Pellatarrum: Mechanical Effects of the Day/Night Cycle

I've written before about the Day/Night cycle in Pellatarrum, but I feel it's time to revisit it because 1) it's been 8 years since I last talked about it and 2) now that I'm actually running games in the setting and not  just talking about it in the abstract, I've realized that there are important mechanics that I missed.

Daylight: 9 am - 3 pm
During the hours of full daylight (during which time the Death Sun is fully obscured), anything which helps life is given a +2 bonus and anything which harms it is given a -2 penalty. Examples:

• -2 to all damage rolls, including those from magic and the environment.
• Exception: damage dealt to undead does not suffer this penalty. 
• +2 to Heal checks and +2 hit points regained from both natural (including resting) and magical healing. 
• +2 to Fortitude saves and Constitution checks. 
• Exception: living creatures below 0 hit points but who have not yet died automatically stabilize during the day, no roll required. 
• Exception: undead are always considered "harmful to life" and therefore any Fortitude save or Charisma check (undead don't have Con scores) made by them during the day have a -2 penalty.
• +2 to all Positive Energy channeling that heals the living and harms or turn the undead. 
• All undead with Channel Resistance have a -2 penalty to their will saves. 
• All undead are considered dazzled when exposed to daylight (this has no effect indoors or underground). 
• Anyone who dies while exposed to full daylight, for whatever reason, will never become undead. Those who die during the day but not exposed to daylight have a decreased chance of it. (I can't recall of there's ever an effect where the DM rolls to see if someone rises as undead or not. If so, apply the penalty.)

As you can see, the day time is inimical to the undead. However, when the Life Sun sets and the Death Sun is rampant, all that switches. 

Night: 9 pm - 3 am
Conversely, during the hours of full sight (during which time the Life Sun is fully obscured), anything which harms life is given a +2 bonus and anything which helps it is given a -2 penalty. Examples:

• +2 to all damage rolls, including those from magic and the environment.
• Exception: damage dealt to undead does not gain this bonus. 
• -2 to Heal checks and -2 hit points regained from both natural (including resting) and magical healing. 
• -2 to Fortitude saves and Constitution checks 
• Exception: living creatures below 0 hit points automatically begin dying at night, no roll required. 
• Exception: undead are always considered "harmful to life" and therefore any Fortitude save or Charisma check (undead don't have Con scores) made by them during the day have a +2 bonus. 
• -2 to Channeled Positive Energy to heal the living and to harm or turn the undead. 
• All undead gain +2 Channel Resistance at night, including those who already have it. 
• Anyone who dies while exposed to the Death Sun will, barring something truly unusual, always reanimate as undead. Those who die from violence at night will almost always reanimate (sometimes within minutes or seconds after death -- take your cue from zombie movies). Those who die peacefully will probably reanimate, but at a decreased chance.  
• How quickly they reanimate, and what into, should be a GM call. Low-level characters are usually zombies, but the nature of their death should be a factor. Higher level characters usually become more powerful types -- see the post On the Elemental Nature of Undead. 

Twilight: Dawn (3 am - 9 am) and Dusk (3 pm - 9 pm)
During the hours of dawn and dusk, there are no bonuses and no penalties associated with the Life or Death Suns, as their presence in the sky cancels each other out.

GMs who desire enhanced granularity at the cost of extra bookkeeping may, if they wish, use the following schedule:

• 6 am - 9 am: +1 to life, -1 to harm
• 9 am - 3 pm: +2 to life, -2 to harm
• 3 pm - 6 pm: +1 to life, -1 to harm
• 6 pm - 9 pm: -1 to life, +1 to harm
• 9 pm - 3 am: -2 to life, +2 to harm
• 3 am - 6 am: -1 to life, +1 to harm

There's probably a sweet spot around 6 pm & 6 am where the suns are precisely equidistant and there are no penalties or bonuses, but making it last for any length of time disrupts the symmetry of the system.

Pellatarrum: My Humans Are (Kinda) Different

I actually didn't plan on doing this one. I know that I've owed you elves for years now, but this is actually an outgrowth of me thinking about elves.

It's interesting that throughout D&D and later Pathfinder, humanity is the only playable race that has children with other races. Sure, there are half-dragons, and the obligatory half-angels and half-devils, but there are no (for example) elf-dwarf hybrids. Why is that?

And that's how this post came about.


Why do half-elves exist?
In Pellatarrum, the reason humans can interbreed with so many races is because the dwarves built them to be highly adaptable. They were, after all, meant to be ambassadors to the elves, who are best described as "fey". Or, in other words, "Powerful, possessed of violent whimsy, and terrifyingly random." The ability to adapt to such an harsh environment was a deliberately engineered survival trait. This explains a lot about humans: why they live all over the place, why they easily form bonds with other races, and yes, why they can interbreed with non-humans.

Inter-fertility with elves is generally believed (though it's never been stated outright) to have been another design choice.  It's often said that the worst thing the dwarves ever did to the elves was to introduce them to humans. Prior to that, the elves didn't think anyone could ever be as beautiful as they were; all other races were hideous. But humans, by virtue of being both highly adaptable and made (somewhat) in the image of elves, were both similar enough to be beautiful and different enough to be exotic that many elves became distracted by them, if not enraptured with them.

How is this represented mechanically?
If you want to represent this, use the Heart of the Fey trait:

Heart of the Fey: You gain low-light vision, gain a +1 racial bonus on Reflex and Will saves, and treat Knowledge (nature) and Perception as class skills. This racial trait replaces skilled. 

However, not all Pellatarran humans still have this trait. Due to their adaptability, their children's traits can change according to their environment, and so any racial trait is available (and sometimes different traits express themselves through children of the same family).

What about half-orcs?
The existence of half-orcs and other human hybrids is generally explained as "Well, adaptability is broad like that. Not an intended consequence, mind you, but it's not a terrible thing for the peoples of the world to become more dwarven in nature."

Why aren't there any half-dwarves?
Again, design. While other elder races saw their creations as tools, cannon fodder, or slaves, the dwarves thought of them as members of their own clan, highly functional but tragically maimed by circumstance and purpose. Interbreeding with them would be too much like interbreeding with a beloved pet or working animal.

Why are humans infertile with gnomes? 
The general consensus is "thrice-damned random fey witchcraft interacting oddly with fine dwarven craftsmanship." This argument is somewhat bolstered by the odd manner in which gnome-halfling pairings resolve, where any children are always the same race as their same-gender parent.

What about humans and halflings?
This always results in more halflings, albeit larger than usual: 4 feet tall or more,  and weighing between 30 and 35 pounds. (For those keeping track of such things, this explains the "Tallfellow" branch of the halfling family tree.

Is there anything in D&D/Pathfinder that a human won't have sex with?
Honestly, probably not.

Pathfinder Gunslingers and Touch AC

I like Gunslingers, but I think the Pathfinder rules for firearms targeting Touch Armor Class instead of regular AC is too powerful.

I've been looking at ACs for creatures as they increase in level (there's a great chart of that here, containing damn hear every beastie in Pathfinder), and when you compare them you see that while the Mean, Median and Mode of regular AC increases with CR at a fairly constant rate, touch AC hovers in the 10-12 range.

This is troublesome because Gunslingers get a +1 to their base attack bonus every single level, which means a Gunslinger will quickly end up hitting every damn thing every damn time unless that creature is intangible, or has such an  abnormally high touch AC (due to magic or Dex) that the wizard can't hit it with magic.

Now I understand the reasoning behind guns hitting touch AC, but that "game logic" falls apart when you consider that blunt weapons like maces and hammers also ought to hit touch AC because the impact damage would get transmitted through the armor to the fleshy bits underneath (concussions happen to people wearing helmets all the time).

On the other hand, I don't want to nerf the Gunslinger, either.

So I came up with a compromise based off the Bolt Ace ability Sharp Shoot, and ruled that:

1. Firearms target regular AC.
2. At 1st level, a Gunslinger may resolve a firearm attack against touch AC instead of normal AC when shooting at a target within its first range increment. Performing this deed costs 1 grit point. This deed’s cost cannot be reduced by any ability or effect that reduces the amount of grit points a deed costs (such as Signature Deed).

I think this is balanced. Instead of hitting nearly every time, a Gunslinger needs to save their attacks for special "oh crap" moments or dramatic combats. And since there are ways to regain grit in combat, plus the Extra Grit feat and magic items like the Ring of Grit Mastery, it's less a case of taking away something special and essential to the class and more turning it into another resource management mini-game like spellcasters have.

And now, I shall pre-emptively answer some expected objections:

Under rules as written, firearms only resolve vs Touch if they are in the first range increment, and outside of that they will take a -2(or higher) to attack. Isn't this enough?

I've been running a Pathfinder game with a Gunslinger for about a year now, and I don't think I've ever had a combat outside that range increment. Most fights occur within 30-50 feet, which is easily within range of a move action + shoot.

Gunslingers are vulnerable to attacks of opportunity when reloading!

This is true. However, 5 foot steps and teamwork mitigates a lot of this. If not, drop the firearm (free action), draw a melee weapon (move action) and attack (standard action) with that fast BAB.

Slow reloading times are a balance for the class!

Tell that to the 3rd level Musket Master in my game. Rapid Reloader + Fast Musket + Alchemical Cartridges means he can reload as a swift action so long as he has 1 grit point.

Gunslingers cannot rapid shot!

Double-Barreled muskets exist and can, regardless of level, fire both barrels in a single attack action. All the Rapid Shot feat would do is reduce the -4 penalty to -2, which seems both logical and fair and there's nothing in the rules to suggest that they cannot.

Firearms break on a misfire roll!

... which can be remedied as a standard action with the Quick Clear deed so long as they have (not spend, have) 1 grit point.

What will your Gunslinger PC think about being nerfed?

I ran it past him before I implement this rule. His answer was It seems like a pretty clean solution to what will definitely become a problem. I say we roll with it and see how it plays out on the table. 

How does it work in play?

We've only had a couple combats since then, but so far it seems to be working well. He's hitting opponents with about the same percentage as the crossbow-using Ranger, and is saving Grit for special occasions. So far we both like what we see, and will address concerns as they come up.

Pellatarrum: Dwarf Migrations

Given that the dwarven city-state of Agnakorem is both resource-rich and of infinite height, one wonders why dwarves exist anywhere else. After all, was it not designed to be a dwarven paradise?

It was, but that doesn't mean the residents of heaven are angels. Or, to paraphrase Sartre, "Hell is other dwarves." There are a few reasons for this.

• Dwarf society is extremely conservative. We're talking "1950s America meets the Stepford Wives" conservative. Dwarven society is just so, and it's been that way for millennia, and it works well so there's no reason for anything there to change. If you want things to change, then you're just being selfish -- have you no respect for tradition and heritage? Why do you want to meddle and make things difficult for others?
• Everybody knows everyone else's business. Imagine Agnakorem as an apartment building; specifically, one of those buildings in New York City where bored housewives look out the windows to see who's coming and going, and bored children play on the stoop. Comings and goings are seen, arguments are overheard, new possessions are noticed as they're being brought up the stairs, kids are tattling and adults are gossiping. There is little to no privacy due to the close quarters and the clannish nature of dwarven society, and so anyone who is just a little bit different is noticed and talked about.
• There is a fixed order of doing things and if you don't have seniority, you're on the bottom. Let's say that you're a dwarven craftsman, and you discover a new technique for forging mithril that is faster and easier than the traditional method. Not only will no one else use your new-fangled method -- it isn't tried and true, after all -- but no one else will buy your material, either, because it's clearly shoddy because it isn't properly forged. No one wants to apprentice to you, because you selfishly believe that your idea is better than the wisdom of your ancestors, and so not only are you a disgrace to your clan and your profession, but you also taint everyone who studies under you. Or works with you. Or sells to you. Or is related to you. Or... you get the idea.
  
  The only way a new idea ever gets adopted is if a craftsman submits it to the Council of Smiths, who will carefully look over the proposal and ask questions (like defending your dissertation, only worse), and then if some small glimmer of merit is seen, then a study is commissioned where the long-term impact of your idea is considered. Yes, perhaps you can forge mithril faster, but what will that do the price of mithril? Will the speed of production increase the demand for mithril items? Can the miners meet that supply? Will the increased amount of mithril on the market devalue the commodity? And what about the crafters who make their living forging tools for mithril-workers? Look, there's an entire economic ecosystem here, all very delicate and balanced, and one little change can have catastrophic effects. Let's study it for a century and see what happens -- we don't want to move too quickly now!
• Dwarves live a long time, so you might have to wait decades or longer for things to change. Imagine a family-run corporation where everyone in management is effectively immortal. It's not enough to have merit; you have to wait for an opening. And if people rarely die or get promoted, there's very little room for upward advancement.

So any dwarf who is a little bit different from the norm, or who is nontraditional, or who likes privacy, or wants to try a new technique, or has more ambition than patience is likely to say "Screw this! I'm out of here. I'm going to find my own mineral vein, and set up my own forge/shop/school/colony, and do things my way!" These dwarves are often charismatic and take friends and family with them when they leave. 

This makes everyone happy: disruptive elements are removed from traditional Agnakorem society, and the young dwarves get to do things their own way... until, of course, they become the Council of Smiths, telling upstart dwarves of the next generation to slow down, think things through, and act in the (new) traditional manner. 

And thus the cycle repeats.

Pellatarrum: A Brief History of the Fire War

Really, it's the elves' fault.

Everyone thinks the Fire War is the fault of the orcs. and to be fair, they did start the war. But you see, there's an important distinction between "Who started it" and "Who caused it", and it's the elves who caused it.

Back before Pellatarrum was created, when the Heroes Who Would Be As Gods discussed their rebellion, the original plan was to overthrow the genie races and have each servitor race live in their native elemental plane as conquerors: air for dragons, earth for dwarves, fire for orcs and water for elves. However, that plan was quickly revised during the initial slave uprising when it was discovered just how powerful and how entrenched the genies were. The four races' strategy was converted into something which looked like a rag-tag rebellion but was really a delaying action while They Who Became As Gods looked for places where their people could escape and the genies would not follow.

Unfortunately, their choices were limited. The negative energy plane was nothing but entropy and death, with positive energy plane not much better because the life energy radiating from it would be too much for any mortal body to contain. The ethereal plane was a realm of formless mist with no resources for sustaining a civilization, and the timeless nature of the astral meant that their populations would never grow and their people would forever be stuck in stasis.

Therefore, it was decided (mainly by the dwarves, but the dragons thought it was a good idea and so everyone else went along with it) that they would make their own realm for their people to live, one with bountiful resources for all and toxic to geniekind.

Thus began the quest for the Engines of Creation, objects of mystery and wonder of which little is still known. The wisest sages of Pellatarrum can only describe them as "conceptual lenses" (Do you mean they're lenses for concepts? Or do you mean that they are lenses in a conceptual sense? ... yes.) which focus the raw creative force of the positive energy plane into true substance. Through means unknown, They Who Became As Gods re-aligned the Engines of Creation for a brief period of time, creating Pellatarrum according to the dwarven blueprint.

And everything was fine... for a time. The dwarves lived in the Dayspire, the elves in the seas, the dragons ruled the skies, and the orcs had everywhere else. Yes, all right, technically the dragons lived on the ground and under the ground and underwater and wherever else they wanted, but 1) they were big and 2) they were loners, not a growing and sprawling civilization, so the orcs were generally okay with this because they had all the rest of the land. Besides, dragons are apex predators, and orcs respect strength.

Yes, everything was fine for thousands of years, until the elf schism. Something happened within their culture to split them so thoroughly that roughly half of their population fled the seas and used magic to evolve themselves for land habitation.

This was, to put it plainly, a massive problem for the orcs, because now they were competing with the elves for territory and resources. While elves didn't reproduce as quickly as orcs, they lived far longer, which gave them an edge in terms of knowledge and power. More importantly, to the orcs this was a violation of the treaty which had been forged at the creation of the world. Was the full and proper name of the realm, written in the tongues of the four races, not "This beautiful thing, crafted with toil, and home to all orcs?"  It was right there in the name, and yet the elves invaded their lands and violated the compact. To the orcs, this was not just a legal misunderstanding or a diplomatic gaffe; this was invasion. This was rank betrayal and theft. And they would not stand for it.

So, in proper orcish fashion, they invaded the elves right back, to show them how it felt and to drive them back to the sea where they belonged. Naturally, the elves didn't care for this and counter-attacked, and soon it was open warfare.

Both sides petitioned the dwarves and dragons for redress of grievances. The dwarves essentially said "This isn't our problem and we don't like either of you enough to make it our problem. Work it out or kill each other as you see fit, but leave us alone." The dragons had to be swayed on an individual basis; some sided with the orcs, some with the elves, but most of them also just wanted to be left alone.

Then the orcs had The Idea. Since elves magically evolved themselves to live on the land, the orcs could do similar (they were not the broken, barbaric race of today, but a people of great strength and magical power). They took advantage of their short lifespans and rapid breeding cycles by force-evolving themselves into perfect warriors, and then they created many races to serve in their armies. Goblinoids, ogres, beastmen; all had a part in the Great Conflagration, with the orcs as their heroes and generals. The war was long, and bloody, and took many orcish generations (both in terms of time and in terms of lives lost). But the Fire Army was powerful, and they broke the back of the elven foothold and began to drive them back to the sea.

If the orcs could have contented themselves with beating the elves, they would have won, and Pellatarrum would be a different place indeed. But they were insulted by the dwarves' lack of honor, and irritated with the aloofness of the dragons, and decided that they would make "home to all orcs" a literal truth by destroying everything which was not orcish.

The fact that the elves, dwarves and dragons needed to create ambassador races to facilitate diplomacy and cooperation during the war shows just how real the risk to them was. Think "Zerg Rush" on a massive scale, bolstered by powerful magics and champions who could inflict hideous casualties even after being dealt a mortal wound. The Great Conflagration was indeed like a terrible wildfire, whipping itself into greater and greater fervor, consuming everything in its path.

The Fire War was terrible in ways that Pellatarrum has never seen again. It was every fantasy battle you've ever seen the movies combined with World War 2. Yes, even the atom bombs. It reshaped the landscape, flattening mountains and creating valleys, boiling seas and burning nearly everything into ash. The most brutal, decisive battle of the war took place around the Dayspire, which had been turned into a massive weapons factory and siege engine platform. Dragons and elves lured and herded the Fire Army into cleared killing fields around the dwarven stronghold, then took shelter in pre-made bunkers which ringed the perimeter. Their job was to prevent the army from escaping while the dwarves annihilated them with technology, and magic, and raw elemental power.

When all was said and done:

• Agnakorem was a holed, smoldering mess that had lost much of its defenses and more than a few outer layers. 
• The dwarven army was exhausted, having used nearly all of its weapons and resources in the war. 
• The elves were nearly extinct, numbering only in the low hundreds and with no home to speak of. (So great was their schism that only a few returned to the sea.)
• The dragons had lost nearly half their adult population. Fortunately, they had laid many eggs in preparation for such an event, and there were plenty of kobolds to sing their eggs through gestation. 
• The orcish civilization ceased to exist. Those who survived fled into the wilderness as refugees, where they had to compete with the other orc-spawned races for resources.

It took centuries for the land to recover. Humans and gnomes, having been granted their freedom, built towns and cities. The elves secreted themselves in the deep forest and the dark jungle, using isolation as a shield while they rebuilt their civilization and studied the magics the orcs used in the war. The dwarves repaired as much damage as they could and returned to being craftmen, albeit ones with an eye towards defensive weaponry. The kobolds were content to serve their dragon overlords. And as for the orcs, one of the few things that the allied races agree upon is that the orcs must never, ever, be allowed to return to their former greatness, so they periodically attack and destroy any orc settlement they can find. The only reason that the orc race is not extinct is because good warriors are also good survivors.

Just to be blunt about it: yes, the three races of dwarf, elf and dragon cheerfully committed genocide during the Fire War, and if they could have killed every single orc child they would have.

As you can imagine, the Fire War is a touchy subject.

• Don't mention it orcs at all. If you're lucky, they'll be ignorant and not know what you're talking about. More likely, it will be seen as a challenge ("You're calling me weak and defeated? I'll show you who is weak and defeated!") that ends in bloodshed. 
• Dragons these days don't care (much) about what the orcs are up to, but they have their spies and their strings to pull if necessary. Some red dragons, though, are very interested in what a new orcish nation could achieve. 
• The dwarves are shamed by their actions -- partly because of the atrocities they committed, and partly because if they hadn't been so isolationist the Grand Conflagration might not have happened -- but they aren't so shamed that they've found room in their hearts to forgive the orcs of today. 
• Elves, on the other hand, practically relish the thought of killing orcs, and those they capture are ritually sacrificed. Elven hatred of orcs is so concentrated, so refined, that it's (nervously) joked that elves don't truly want to kill all orcs, because that would mean there would be no more orcs left to kill; instead, they want to put them in farms so they can be killed in quantity at leisure. 
• Halflings avoid orcs whenever possible. 
• Humans and gnomes are the only non-orcmade peoples willing to give orcs a chance. Sometimes that turns out well, and sometimes it's rewarded with violence. 

In many ways, Pellatarrum is quite literally post-apocalyptic. It's just managed to clean up rather nicely.

Pellatarrum: Idle Thoughts Lead to Mad Noodlings

Me:  "You know, the Summon Monster spells suck at lower levels. Everything at level 1 sucks, and why would you want to summon anything except elementals at levels 2 and 3?"

Also me, after poking around for a while: "Why are there lightning elementals? Lightning isn't a classical element. Sure, it's the energy associated with Air in Pathfinder, but.... oh. Hmm."

Me, later: "Okay, so I have to dip into 3rd party content to do it -- but it's from a reliable and respected publisher so that's cool -- but I have statted-up elementals for each of the elemental energies. Well, except for fire, because fire is always an energy, but I can deal with that later. But it's so weird that there are listings for mud, magma and salt elementals."

Me, much later: "OK, so regular elementals are their platonic states. Then we have the energy states -- I'll call them 'energetics' -- and they're the ones which have been energized by the positive energy plane. Which means we need negative-energy infused elementals as well -- I think I'll call them 'entropics', nice alliteration there -- and that's great because it means that salt can be the negative form of water. I'll need to come up with entropic forms of the other elements, though. And fire.. okay, I can rationalize that because all of the elemental forms don't have any ranged attacks, so I can further differentiate energetics by making them all blaster types. Which means I need to rename "ice" to "cold", but I can keep the power, and I'll have to stat up a ranged version for fire and call it "heat". Great. But mud and magma are like half-and-half elementals..."

Me, even later: "OK SO I HAVE CREATED A MATRIX TO DEVISE NAMES FOR ALL THE ELEMENTAL HYBRIDS. I'm a little bit crazy, but that's okay. I'm going to need to stat up most of them, but maybe I can steal powers from mephits or other elemental creatures.... but WHY DO THESE THINGS EXIST? Some of these planes don't even touch?"

Me, right before collapsing in exhaustion: CLEARLY THIS IS THE RESULT OF WIZARDS WHO ARE SUMMONING TWO DIFFERENT ELEMENTALS INTO THE SAME SPACE AND SMOOSHING THEM INTO ONE ENTITY. I DON'T KNOW WHY THEY WOULD BUT MY PLAYERS HAVE DONE SOME CRAZY SHIT SO SURELY NPCS CAN BE ALLOWED THE SAME LATITUDE IN WTFERY. 

Me, getting out of bed to write something down because this entire process has shaken something loose: "well that's a clear and easy way to differentiate the major races on a two-axis graph zzzzzzzzz."

Pellatarrum: Gods?

This is a funny subject to be talking about, since the original impetus of creating Pellatarrum was to make a fantasy world where there was a semi-monotheistic dualistic belief system like Europe had in the middle ages -- "Mother Church vs. Those Godless Heathens/Devil Worshippers" -- but side-stepping the entire awkward religion thing because how do you get Dwarves and Elves and Orcs to agree on the same god?  So I created the Church of the Light, the Cult of the Dark, and the Cabal of the Gray and rationalized everything with veneration of life, privacy, and nature, respectively. And I think it turned out pretty well, if I say so myself.

And then I got the bright idea to run a Pathfinder game set in Pellatarrum, and I started to explain the cosmology to my group and went "...oh, crap." Not because my players are dumb, mind you, but because half of them are old-school D&D grognards who are all about mythology, and the other half had never played before and didn't grok things like energy planes and how you could worship a concept instead of a god. Also, I *suck* at making dungeon crawls and prefer to use pre-published ones, and those (especially at higher levels) depend pretty heavily on Outsiders as enemies.

So with my usual charm and aplomb I took a metaphorical chainsaw to my own idea (kill your darlings, says the aphorism) and went with a modified Pellatarrum that incorporated deities but tried to preserve the weird flavor of the setting.

It is still an experiment, but here's what I've worked out:

• Everything in the Pellatarrum creation myth still happens: chosen ones hidden on elemental planes, destruction of the outer planes, the four elder races trigger the Engines of Creation to manufacture their own Material Plane. 

• Those heroes who literally create the world ascend to godhood, along with some of their closest compatriots (for example, Torag brings his family with him into divinity). Therefore the oldest gods in Pellatarrum are -- or rather, were -- dwarves, elves, dragons, and orcs. 

• Other races can be elevated through heroic deeds to demigod status and then achieve greater divinity through worship (which is earned by doing divine deeds, which gets more worshippers, etc). So far -- as in, this could change if I change my mind -- only humans have achieved divinity. 

• This gives racial pantheons based upon themes but allows for some cross-overs. For example, the god of magic is/was a dragon, but wizards from nearly all races revere him; people who do nature-y things gravitate towards the elven gods; etc. I'm still hammering out the specifics, but the general idea is:
• Dwarves: community, creation, and defensive war. 
• Elves: nature, arts, and emotion. 
• Dragons: secrets, knowledge, and power. 
• Orcs: warfare, passion, and strength. 
• Humans: anything that doesn't fit these categories, or bridges them. 

• This does however mean the orcs are cast in the role of "perpetual bad guys" and one of the things I've tried to avoid with Pellatarrum is the lazy "This race is always evil" trope. Humans are complex and neither wholly good nor wholly evil, so why should dwarves or elves or orcs be the same way? I don't like that. On the other hand, it's not like the elves would worship an orc god of war (or a dwarf god of war), so trying to round out the orcs into a "not wholly evil, just alien and misunderstood" race then causes more problems, like where are all these evil gods coming from? Who is worshiping them? I'm probably over-thinking these things.

• I'm still not sure where the various deities live. I don't want to put them on the elemental planes because that would set up a weird state of affairs where the souls of the faithful return to the realm where their ancestors were slaves. I can put one pantheon in the positive energy plane, but putting another in the negative energy plane seems a bit cliched in a "These are the bad guys" style. I like the idea of the gods living on the same plane as their worshippers, because that seems very Greek and isn't done much in fantasy, but then I have to decide what happens to the souls of the faithful.

• Speaking of cliches, I also want to avoid angels and devils and demons. I'm thinking of going with D&D 3rd edition energons, because they're  nicely elemental like everything else in Pellatarrum, and they're weird and alien. I'll need to bump up their stats, though, and likely change their names, because while Xag-Ya and Xeg-Yi are okay-ish, I have no freaking idea how to pronounce Xac-Yij and Xap-Yaup is just plain stupid.

Sigh. This is a headache I wanted to avoid, which is why I originally made my campaign setting agnostic. I've never found a "universal pantheon" which I liked, especially given the multitude of fantasy races out there, and "multiple pantheons" just strikes me as annoyingly redundant. 

If anyone has suggestions on what to do, I'd love to hear them. 

Pellatarrum: Summon Monster 1

Summon Monster I summons a variety of... not entirely useful creatures, and then tries to make them more interesting by applying the celestial, fiendish, entropic, or resolute template to them. This is all very well and good, except that Pellatarrum is a world where the outer planes no longer exist, and there are no angels or demons, and so these templates really make no sense within the setting.

There are however two easy fixes to this:

1. Replace the aforementioned templates with Aerial Creature, Aqueous Creature, Chthonic Creature or Fiery Creature and say that the various critters are being pulled from the elemental planes instead of the outer ones. 
2. Take the Elemental (Small) which is summoned with Summon Monster 2 and apply the Young template to it, making it weaker and dropping its challenge rating, thus making it suitable for a level 1 spell. 

Or heck, do both. Just not at once, because a fiery fire elemental is redundant, and an aqueous fire elemental is stupid. 

Given Pellatarrum's elemental connection to the seasons, GMs wishing a bit more crunch can give bonuses (nothing higher than a +2) to Base Attack Bonus and Armor Class if that particular element is in season, and similar penalties when it is in opposition.

Pellatarrum: Elemental Energies

Back when I first started talking about Pellatarrum and the elemental seasons, people were mystified as to why I placed earth opposite fire instead of the more traditional water.

My initial explanation was along the lines of "Sleep outside at night without a ground cloth. The earth will suck the warmth from you. Ergo, earth is cold, the opposite of heat." People didn't completely buy that explanation, though, because both wind and water can pull the heat from you.

I think my original explanation failed because it was rooted in trying to explain Pellatarran metaphysics from inside the universe instead of outside. Therefore I will explain it using game mechanics.

Each elemental state/plane is associated with a form of energy in Pathfinder: fire is fire (duh), water is cold, air is lightning and earth is acid for some damn reason. Now fire and air are fine and sensible, and while I can see water being cold, I just cannot see earth being acid. Why is the "liquid" energy not associated with the only elemental liquid? Water erodes solids; acids and bases corrode solids. There's a similarity there. Conversely, water can be hot: just look at hot springs and steam and humid days.

Then I had an interesting thought: if I make acid the water energy and cold the earth energy, then there's an interesting balancing act going on with the elemental planes. Fire, the element of change and heat, is opposed by earth, the element of cold and stasis; air and water, the two fluids, then balance each other out. This gives us a really interesting set of poles (heat/cold, change/stasis) separated by a yin-yang pairing of opposite sides of the same coin -- air and water can be both clear or opaque; they are seen yet unseen (you see fog but do not see air; you see water but also see through it); and they exist within the other (bubbles of air within water and rain falling through the sky).

I found this really compelling and poetic, and yet nontraditional, which is an excellent summation of how Pellatarrum ought to work.

So that's why in my game setting, earth is the element of cold and water is the element of acid.

Pellatarrum: Crunchy Bits for PC Races

I've been running a Pathfinder game set in a modified* Pellatarrum since the summer, and over the course of it I've realized that some mechanical changes need to be made to PC races to fit them into my setting.

* Modified because the players didn't completely grok the whole "Church of Light/ Cult of Dark" thing, so I just ruled that the old gods were killed but the heroes of the four Elder Races became the new gods as a result of creating Pellatarrum. I lose some flavor this way, but it means I don't have to re-write a lot of stuff and there's a lot to be said for ease of implementation.

Note: the following rules apply to standard examples of their race. Player characters or notable NPCs may deviate from these standards.


Dwarves

• Replace Defensive Training with Deep Warrior. 

While I am sorely tempted to give dwarves Damage Reduction 5/Piercing to reflect their elemental origins, I fear that this is just me being a dwarf fangirl. If I did do such a thing, it would replace both Defensive Training and Hatred.

Elves

• In addition to the regular Pathfinder modifications to ability scores, Pellatarran elves receive a +2 to Charisma and a -2 to Strength.

Elves are graceful and smart and beautiful. Elves are not strong, nor are they tough. There is a reason why their racial weapon proficiencies are based around weapons which use dexterity. If they need strong, tough warriors, that's what humans and half-elves are for.

Gnomes

• Replace Keen Senses with Blended View. 
• Replace Defensive Training and Hatred with whatever you like.

Gnomes were created by elves to be an ambassador race to the dwarves, so having both low-light and darkvision is reasonable. They also don't hate kobolds like traditional gnomes or go to war with giants; most Pellatarran gnomes live with or near human settlements, so pick something that replaces defensive training and hatred to make your gnome more interesting. 

Halflings

• Replace Halfling Weapon Familiarity with Hatred: Goblins.  Please note that this is just goblins and not goblinoids, meaning there is to bonus to attacking bugbears, hobgoblins or others. Since this reduces the usefulness of the trait, the bonus is increased to +2. 
• Replace Lucky with Lifebound. 
• Replace one of the skill bonuses (Acrobatics, Climb, or Perception) with Detect Life 1/day and Detect Undead 1/day. 

I actually wanted to do so much more with these guys, but I didn't want to turn them into a race of Mary Sues.

Half-Elves

• No changes at this time, although players should consider the traits Elf-Raised, Human-Raised, and Kindred-Raised to develop their characters.

Half-Orcs

• Replace Orc Ferocity and Orcish Weapon Familiarity with Human-Raised
• -- OR-- 
• Replace +2 to one ability score, Intimidating, Orc Blood and Orc Ferocity with Orc Atavism.

This is essentially "Choose which culture in which you grew up." Half-orcs raised by orcs ought to be very different from half-orcs raised by humans.

Humans

• No changes at this time.

Orcs

• Replace Light Sensitivity with Dayrunner.

Pellatarran orcs are creatures of fire, and as such suffer no ill effects from bright light.

Kobolds

• Pellatarran kobolds must pick a scale coloration. 
• In place of a feat they may become Dragonbreath Kobolds.

Kobold PCs are weaker than PCs of other races. Giving them +1 natural armor and a 1d8 breath weapon that takes 1d4 rounds to recharge in exchange for a feat goes a long way towards making them playable.

EDIT:  I had forgotten that all kobolds had +1 natural armor anyway. So 1 feat to allow them a 1d8 cone or line elemental attack every 2-5 rounds seems incredibly fair to me, given how they have -4 Str, -2 Con and +2 Dex. There needs to be some reason to play a race like this, and for me that reason is for people who are fascinated with dragons and want to play one.

Pellatarrum: The Many Names of Dwarves

As has been mentioned before, the dwarven language is one of extreme concision because their culture prizes conceptual refinement over all other concerns. This pattern extends to naming conventions as well, with only the most illustrious dwarves of myth and legend (or gods) having one-word names and therefore being considers exemplars of their type; all other dwarves have additional names which further describe and therefore diminish them.

The Overname describes what a particular dwarf has chosen to do with his or her life: a devotee of the Church of Light, a worker at a forge, a warrior in service to the defense of the great Citadel-Forge of Agnakorem. Other races often perceive the overname as a title or job description, but it so much more than that: the overname declares a dwarf's purpose, and it comes first because a dwarf without purpose is no dwarf at all and might as well be a lump of stone.

A dwarven ranger who guards the underside of Agnakorem gainst aberrant horrors from the opposite side of the disk would have an overname like "Horizon Warden". *

*Horizon being the term for the line bisecting the disc of Pellatarrum lengthwise, separating the land of the Dayspire from the land of the Nightspire, and serving as a border between What Is Pure and What Is Not. You know you have crossed the Horizon when gravity reverses.

Next is the Clan name, because dwarven culture states that the family is more important than the individual, and the clan is more important than family. This is sometimes observed more in the breach than in practice -- it is difficult to place the needs of blood relatives below the desires of a collective of distant kin -- but this format is stressed because it allows for the formation of dwarven city-states. A contemporary cultural approximation would be the way military personnel swear to serve their country and put its needs before all others, including familial separation and/or death.

Since most dwarf clans are created through heroic action that earns a sobriquet. For example, Clan Ironfoot earned its name through the actions of its founder who used an iron-shod boot to crush the skull of a hated orc chieftain in heroic combat. (Technically all dwarf clan names ought to be rendered in dwarven, but for purposes of flavor and style and ease of use by player characters, the English translation is used instead.)

A horizon warden of the Ironfoot clan would be addressed as Horizon Warden Ironfoot, and this is all the name that needs be used during performance of duties or non-social interaction. Example: "Horizon Warden Ironfoot, is this tunnel safe to use?"


The Patriarchal name is used to denote family ties through marriage. The eldest competent male dwarf of the line is the patriarch of the family, and while he has the ability to speak for the entire family this ability is rarely exercised outside of emergencies or times of war. (Dwarves understand the necessity of a single command voice during a crisis, but the patriarch is often too old, too busy, or both to effectively micromanage every aspect of the family.) During normal life the patriarch acts as the voice of wisdom: giving advice to parents, mediating disputes between adults that threaten to split the family, granting official (read: ceremonial) permission for marriages, and the like.

The patriarchal name is the name of the patriarch plus the suffix -dom, meaning "house of".

If you needed to address a ranger of a particular family -- perhaps you are the commander of a patrol unit and need to inform the troops that a relative has died -- you would say "Horizon Warden Ironfoot Tovhendom, please see me at once" to ensure that only the dwarves whose patriarch is Tovhen would report to you.


In contrast to the patriarchal name which indicates marriage, the Matrilineal name indicates blood relation. While dwarves are hardly a promiscuous people, they are also a very practical one, and realize that while the father of a child may be in doubt, the mother is not. (In cases of foundlings or other adoptions, the adoptive mother gives her name to the child. The reasoning is that anyone who raises a child as her own is that child's mother, biology be damned, because love trumps biology every time.)

The matrilineal name is the name of the mother plus the suffix -vord for son and -vorn for daughter. Unless you are on familiar terms with a dwarf, this is the most specific form of address you may use. After all, how many female Horizon Wardens of the Ironfoot clan whose patriarch is Tovhen and whose mother is Kreska can there be?

Again, keep in mind that dwarven culture perceives concision as ideal; the more descriptors you add, the more familiar (and in the case of strangers, the more insulting) you become. If you call her "Horizon Warden Ironfoot Tovhendom Kreskavorn", she will realize that she is being singled out and will likely be wary, if not outright testy, at the specification.


The Personal name is the given name, or what we in the west call the first name. It is a name of incredible familiarity, and to address an unfamiliar dwarf in such a manner is a grave insult (think "little Bobby" or "little Suzie"). While dwarves are not specifically against a tavern-clearing brawl, per se, most of them have the manners and self-control not to engage in such indecorous behavior; rather, they prefer to nurse their grudges and think of ways to thwart, impoverish and harm their opponents over the long term. On the other hand, sometimes a fist is thrown in the heat of the moment, in which case honor demands that aggression is returned with aggression.

However, if a dwarf requests that you address her by her personal name, it is a great honor. Most acquaintances only use the patronym and matronym, but a true friend not only uses the personal name but often uses only the personal name; in deference to dwarven concision, this is a way of saying "You are elevated in my eyes."

For example. Horizon Warden Ironfoot Tovhendom Kreskavorn Taszvya is known as Taszvya only to her blood family and dearest friends ("blood not of blood"). Her extended family refers to her as Kreskavorn Taszvya, and she is known to acquaintances as Tovhendom Kreskavorn. Use of her full name by non-family diminishes and dishonors her, and requires either apology or blood to cure it.


The Love name is the only name not given by family. It is a diminutive of the personal name and is so shockingly intimate that it is rarely spoken outside of the bedroom, and almost never outside of the home. Shortening a name in dwarven culture effectively says "I elevate you above all, even the gods themselves" and while such affection is encouraged and expected in dwarf culture, it is something which simply Is Not Done In Public. In the best case, it is seem as two lovebirds demonstrating extremely inappropriate and vulgar public displays of attention; in the worst case, it's humiliating (like being called "sugar buns" in front of co-workers and superiors). Inappropriate use of a love name can destroy relationships and start wars, but the lovers who are so confident in their love that they can whisper it in public are quietly lauded as the ideal of dwarven romance.

If you call Kreskavorn Taszvya by the name "Taya", you had better be alone and on intimate terms, and preferably engaged to be wed.


Finally, there is the Titular name, which exists outside the spectrum of overname to love name as it is expected to change over time as the dwarf improves her skills and therefore her position within the community. A ranger who has only just finished training would be referred to as "Horizon Warden Recruit", whereas her superior would be "Horizon Warden Sergeant". Similarly, Blacksmith Apprentice is just that, while a Blacksmith would be his mentor. A highly skilled dwarf would be referred to as simply Smith, which denotes mastery of multiple fields.

It is possible for a dwarf to change his overname, but it is rare and always in conjunction with the ascension of titular name. For example, a Horizon Warden Smith (one who is skilled in the crafting of defenses, patrols, traps and asymmetrical warfare) could become elevated to Grand Protector, the dwarf who is in charge of all defense of Agnakorem. In this case the titular name would reset to Grand Protector Novice, indicating a fresh promotion. A Grand Protector Smith is terrifyingly competent, having spent literal centuries in his profession.

Arcane Recovery

I need a break from talking about gender dysphoria and the military, so here's a little thing that I took from 5th edition D&D and turned into a Pathfinder Feat.

For those who don't know, 5e grants the Arcane Recovery ability to wizards at first level:

Arcane Recovery

You have learned to regain some of your magical energy by studying your Spellbook. Once per day when you finish a Short Rest, you can choose expended Spell Slots to recover. The Spell Slots can have a combined level that is equal to or less than half your wizard level (rounded up), and none of the slots can be 6th level or higher.

For example, if you’re a 4th-level wizard, you can recover up to two levels worth of Spell Slots. You can recover either a 2nd-level spell slot or two 1st-level Spell Slots.

In 5e, a Short Rest is defined as "a period of downtime, at least 1 hour long, during which a character does nothing more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds."

Since my 2nd level PCs were still struggling with resource management, and because the wizard had never used his Scribe Scroll feat, I gave him the opportunity to replace scribe scroll with the new Arcane Recovery feat.

He took it, saying "Given at 2nd level I've only got 3 first level spells per day, that one extra spell is like 33% extra. And that round up makes it neater at level 3."

I'm not even sure why 1st level wizards even get Scribe Scroll. It takes 250 gold to create a 1st level spell scroll, and starting gold for wizards is at most 120 gp. By the time they have the gold to create scrolls, they're likely 2nd or 3rd level.

Coincidentally, 3rd level is a feat level, so my PC still wants Scribe Scroll, he can take it then.

Anyway, if you like to use Hero Lab, here is Arcane Recovery.user for your downloading pleasure.

Sunder Wallbane

The following events actually happened during a game of Pathfinder I ran last night. (We're taking a break from Traveller.)

The Player Characters (PCs) were exploring a dungeon and ran headlong into a nasty hobgoblin pincer ambush that ripped them a new one. Despite taking heavy damage, the PCs managed to kill the chieftain and his cleric consort and many of the remaining hobgoblins, and so the surviving hobbos fled to an inner room and bars the doors. The PCs, bloody and low on hitpoints and completely out of magic, retired to their own secure room to rest for the night.

The next morning -- having not been attacked during the night by counterattacking hobgoblins, which was a fear of theirs -- the PCs return to the site of the ambush to see if they can get through the door and into the rest of the dungeon. The resident trapsmith takes a looks and declares that not only are the doors barricaded, but they are probably trapped as well, and so getting past them will be a long and probably risky undertaking. She further observes (because I am feeding her this info) that it would probably take as much effort, and be safer besides, if they just tunneled through the stone wall and bypass the traps entirely.

I suggested this for the following reasons:

1. They're an all-dwarf party, so tunneling is completely reasonable to them. 
2. There's a PC, Perga, who has a heavy pick and the Profession: Miner skill.
3. I like making odd suggestions and seeing what the party will do with them. This has given me hours of amusement, and if a GM can't laugh at her players, she's not properly enjoying her role. 

The party decides that this is actually a great course of action, and decide to have Perga (who is actually a Gunslinger -- this will become hilarious later) do his thing. I immediately start looking up rules for hardness and hit points of dungeon walls, and calculating how many wandering monsters will come investigate the sound of metal on stone. After I'm all set up, giggling to myself at the wickedness of my plan, I have Perga roll his Miner skill.

He rolls a natural 20.

Since this is technically an attack, I have him roll to confirm a critical hit. He does. He rolls another natural 20. He rolls again, and gets a 17. I look at the Break DC of the wall and see that it's 35. I look at the critical multiplier of the heavy pick and see that it's x4.

I think about this for a moment, then decide "Oh, why the hell not. This is a game about magic and epic adventures, and two nat 20s in a row is 1 in 400 odds. Also, it moves the plot forward, and it amuses me." The entire PC party is on the edge of their seats as I describe what happens next:

Perga carefully sets Matilda, his musket, to the side. He looks thoughtfully at the wall, as if to say "Where should I hit?" His decision made, he carefully draws an X on the wall.

He takes his pick out of his pack, spits on his hands, and takes a few swings, limbering up like a professional baseball player. "Right, the power of the swing comes from the hips... remember the follow through..." Then he hauls back and, with a mighty swing, the pick whistles through the air and buries itself deeply into the stone.

It doesn't want to come free. He wiggles it, and there's a cracking sound as a fracture races out from the point of impact. Then another. Then another. Then the entire wall crackles as fissures spiderweb outward from where the pick hit, all while Perga is trying to pry his pick loose. Straining with all his might, he gives the pick one last pull, this time with a bit of a twist to pop the head free by prying out some masonry with it.

The bit of masonry is pried out. The head pops free. And with its departure, all 20 feet of the cracked wall collapses with a roar into rubble, leaving a massive hole into the room.

Perga looks at the wall. Looks at his pick. Wall. Pick. Wall. "Huh," he says. "Never seen that happen before."

Later that evening during post-game wrap-up, I tell Perga's player "Give that pick an epic name, because you managed to infuse it with a little bit of legend."  He chose the name "Sunder".

I told him "Congratulations. You have a Pick of Wall Slaying."


Sunder Wallbane
(Heavy Pick)
Sunder has +2 to hit against structures, and does an additional 2d6 damage to them. Against all other foes, it is considered a magical weapon but has no additional properties.

Further commentary from the GM:
Technically, magical items first need to be masterwork quality, but you live in a magical world and you double-critted, and it moved the plot along, and it amused me, and the rest of the party will be talking about this for years, so yeah, it's magical. Epic actions can turn mundane items into relics in my game.

Given that you critted and one-shotted a wall, it seems fitting that Sunder be a "slaying" weapon, and what it slays is walls. Well, structures I guess, because floors are just horizontal walls and ceilings are lifted horizontal walls and roofs are slanted walls. Don't get cute by trying to use it on non-wall things like rock outcroppings or canyons or hills, because that gets into a semantic argument like "Well, that golem is made of stone, and walls are made of stone, so etc."  No. Sunder kills man-made structures because non-dwarf engineering is feeble. The benefit of this is that so long as it's constructed and not natural, you can slay it.

This is all hilarious to me because it's the first magical weapon the party has, and it's a melee weapon, and it's in the possession of a Gunslinger who shoots things at range. I do expect that it will get more use as a tool than a weapon,  because while it's merely an adequate weapon it's an amazing tool, doing 3d6+2+strength against fabricated structures.

I also love my idea that magical weapons can be spontaneously created through epic deeds. It avoids the soulless "You find or buy a weapon" issue because Sunder now has history with the PC group. They aren't going to want to part with it, because it's sentimental to them. Instead, they're going to use it, and its legend will continue to grow. In the same way that ancestral katana were said to have inside them the souls of the ancestors who wielded them, so too will the deeds of Perga Ironfoot increase the power of Sunder Wallbane. With more epic uses and epic successes, I can see it growing into a magical weapon of legend.

I look forward to seeing what the rest of my players can do. 

Pellatarrum: Decomposition

It's been a while since I last talked about my elemental-clockwork fantasy universe, so it's time to revisit it. In properly weird fashion, we're going to discuss the ways that various races decompose after death.

But Erin, why does this matter for a D&D or Pathfinder game? Once the NPCs are dead, they aren't important any more. 

Wrong! This matters because small things in the background (often derided as "fluff") affect and shape the formation of larger cultural elements, which go on to affect the PCs through the shape of rituals, customs, traditions and mores of the game world. Also, how many dungeons expeditions turn into tomb robbing?

Dwarves
As previously mentioned, dwarves do not rot; instead, they petrify and eventually turn into solid stone. In game terms, this means a few things:

1. Dwarf corpses never come out of rigor mortis. Dwarven priests use the Soften Earth and Stone spell to unlock the joints for dressing in finery and posing for eternal rest (necessary if the death is sudden and the body is splayed in an undignified manner).
2. Dwarven tombs are difficult to rob of their wealth, because the treasure is likely to be in the shape of weapons and armor that are now bound to, or being held by, several hundred pounds of unmoving statue. Bring a spellcaster, or an adamantine hammer and chisel and a lot of patience. 
3. Given the elemental nature of Pellatarran undead, dwarves rarely rise as true undead as their bodies have become immobile and their natures apathetic.  However, necromancers can still animate their freshly-slain corpses.

Elves

It is of utmost importance that the corpses of elves be kept from water, else they rise as fearsome undead. Admittedly, every corpse must be kept from water because it is the element of fear; it just seems especially prudent to keep the race linked to water from rising as a fear-based undead because that sounds like doubling up on trouble. 

The problem is that elf corpses don't rot; they deliquesce, their flesh (and later, their bones) melting into liquid. This can be avoided if proper elven funerary practices are followed, but this isn't always possible in cases of accident, misadventure, crime (like murder, or a kidnapping gone wrong) or the evergreen "an elven adventurer dies in a dungeon." The good news is that this means elves who rise as physical undead don't stay that way for long. The bad news, though, is that this drastically increases the chances of them rising as incorporeal undead. 

It is rumored that powerful necromancers can capture the essence of these elves by storing the juices of their former bodies in properly enchanted canopic jars, and that by sipping from them like potions, the knowledge and memories of the captured elf can be accessed by the imbiber. Of course, these stories also hasten to warn that this is an excellent way to become possessed by the spirit of the elf you're sipping...

Orcs

Orc corpses don't rot; instead, they char from the inside-out. According to orc lore, once the soul is freed from its body, its passage sears its former flesh. The only way to tell if an orc died from a fire or by other means is to cut it open and see where the damage is greatest. 

Given enough time, orc corpses will turn to ash and blow away. The orcish practice of cremation is largely seen as a way to speed this process along, as orcs have more important things to do than wait for bodies to ashify. 

Much like elves, this means that orcs rarely rise as physical undead, but have a greater chance of becoming incorporeal undead. This ironic similarity is a source of irritation for both peoples, and mentioning it is a fantastic way to start a fight in either culture. 

Dragons

Despite what you may expect, dragon corpses do not evaporate into gas. That would be silly. 

No, they just explode dramatically as their breath weapons seek to rejoin the air around them. (Air is breath, after all.) The size and power of the explosion is based on their age, so the corpse of a Great Red Wyrm will explode in a 24d10 fireball and be consumed by it. 

This is one reason why other dragons will collapse a cave or mountain upon their dead. Another reason is "Not all breath weapons completely destroy the body, and undead dragons of any color are utterly terrifying."

Sometimes this explosion happens days, weeks, or even months after their deaths; sometimes it happens immediately. Even in death, dragons are inscrutable. 

Other Races

Non-elder races, being creations of the Material Plane, just revert to the materials from which they were made through simple rotting.

What's that, you ask? What about the halflings?

Oh. Well, there's nothing to tell, really. Halfling communities don't have an undead problem. They're just such a radiant, positively energetic people that for some odd reason, they don't become undead unless there are unusual circumstances, like a necromancer or a powerful artifact. 

You know, come to think of it, you've never seen a halfling graveyard. Odd, that. 

(Go on. Think through the implications of this. If you aren't disturbed, you haven't thought it all the way through.)

Pellatarrum in Photographs

As I try to get back into the habit of writing creatively more often (and hopefully finish up the dozen or so projects I have on my plate), I figured I'd ease back into Pellatarrum by picking some photographs that really spoke to me and then explaining why I feel they'd fit perfectly in my pet fantasy world.

The Disappearing Cove

(photo by Michael Marten)

Pellatarrum has no moons, and thus logically has no tidal action. However, as I have said before, science and logic is boring when it comes to fantasy.  Tides are interesting, so Pellatarrum has them.  Why?  Take your pick:

• The water periodically drains away through caverns to the opposite side of the disk. However, the Water component of the Engines of Creation  (ancient artifacts which created the pocket Material Plane of Pellatarrum) notices the imbalance and pulls more from the Elemental plane to refresh the supply.  
• Does this mean there is a MASSIVE underground sea about halfway through the disk?  Possibly...
• There is a creature of epic, monstrous proportions  (think Jörmungandr ) asleep at the bottom of the sea. Each time it draws breath, it sucks seas into its lungs; every time it exhales, tides rush in. Storms at sea happen when this creature has nightmares and shifts restlessly in its sleep. 
• This particular cove sits at a nexus of positive and negative energy. This nexus is usually netural, but the day-night cycle of Pellatarrum is enough to overcome that balance. When daylight strikes the cove, creation wins and water is generated ex nihilo. This lasts for as long as day is dominant; as night begins to fall (and necrosis begins to win against radiance) it becomes less and less. When night finally arrives, the water begins to dissipate into salt until there is nothing but a salt flat where once a cove stood... until daylight starts the cycle over again. 
• Expect this area to be a riot of life and healing during the day, and then become incredibly haunted at night.

Mountain Shards

Winter in Pellatarrum is a time when Elemental Earth rains supreme. Usually that just means some soil comes loose and falls to the ground, its intense cold freezing the water around it, with the net result that fields get a few inches of rich fertile soil across them (and cities get that much muddier).  Sometimes larger pieces -- pebbles, really -- fall during a large storm, like hail. 

But every so often, something dramatic happens, and gigantic shards of Earth calve from its surface and plummet like falling spears. Pellatarrans call this Mountainfall, and when it happens it can drastically reshape the landscape:  the valley just over the hills can be buried by a newly-fallen mountain range, or a farming community's fields can be cratered beyond recognition. 

(Mapmaking is a vague art, not a science, in Pellatarrum. Better by far to take along a Ranger who can read the signs and get you there than risk death by taking a map you didn't realize had expired, and whose path takes you along watercourses that no longer exist, so that you die of thirst.)

These mountain shards occurred when a large chunk of Earth broke away and, while falling, broke apart like a cluster of spears. Locals call these the Javelin Peaks.

Dracosign

I wouldn't go here, were I you.  This looks like the result of a blue dragon arranging the landscape in a form it finds pleasing. Any trespass is likely to be interpreted as despoiling of a draconic masterpiece. 

If you must pass this way, bribe the local kobold tribes for safe passage; do NOT wander off the designated paths; and if your guide stops to show you a vista or give you an interpretation of what you're seeing, pay attention and ooh and ahh appreciatively. Dragon artistes do not take well to uncultured ruffians, and you never know who is watching....

Deathblossoms

Yeah, I wouldn't touch these flowers, either. This is clearly a forest at night (when the Dead Sun reigns) and these suckers are a bright yellow under negative energy. I don't know if they're undead (can plants be undead? Why not?), plague-ridden, vampiric or just really damn poisonous. This should be a big ol' NOPE NOPE NOPE from all sensible rangers and druids. 

Pellatarrum: My Dragons are Different (part 10)

Oh my God, I can't believe I never finished this. I had every good intention of so doing, and then I got distracted, and now it's been three years since part 9?   Good Lord.

Anyway, this is the conclusion to the My Dragons are Different series.  Please accept this with my sincerest apologies!

Written as a cooperative effort by Erin Palette and Mike Kochis

"Challenge is a dragon with a gift in its mouth... Tame the dragon and the gift is yours."

-- Noela Evans 

XI. Life, Death, Rebirth

Herein lies a hodge-podge of thoughts and notions which didn't merit an entire category.


Mating
Being especially long-lived (a competent dragon can live for a millennium or more), dragons are equally slow to reproduce.  Finding a suitable mate is the first hurdle;  it is difficult for innate schemers to trust each other enough to become intimate in such a manner. Therefore, mating is (much like all things draconic) planned out in advance, by proxy as much as possible, and through intense negotiation.

When all is finally said and done, their mating is more akin to a human "one night stand" than anything else:  the two dragons, having finally determined that turning on each other mid- or post-coitus will result in mutually assured death, meet in a location carefully determined to be tactically non-advantageous to either party (saying "without possibility of ambush" is rather facile, as of course both dragons will bring along allies to watch their backs during the deed); the male deposits sperm within the female's egg sac; then they both leave.

"Will my offspring be a threat to me or my future plans" is a keen consideration when mating, especially among males, as all children are birthed by the mother in her lair, and therefore out of the father's control. Ideally, the male is from far enough away, and has interests sufficiently different from the mother, that any offspring will not infringe upon the father's territory -- and recall, dragons interpret "territory" as "within my area of interest".   If this ideal cannot be met, then a typical arrangement is for half of the eggs to be delivered to the father's kobolds after being laid.  No male dragon will ever accept delivery of live young!


Eggs
Gestation within the mother takes a year, but incubation within the egg takes decades or centuries, depending on the age of the mother; a good rule of thumb is to assume that incubation is roughly equal with a dragon's age category.  Therefore, the eggs of a young adult (the youngest age at which a dragon can give birth) would take between 50 and 100 years to gestate, while an ancient dragon's eggs take nearly a millennium to gestate!  The benefit to this, however, is that the hatchlings will have absorbed a massive amount of information while "in ovum", and therefore will be far more powerful than their peers:

• Young Adults' offspring are Challenge Rating -1;
• Adults' are base CR;
• Mature Adults' offspring are CR+1;
• Additional +1 to CR for each age category after that. 

This is why fathers refuse to accept live offspring: by the time they are delivered, they will already have been indoctrinated into the mother's way of thinking (including her distasteful regard for the wrong kind of thing to hoard).


Young
Eventually, some ambitious adventurer will get it into his head that it would be a great idea to steal a dragon egg and raise it as his own.

Setting aside for the moment that this sort of thing requires an epic expenditure of time, treasure, and effort to rival killing the mother (for that is what it will take), as well as the time requirement for gestation -- this adventurer now must contend with a young being who is, at birth, as smart and as strong as a human adult; possessed of a terrible hunger both physical and intellectual; lacking the cultural and ethical conditioning of the mother; and only going to get larger, stronger, more ravenous, more territorial, and more uncontrollable as time passes.

Meanwhile, in the real world, animal specialists with doctorates are routinely maimed and/or killed by animals dumber than they are.

If any player character wishes to raise a feral dragon, the GM should smile and say "Yes, absolutely," and then harshly punish even the mildest mistake or lapse in judgement.  If necessary, consult the parents of teenagers for ideas.


Half-Dragons
Given the difficulty in finding a suitable mate, and the massive amounts of time and effort it takes to bring a dragon to term, the existence of half-dragons -- the product of a shape-shifted dragon and a member of a lesser race -- suddenly makes more sense. These cross-species "booty calls" have two benefits:  the dragons satisfies its biological urges (more common for males than for females), and, if pregnancy occurs, a useful tool/minion/catspaw is created.

It is worth noting that if a female dragon is so impregnated, she must stay in that shape-shifted form for the duration of the pregnancy, else the child be miscarried. However, a female dragon carrying eggs that were fertilized by another dragon, but are still unlaid,  may shift form without detriment to the young.

Pellatarran Half-Dragons are created as per Pathfinder rules.


Dracoliches 
Despite being exceptionally long-lived and paranoid, dragons can and do die. Usually this is through enemy action, but it is possible (however unlikely) for them to succumb to illness or injury; death from old age is unknown. Indeed, it is entirely possible that dragons cannot die due to age.

However, just because it is difficult to kill a dragon does not mean it is impossible, and this fact worries many of them. If they are worried enough, they will consider becoming undead through dark rituals; these undead dragons are known as Dracoliches or Raveners.

White dragons in particular are most prone to this, as their typical area of interest is "survival", but any dragon of sufficient age and expertise will have amassed enough foes who want it dead that making itself immune to death is a tantalizing option.  Black dragons, with their passion for knowledge that encompasses occult lore both forgotten and obscene, are the ones most likely to posses the know-how to become undead without needing the assistance of a divine spellcaster. Green dragons, on the other hand, are the one species actually less likely to embrace undeath, as their obsession with biology and living things is anathema to reanimation.

It is worth noting that any necromancer of the Dark would give his left anything to gain an undead dragon for an ally. However, this also means that said necromancer has some degree of power over the freshly undead dragon -- a situation which any proper dragon cannot abide. Therefore, any Cultist of the Dark assisting a dragon into undead-hood needs to be very powerful and very clever, or else he will end up very dead at the claws of his newest creation.

The Church of the Light, naturally, regards Dracoliches as abominations of the highest order and will spare no effort to destroy one.  Even the Cabal of the Gray regards undead as unnatural and will go out of their way to aid in the destruction of a  Ravener.

Dragons regard becoming undead with an attitude that combines the concepts of  "That's disgusting," "That's cheating," and "That is damn useful, I need to figure out how to do that myself."  Naturally, any dragon known to be undead will be regarded as a greater threat than typical, and so its rivals will display an unusual amount of cooperation to take it down... followed immediately by the victors fighting among themselves for possession of the knowledge so they can do it to themselves.

Languages of Pellatarrum: Elven

Imagine the sound of water: sometimes flowing, sometimes raining, sometimes crashing. Sometimes it is the gentle lapping of waves against the shore; other times it is the thunderous roar of the tsunami.

Always, though, is the universal constant of motion. Trapped water is unnatural, either artificially constrained (by man) or of dubious health (a still pond where nothing lives).

So it is with elves; so it is with Elven. Always moving, always fluid, be it a babble or a murmur or a roar. A still elf is a dead elf, and a silent elf is either dead or trying to kill you.

"Patience, Corwin. Sequence and order, time and stress! 

Accent, emphasis... Listen." -- Brand, Sign of the Unicorn

Spoken Elven is a synthetic, moraic language, delivering syllables in a manner different from English. Stressed syllables are pronounced for a longer period of time (and with a higher pitch) than unstressed syllables. So while an articulate speaker might put stress on some syllables, the timing for each mora remains the same regardless of the stress or pitch.

Elven has three "dialects": field, familiar and formal, used for hunting/combat, relations with friends and family, and the polite language of court and law, respectively. The spoken versions are a strictly atonal moraic double-marking fusional languages and use a dizzying array of prefixes, infixes, simulfixes, transfixes and suffixes, although only the field language uses duplifixes (children may occasionally use duplifixes in the familiar speech; it is considered a mark of immaturity, much like human children saying "me want" instead of "I want"). All three versions are atonal, however, and use virtually no stresses to distinguish between different words. 

While the language is atonal, tonality may be used for other purposes. Usually it is decorative embellishment to make the spoken word more pleasing to the ear, but tonality can also be used to cast a spell's verbal component while chatting about a completely different thing -- it is often said that elven sorcerers can cast glibness before they've stopped saying "Hello"). In battle it can also be used to frighten and terrorize the enemy, and it is no coincidence that most banshees are elven. All of this makes it very hard for non-native speakers to gauge tone or intent, which leads to the common conception that all elves are even-spoken madmen who can go from calm to murderous without raising their voices. 

Elven poetry has a smooth, flowing sound, but their spoken language is more like waves against rock, or dripping water with a steady and definitive (sometimes even hypnotic) rhythm. Most non-elves regard it as "beautiful but boring", and more than one famous political soliloquy has been mistaken for a lullaby.  The elves think that the idea is ridiculous, to the point that a frequent elven proveb on ignorance -- in fact, the sentence that non-elves hear the most when in contact with elves --  is "To hear the wind and think it water." 

 

Conversely, this confusion also means that human poetry is also meaningless to elves ("What's a pentameter?" "Syllable weight." "Huh?") and explains why they consider humans to be artless savages. Elves are capable of understanding the art of dwarven verse (highly structured, like haiku or old Norse poetry), but consider it dull and formulaic.

 

Elves are practitioners of circular breathing, and because of this they can talk for what others races consider an abnormally long time. Indeed, it is a common rhetorical practice for elves to talk at the same time as their opponents, obscuring the debate with a torrent of conflicting verbs. Skilled elven courtiers are able to listen to both sides simultaneously, positioning themselves such that each debater speaks into a separate ear. This makes elven debates a physically fluid affair, as a debater maneuvers for position such that his audience can only hear his argument; his opponent doing likewise; and the listeners jockeying for the prime position between the two. Human diplomats have observed that an elven debate is somewhere between "an opera and a soccer match, with no way to keep track of the score until the audience indicates who won." 

 

This long-windedness serves them well when dealing with other races: they talk over their opponent until he has to take a breath, in which case the elf dominates the conversation. The only race on whom this does not work are the dwarves, who simply wait with the patience of stone for the elf to exhaust himself after talking for hours and then make their point. Unfortunately, by this time the elf is too fatigued to listen, and so the conversation accomplishes nothing. After too many such failures, both sides created ambassador races, designed specifically to communicate more effectively with the others. 

 

This decision served the elves far better than it did the dwarves, as no elf wanted to be an ambassador to the orcs or the dragons;  orcs had a distressing tendency to strike (or kill) the diplomat in a fit of anger, and dragons were either amused by the longwinded audacity of elves and refused to take them seriously, or exercised their fearsome presence and scared the elves into quietude. 

 

It is believed by many (mostly dwarves, but some humans as well) that Elven is madness in a linguistic form, an insanity that is transmitted by reading or listening, and that if they learn the language, it permanently alters the brain, leading to erratic (chaotic) behavior. While there is no physiological reason why dwarves cannot learn Elven, there is tremendous social and psychological pressure to shun it, and so they tell themselves that they are physically incapable of speaking or understanding it, and thus will not abide it in their presence.

Specifically, there is no real-world language similar to Elven. There is no such language on earth, or anything even remotely close to it. The closest approximation is "imagine the drunken love child of Gaelic Irish and French, with perhaps a bit of Hindi and/or Arabic thrown in."


Written Elven, on the other hand, is strictly analytic. In order to conserve space (and because the reader can go back for clarification if necessary), any grammar notifications are done at the beginning of the sentence. Needless to say, elven use of punctuation is also maddeningly complex, and non-natives tend to feel a bit dyslexic when reading it. Reading it aloud is nearly impossible for reasons which are difficult to explain, but can be illustrated by means of analogy -- look at the picture below and try to read it aloud without first studying it:

Written Elven shares the same root words as spoken, complete with field/familiar/formal dialects. What is most curious, however, is that elven culture despises writing. Like Celtic bards and druids, elves view the written experience as something that can never come near the oral presentation. As suchs they only write down instruction manuals, legal documents, and the like. Their sacred texts are never written down, nor is any of their art; the former would be profane, the second barbaric. However, this has not stopped non-native speakers from making such transliterations.

Visually, Elven bears a strong resemblance to Diwani Arabic, and is notable for three defining characteristics:

1. There are no straight lines within its script.
2. It is "more cursive than cursive," in that there is no need for the writer to ever pick his pen off the paper, even for punctuation. Letters never have dead-ends or dots or crosses; everything loops. 
3. It utilizes the boustrophedon style of alternating sentence direction. There is no standardized starting direction of written Elven and is a matter of individual preference; reading direction is indicated by the position of grammar notifications at the beginning of the first sentence. 

This concludes the "Languages of Pellatarrum" series. 

This article would not have been possible without the contributions of Demonic Bunny. 

The answer to the sentence diagram shown above is:  "Using a new kind of stroke rehabilitation therapy, scientists have shown for the first time that the brain can be coaxed into reorganizing its circuitry so that people regain nearly full use of partially paralyzed limbs, even if the stroke happened years ago."