 150 feet per round times one-third to one-half your spellcaster level. But that would be sadly illegal. Instead, I decided that the elves and the spider people use ornithopters and entomopters, respectively (elves feather theirs with their leaves, spider people make the wing-membranes from silk). And the ships have magic engines, used by spellcasters, but instead of eating your day's spellcasting, they're attuned to like a leyline, as described in Occult Adventures, and they provide the variable bonus to drive checks (Spellcraft or Fly, whichever is higher) instead of caster level.
  
  The "evil Atlanteans" are the users of the steam airships, which I think are still controlled by the kind of "leyline engine" that controls the ornithopters and entomopters. And then I decided that dwarves, who I was going to also have using ornithopters, instead eschew flying, and instead use subterrenes ("drill tanks", except with tunnel borers rather than drills strictly so-called) or submarines, also powered by "leyline engines"—not sure exactly what they'll look like. Submarines with those engines are also what the snake people will use, instead of flying ships. And then I was wondering what the gnomes should use; I considered some kind of Leonardo-esque "air screw" helicopter, using their sacred fungi to make the "screw", but—read on.
  
  I think the elf ones will be "crowships" and the spider-people entomopters will be "darnerships" (i.e. they're dragonflies, though I won't actually use the deckplan of the somewhat iconic all-purpose spelljamming ship). I don't know what the dwarf ones will be shaped like (I'm leaning toward the one vehicle being usable as both subterrene and submarine, so maybe something like "snailship"?), but the snake submarines will be "sharkships". But there are no helicopter animals, so I decided actually gnomes should use flying boats (not submarines though) that mimic flying squid (which may actually be able to really fly—albeit not very strongly—by undulating their bodies like dolphins, to "flap"), which I'm going to call "teuthopters".
• All of which raised a quandary: what is your parachute, on one of those? An actual parachute? A glider of some sort? A set of wings of flying (which really ought to be called a cloak thereof, it's a cape that changes into wings)? A ring of feather falling? (Probably that one.) The spell won't cut it, it generally wears off well before you hit the ground, if you assume a paratrooper-style 2000-foot jump height—even a 20th level caster will still leave you 800 feet in the air when feather fall wears off. (Cruising altitude for an airship, if we take Zeppelins as a model, is only 650 feet, which you still need to be at least 10th level to fall from at 60 feet per round and a 1-round-per-level duration.)
• Decided that instead of Tainish from Unsounded and Hardic et al. from Earthsea, the languages on the other continent, in my setting, will draw inspiration from Dothraki and what little we see of Ghân-buri-Ghân's language, Drúadanic. Just like how my main continent has the protagonists speak the Tolkien-derived one (Adûnaic) and the vile and hated enemy speaking the Game of Thrones-derived one (no disrespect intended to David Peterson; he didn't create the Valyrians or Dothraki, he just did the best he could to give those caricature-cultures halfway decent conlangs), the Egypt-y ones are the ones who speak the Tolkien-based one. (Yes, both the civilized and the "barbarians" speak languages associated with "barbarians". On the other continent the Adûnaic-based language was originally that of peoples despised by the evil Atlanteans as "barbarians", even though it's based on the language of another setting's Atlantis/Rome-analogue just as Valyrian is.)
  
  One thing this meant is that I had to slightly rework the script I worked out for them, which was fine actually. Since the Drúadanic-based language has a very limited sound-palette, too limited to let the Dothraki-based one be written conveniently in a script for it, I instead went with the script having been devised by scholars for writing both, like the 'Phags-pa script in Yuan China, though based on older scripts used only for their own (and incorporating, I think, ancient logograms that the older form of their script ultimately descends from but that it's a real pain in the ass to actually work out). I also gave them a numeral system, with different rules from the alphabetic characters, an important thing to do when you make the numerals for a con-script. (Usually. The this-side-of-the-world cultures just use their first nine letters for 1–9 and a space for 0—I think they write numerals inside a circle or something—because originally they used Greek- or Hebrew-style numerals, and then just adapted them to positional use.)
• I also worked out my giants' numerals and redid my gnomes' system. All four of my nonhuman numeral systems, Dwarven, Elven, Giantish, and Gnomish, were originally based in some way on the body-part they used for counting (Elven and Dwarven dozenal on the individual knuckles of each finger, Giantish octal on the spaces between fingers, Gnomish vigesimal on fingers and toes). Which I highly recommend as a shortcut to making constructed numerals, but it still bugs me that they have characters for "10" (whichever that means in their numerical base), that they don't use now they have zero.
  
  See, the Elven and Dwarven numerals have a regular pattern for 1–3, 4–6, 7–9, and then write ten and eleven—digits A and B—in a way that clearly indicates the next number should, though representing the numerical base and thus "10", be the digit C. Giants write 1–4 regularly, and 5–7, and then you wish you didn't have to write 8 as "10"; gnomes have a regular way to write 1–5, 6–A, B–F, and G–J, and you wish you could use the obvious symbol for K instead of writing it "10".
  
  This would bother me less except that my other-side-of-the-world numerals have a pattern for 1–3, 4–6, and 7–9, so there's no leftover regularity that makes "10" feel unnatural. Because where the other races modified a pre-positional numeral system to writing positional numbers, the civilization over there, whose script was purpose-built and semi-artificial, were free to come up with their numerals wholesale. I have worldbuilding reasons for all the other scripts' numerals being irregular, but it still bugs me.
• So the actual name for "ley lines" as a mystical thing—the concept has more legitimacy as a part of fengshui than as part of Alfred Watkins's pseudoscience—is lóngmài, literally "dragon vein" (the same as the ryūmyaku that Xingese alkahestry is powered by, in Fullmetal Alchemist). I submit that "wyrmlode" is the cool fantasy-sounding English (and from purely English roots) version. ("Lode" is a bit too modern, here, but "wyrmedder"—the second element being the aboriginal English word for "vein", still extant in some dialects—sounds too weird.)
  
  I decided that in my setting, dragons give their name to the phenomenon because they live primarily by tapping into it, like fleas, and only eat other creatures for nutrients, like butterflies eating mud or tears. Which explains a number of things about dragons, like their obsession with their lairs (maybe heaping up a hoard in a nexus of these energies, is the dragon equivalent of rearing a standing stone there?), and also how you can keep a 24-ton dragon alive on the same diet as something like a 5-ton tyrannosaur.
  
  A lot of dragons' adaptations (notably not their breath weapon) are, thus, intended for fighting other dragons away from the territory where they get their geomantic topomantic energies. (I kinda want to call the "wyrmlode" nexuses "alkahest fields", using the Fullmetal Alchemist translation of dan 丹 to render dantian 丹田—I guess I could also say "cinnabar fields"—which usually refers to yogas chakras, the equivalent of such a nexus in the body's qi, rather than that of a landscape, but is also used for the fengshui equivalent. "As above, so below", as the guy Ed and Al's dad is named after would say.)
• I had had the "ley line guardian" witch-archetype known, in-universe, as "rhumbline" witches, since the main witches of my setting are the thalassocratic Valyrian/evil Atlantean maritime empire. But I guess it actually makes more sense to just have them be called "wyrmlode" witches. Maybe they practice sorcerer-like (but Intelligence- rather than Charisma-based) spellcasting through watching and copying dragons, which is where my sorcerer "bloodlines" come from (hence I call them "lineages" instead).
• I found a random wordlist generator, an online thing called Awkwords. I had used this old freeware app called Langmaker (no relation I know of with the defunct wiki), but that only works on Windows XP and earlier (it might still work on 7?) I used it to make my Elven, Dwarven, and "formerly Tainish now Drúadan Egyptian" sign-languages. But I was feeling out-of-sorts, having already made all the languages for my setting ("Alexander wept, for he had no more worlds to conquer"); that was a part of why I redid both the languages on the other continent (though I had been dissatisfied with them for a while.
  
  I also decided to work out a language for the arthropod-people made by the spider-outsiders, like the one used by the snake-, lizard-, and fish-people the snake-outsiders made; I had had them using a weird pronunciation of my Sylvan (in my setting, a language used in common by talking beasts), but now they have their own. Unfortunately it's not directly mappable onto Undercommon from the standard list in the Linguistics skill like that is. (But hey there are a bunch of slots freed up by my combining all the outsider and elemental languages, plus Aklo, into "Primordial".)
  
  Hmm. Maybe have the talking beasts use a mispronounced version of their humanoid riders' languages? That would be more thematically appropriate, since the talking beasts are all the children of the older "litters" of the nonhumans' gods, and thus regard their humanoid counterparts as their spiritual aunts and uncles. Then I can give Sylvan to the bugs. Yeah might go with that, though it'll be a lot of work.
• Partly out of the desire to play with the new toy, I also decided that I might do my Primordial language as an actual language after all; just babbling glossolalia and using asemic writing as the script is cool and thematically appropriate and not at all fulfilling to me as a conlanger. And the artist must ultimately please himself.
  
  So I generated a very short wordlist, made only of semantic primes (then I added semantic molecules, because having to refer to everything by primes would be a pain in the ass); I still have read magic convert magical writings composed in Primordial into something readable, but by changing the writing—which is pure ideograms, not logograms—into the natural semantic metalanguage of your own lexicon.
  
  I might actually generate a full-sized lexicon for it. Or maybe I'll go straight back to the glossolalia and asemic script, and put the time and work I might have put into developing Primordial into a "real" language (but one that's thematically not as consistent or as interesting from a worldbuilding standpoint) into developing my bug-Sylvan and "talking animal" dialects of my humanoid languages.