OSSR: Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings

[Desdan_Mervolam]

The chart there of wizard specializations is kinda borked, Frank. Mostly on the title line and the "Enchanter" line.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So. Assuming that you A.) had a DM that let you use many but not all of the 2E class expansions (Complete Handbooks, Spells and Powers, but not obscure setting crap) and B.) had another DM that restricted you to core rules only, which were the best schools to specialize in?

The 2E D&D rules for illusion make the school look really fucking boss. Unfortunately, even in games like 3E D&D and Pathfinder there's an unspoken assumption that the DM may randomly metagame or special plead your illusions out of usefulness. Rule Negative Two and all. I can't imagine how bad it'd be in an edition where the playerbase is encouraged to clap, hoot, and masturbate like trained chimps every time a DM slaps down a player that got too big for their britches.

[Ancient History]

Your ideal for AD&D 2E were the double specialist wizards from Dragon Magazines - Frost Wizards (Air & Water Elementalists) and Pyrogathean Wizards (Fire & Earth Elementalists).

[Lago PARANOIA]

That's Dragon Magazine crap. Even if you had the most milquetoast and permissive DM in the world using Dragon Magazine crap is just... poor sportsmanship. Like doing the high jump with a jetpack.

[Username17]

2nd edition Illusions are so boss it hurts. When you make an image, it does real damage to anyone who fails to disbelieve. Phantasmal Forces is basically 3rd edition's silent image except that people in the absolutely massive area who believe take completely uncapped damage every round for as long as the caster feels the need to concentrate and they go unconscious if they run out of hit points. It's about as effective as a high level caster with wail of the banshee, and it's a 1st level spell. If you happen to be an Image Maker and get to bypass Undead immunity to Images (unlike 3rd edition, Undead in 2nd edition are specifically immune to phantasmal forces), it's obviously more effective.

Now that being said, Illusionists had a horrible learning curve. You had to find an illusion that your DM would accept that your character was familiar with and which could plausibly do damage to victims without making any noise (or use two spell slots to end the combat by first using audible glamer). That's going to be different from DM to DM. I mean, some DMs will let you launch illusionary arrows or have illusionary beholders shoot fully effective death rays, or have shadows rise out of the walls, or have rocks fall from the ceiling, or have negative energy rays shoot out of your staff, or whatever. It's wildly variable. And you pretty much have to trial and error this shit, because the DM probably won't tell you if he is going to buy a particular killer app before you've done it.

The higher level versions of phantasmal force are actually weaker. Improved phantasmal force, for example, has half the area and twice the casting time. The advantage is that it allows you to make impact noises and growls and shit, so the DM is more likely to agree that your chosen illusion is allowed to work (and you're allowed to move while concentrating, because it's 2nd edition and there isn't a standard definition of concentration duration). So with a higher level spell, you accept less raw power in order to be required to use less finesse to get the same sort of "I Win" effects.

So much is DM adjudication that people were loathe to suggest Illusion as a path to go down, but if it was allowed to work it was by far the most powerful school. Not only could you dump mass save or die spells from 1st level, but even at 2nd level you could move your spells and keep them going indefinitely as long as you didn't cast another spell. You could plausibly beat an entire dungeon with a single casting of improved phantasmal forces by backing your team up with like 8 illusionary Trolls or something.

-Username17

[tussock]

My point was that different cultures will have different standards of beauty and desirability, and if you took a bunch of people that all valued strength and hardiness far more than agility, and put them on an island for, lets just say, a thousand years, after that time you'd have a culture where people tended to be strong and hardy and not very dextrous,

That's not true, by the way. The only things sexual selection can change quickly (inside ten thousand generations) are those which don't hurt survival in any case. Things like muscle mass and coordination are survival traits, so they can't normally be selected against.

You can get bigger or smaller penises. You can get darker skin in men only (women's skin colour strongly effects births). Note that you can't really select for lighter skin, because that's usually a deletion, and thus associated with other genetic damage, which will fuck you up if you select for it.

Island traits in humans (like pacific island fast-twitch muscle) are survival traits there, and they're often not set in the population because getting all the genes reduces survival.

Sex selection on muscles gets you things like Chatham-island sheep, where the males have wool that shaped itself into big muscle patterns, but actual muscles fit for survival. A lot of birds have huge puffy chest feathers on males for the same reason. It's all trivial appearance stuff.

Big nose? Sure, so long as it doesn't stick out "too far" and harm your survival rates. That's how "breeds" differ, without some sort of artificial selector that kills off healthier individuals. Dragons might produce stunted weak humans, or big slow brutes, human choices can't. Well, not without huge eugenics programs.

[Username17]

Tussock: stop being retarded. Peacock tails massively hurt survival. Peahens live twice as long as peacocks. As a doctor and a biologist, I can tell you that every single thing you said is bullshit. Anyway...

Book 1 & 2: Chapters 5
A Typical Village


Basically this.

The fifth chapter in each book in the book is a description of a “typical village.” The example villages are Lindendale (population unknown, but seemingly between 100 and 200) for the Halflings, and Granitehome (population 350) for the Gnomes. Despite the fact that specific population figures are given for Granitehome, it's a lot less well fleshed out, and appears to be a series of caves where incestuous families sleep in piles. Seriously, there's just this cavern with a number on it, and when you look up the number it says “Pipwhistlion Clanhold: These [sic] family of eighty provides the bulk of the community's miners.” So there's just a big room where eighty related Gnomes sleep and do their business. The mines, that they presumably work in, are separate. Basically, I'm not even giving Granitehome points for effort, this is a joke. The cartography doesn't make any sense, the descriptive paragraphs are neither descriptive nor paragraphs – just labels to attach the descriptions that were never made.

Lindendale is more fleshed out, but it has less than two dozen dwellings in it, and that includes the inn and the cheese factory. One of the dairy farms has 49 Halflings living in it (many of whom are children), but other than that the buildings seem to just have regular families or even just “some guy” living in them. A fundamental problem I have with this setup is that people seem to live with their children and sometimes grandchildren and great grandchildren. Where do peoples' cousins live? Apparently in Halflingland, when you become a homestead's patriarch (or matriarch), your brothers and sisters and all of their descendants have to flee or die. So I guess that Halflings practice Ottoman succession rules, with the entire family living in relative harmony until the old patriarch (or matriarch) dies and suddenly it's time for an orgy of fratricide and sororicide until only one remains from the oldest generation. That's actually way more interesting than anything in this book, and I'm actually just getting it from the fact that the presented demographics do not make sense. The only exception for that is a house where three widowed sisters live together with their various sundry children and grandchildren – but they are also candle makers, so I'm not sure there are any lands to divide.


Little men, giant hats.

You could actually riff on that and make for a race that fits into D&D adventures pretty well. Halflings share their lands with all of their direct descendants, but when they die it all goes to on to one of their sons or daughters, and the families of everyone else have to GTFO. So you have a whole domestic tranquility deal, but at the same time whole dynasties of Halflings would have to pull up stakes on short notice to go claim new lands or live in cities or just become nomads or adventurers. On account of Halflings never ever dividing farmland on succession.


This succession system doesn't always work out well.

If that last bit seems a little ranty and off topic, that's because there's very little to talk about in these chapters. The Gnome village is just a dry recitation of how many Gnomes can be found in each clan's colony pod, and while the Halfling village is a lot better it's still woefully incomplete. The economics of the Halfling village don't seem to make any sense. The demographics are unfinished and there don't seem to be enough cows to support the cheese factory. I don't know where barrels or cloths come from in this village. There's a woodcarver, but no cooper. Shit like that. It's all half-assed.

Appendix Adventure Suggestions for Gnome and Halfling Campaigns


For some reason, the overlong appendix title made me think of that.

This last appendix is basically predicated on the idea that Gnomes and (especially) Halflings are, as written in this book, basically unplayable. They aren't supposed to care about the basic motivations of standard D&D adventures. What follows is a list of 10 extremely sketchy adventure seeds designed to bring Gnomes and Halflings into the action. Not a terrible idea, but but most of them are pretty standard shit like “Goblins have kidnapped some people, go rescue them for a reward!” and “evil wizard cursed some people, go stab him in the face!”

So I dunno. The premise of this appendix is that Gnomes and Halflings shit all over the basic narrative structure of Dungeons & Dragons. But the actual plot seeds are just basic narrative structure of D&D with the stipulation that at least one of the people deciding to go on the adventure is short.

One thing that I thought was pretty weird is that one of the Halfling Adventure seeds is called “Meddlesome Officialdom” with the premise being that the local lord wants to collect taxes and the Halflings don't want to pay it. That seems like a perfectly reasonable conflict, but the author thinks that not paying your taxes is a thing you should support.


So Halflings are these idiots, I guess.

And that's the book.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Note that you can't really select for lighter skin, because that's usually a deletion, and thus associated with other genetic damage, which will fuck you up if you select for it.

Does anyone know WTF tussock is talking about?

[schpeelah]

There are three types of mutation - insertion, deletion, and substitution. They add, remove or change a letter of the genetic code respectively. A thing to note that genetic code has the equivalent of a byte - every three letters (a codon) code one amino acid in a protein. So while a substitution may change one amino acid in the sequence (unless it changes the codon to the end-of-protein sign) or none at all (because there are more codons possible than amino acids available, so there are multiple codes for some amino acids), the other two are guaranteed to change the rest of the gene by shifting everything by one letter.

The part where he's full of shit is where he thinks making the genes responsible for melatonin production less active involves a deletion and where he thinks deletions are associated with more problems than insertions and with "genetic damage". Oh, and where he doubts it's possible to evolve from dark to light skin, so either he's skeptical about the existence of white people or is a creationist.

In genetics, a deletion (also called gene deletion, deficiency, or deletion mutation) is a mutation (a genetic aberration) in which a part of a chromosome or a sequence of DNA is missing. Deletion is the loss of genetic material. Any number of nucleotides can be deleted, from a single base to an entire piece of chromosome.[1] Deletions can be caused by errors in chromosomal crossover during meiosis.
Causes include the following:

Losses from translocation
Chromosomal crossovers within a chromosomal inversion
Unequal crossing over
Breaking without rejoining

In genetics, an insertion (also called an insertion mutation) is the addition of one or more nucleotide base pairs into a DNA sequence. This can often happen in microsatellite regions due to the DNA polymerase slipping.

A point mutation, or single base substitution, is a type of mutation that causes the replacement of a single base nucleotide with another nucleotide of the genetic material, DNA or RNA. The term point mutation also includes insertions or deletions of a single base pair.
Point mutations usually take place during DNA replication.

You didn't have that on biology in high school?

[Shiritai]

I'm pretty sure Lago knew what the individual words meant, and I have to agree that the tussock's statement as a whole was complete gibberish. Selection on pre-existing alleles has about fuck and all to do with mutations, no matter the type.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Oh, and where he doubts it's possible to evolve from dark to light skin, so either he's skeptical about the existence of white people or is a creationist.

Or he thinks white people are the "default" and all the dark-skinned people are mutations of that.

[Occluded Sun]

That's not true, by the way. The only things sexual selection can change quickly (inside ten thousand generations) are those which don't hurt survival in any case. Things like muscle mass and coordination are survival traits, so they can't normally be selected against.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Ever seen a peacock?

You can get bigger or smaller penises. You can get darker skin in men only (women's skin colour strongly effects births). Note that you can't really select for lighter skin, because that's usually a deletion, and thus associated with other genetic damage, which will fuck you up if you select for it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

[Username17]

Note that you can't really select for lighter skin, because that's usually a deletion, and thus associated with other genetic damage, which will fuck you up if you select for it.

Does anyone know WTF tussock is talking about?

...Yes.

There's a lot to unpack there, and getting into the fine level stuff where Tussock is wrong about how the nitty gritty of how DNA works is rather missing the point. Tussock is of course fractally wrong, with every little part of his argument just as wrong as the whole thing. He does this a lot.

To even get to why the fuckity fucksticks he's even talking about whether or not you "can" select for lighter skin, you have to wrap your mind around the fact that he thinks that sexual selection has some sort of difficulty selecting for something which is a negative survival trait. And you could see how someone might believe that if they didn't understand probability and didn't get that a multiplier that is very close to one and a multiplier that is not very close to one have very different effects.

The truth of course is that evolutionarily effects are sometimes slow and subtle and sometimes really fucking fast. Sometimes you get a big plague and literally every single vulnerable member of the species fails to pass on its genes. Sometimes there is a very strong sexual selection for men patrilinially descended from Genghis Khan and the contents of that Y-chromosome get spread to 16 million men over the next few centuries. And then again, sometimes a gene just makes you a little tougher or a littler sexier or something and it would take tens of thousands of generations for the effects to be noticeable.

Anyway, sexual selection traits among humans are especially known for propagating crazy fast, because cultures can literally decide over night that gingers aren't demon spawn and are actually super sexy or vice The versa or whatever. So point one is that Tussock is under the misconception that it would be hard for a trait to be propagated through a human population if it came with some amount of negative effect on survival. This is not remotely true, but that's what Tussock claimed to believe.

So now we take a step down into the crazy a bit, where Tussock believes that lightening skin would present a negative survival trait. Well, whether it would or not largely has to do with whether you're more likely to get sun burns or vitamin D deficiency. Certainly at northern latitudes, in the days before calciferol additives in food, it was probably somewhat better for survival to have fairer skin - while at more southern latitudes in the days before SPF 45 lotion was developed it was probably somewhat better to have a permanent tan. The effects aren't massive in either direction, and I think the fact that many Arabs are quite pale and many Yakut are pretty dark pretty much speaks for itself.

And now we have to take another step into the deeper crazy. This is where Tussock believes that the reduction of pigmentation would be caused by the deletion of pigment genes; rather than by the vastly more likely structural alteration of regulatory pathways. Thus, he assumes that going from more pigment to less pigment involves the loss of a fair amount of genetic material, which would correspond with microdeletion syndromes, which would be bad. This is, of course, totally bollocks.

The things Tussock was saying weren't exactly word salad, it was simply a chain of inferences where every single link in that chain was flatly wrong.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Thanks, guys!

[Occluded Sun]

Vitamin D deficiency away from the equator is highly dependent on diet. The Inuit have skin that's about as dark as the rest of the Native Americans, North and South. And the native Finno-Ugric Sami people have notably darker skin than their paler and more numerous displacers.

Both of those examples groups eat a lot of meat during the winter. It's speculated that the various groups that fused to become Caucasians went through a period where they were vegetarian farmers and so couldn't get vitamin D from their foods during the dark times of year.

I'm not even going to try touching the genetic claims, which are absurd and nonsensical.

[fbmf]

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT! Occluded Sun and Frank are in agreement!

Tomorrow: Sun rises in west. Pope Francis endorses violence in Middle East.

Game On,
fbmf

[Occluded Sun]

Pope Francis endorses violence in Middle East.

No Crusades jokes, please. Too soon.

[TiaC]

So now we take a step down into the crazy a bit, where Tussock believes that lightening skin would present a negative survival trait. Well, whether it would or not largely has to do with whether you're more likely to get sun burns or vitamin D deficiency. Certainly at northern latitudes, in the days before calciferol additives in food, it was probably somewhat better for survival to have fairer skin - while at more southern latitudes in the days before SPF 45 lotion was developed it was probably somewhat better to have a permanent tan. The effects aren't massive in either direction, and I think the fact that many Arabs are quite pale and many Yakut are pretty dark pretty much speaks for itself.

Sunburn is probably not a source of selective pressure as it doesn't really affect survival until after your children are adults. It is thought more likely that folic acid's degradation under sunlight is the cause.

As to Occluded Sun's point about diet, northern europe is very warm for its latitude due to the gulf stream. This makes farming more viable, while other areas of similar latitude do not allow it. The reduced meat intake would lead to a diet light on vitamin D.

[norms29]

Sunburn is probably not a source of selective pressure as it doesn't really affect survival until after your children are adults.

yes, because living grand parents helping with child care is never a factor in family size or childhood mortality rates in a pre-state (or even just preindustrial) society:roll:

[TiaC]

Sunburn is probably not a source of selective pressure as it doesn't really affect survival until after your children are adults.

yes, because living grand parents helping with child care is never a factor in family size or childhood mortality rates in a pre-state (or even just preindustrial) society:roll:

First, We've already done the grandmother hypothesis bullshit. It really doesn't help, especially since that's just one more mouth to feed.

Second, do you really think skin cancer makes a difference to longevity in a hunter-gatherer society? By the age when sunlight could kill you, you are already dead or a drain on the tribe's resources.

[Prak]

Thank you assorted people for responding to Tussock when I couldn't muster a decent response myself with my limited knowledge of genetics.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Sun burns can absolutely be life-threatening, even to people of pre-reproduction age, and especially in a stone age context where the margins of survival are so much thinner than they are today. Sunburns are fucking burns, very similar to any other burns a person might get. They can incapacitate a person, cause fever, increase the chance of infections, etc.

[norms29]

First, We've already done the grandmother hypothesis bullshit. It really doesn't help, especially since that's just one more mouth to feed.

I'll admit I had to look up "grandmother hypothesis" and now I'm wondering if you either misunderstood me, are trying to move goal posts, or you're using it in a much broader sloppier meaning.

because as I gathered, the grandmother hypothesis was that taking lifespan as a given menopause at some age was beneficial to a lineage at some point despite by definition reducing the potential number of offspring produced.

what I am saying, is that taking menopause at a particular age as the given, greater post-menopausal lifespan is of potential benefit to one's lineage

Second, do you really think skin cancer makes a difference to longevity in a hunter-gatherer society?

I think angelfromanotherpin already beat me to this one.

sun burns can absolutely be life-threatening, even to people of pre-reproduction age, and especially in a stone age context where the margins of survival are so much thinner than they are today. Sunburns are fucking burns, very similar to any other burns a person might get. They can incapacitate a person, cause fever, increase the chance of infections, etc.

which honestly is an even bigger impact than the one I was envisioning, I was just going to point out that stubbing your toe will make a difference to longevity in a hunter gather society. any minor illness or injury saps scarce resources from the body. marginal affects add up.

By the age when sunlight could kill you, you are already dead or a drain on the tribe's resources.

increased resistance to a particular form of illness or injury seems likely to further delay the point at which you become a drain rather than a contributor.

[TiaC]

First, We've already done the grandmother hypothesis bullshit. It really doesn't help, especially since that's just one more mouth to feed.

I'll admit I had to look up "grandmother hypothesis" and now I'm wondering if you either misunderstood me, are trying to move goal posts, or you're using it in a much broader sloppier meaning.

because as I gathered, the grandmother hypothesis was that taking lifespan as a given menopause at some age was beneficial to a lineage at some point despite by definition reducing the potential number of offspring produced.

what I am saying, is that taking menopause at a particular age as the given, greater post-menopausal lifespan is of potential benefit to one's lineage.

Over on MPSIMS a few months ago, this came up. The other part of the grandmother hypothesis is trying to explain a way in which greater post-reproduction lifespan could be selected for. This is not at all obvious. It is highly doubtful that the survival of the elderly has a noticeable positive effect on their genes' survival.

Second, do you really think skin cancer makes a difference to longevity in a hunter-gatherer society?

I think angelfromanotherpin already beat me to this one.

sun burns can absolutely be life-threatening, even to people of pre-reproduction age, and especially in a stone age context where the margins of survival are so much thinner than they are today. Sunburns are fucking burns, very similar to any other burns a person might get. They can incapacitate a person, cause fever, increase the chance of infections, etc.

which honestly is an even bigger impact than the one I was envisioning, I was just going to point out that stubbing your toe will make a difference to longevity in a hunter gather society. any minor illness or injury saps scarce resources from the body. marginal affects add up.

By the age when sunlight could kill you, you are already dead or a drain on the tribe's resources.

increased resistance to a particular form of illness or injury seems likely to further delay the point at which you become a drain rather than a contributor.

I find that I was operating on older research here. I had been going off of papers like this, which dismiss it because skin cancer was considered a disease of the elderly. However, a recent study has shown that if sufficiently pale, skin cancer is a problem even at a young age. Still, the amount of pigmentation needed to avoid skin cancer and sunburn is less than is often found in Sub-Saharan Africa so Folic Acid deficiency remains as a cause.

[tussock]

Edit: Thanks for the OSSR, Frank, enjoyed. Sorry for the threadcrapping. But not that sorry.



Skin colour really is a huge thing for birth rates in Humans. Vitamin D production and Folate damage is caused by the same thing, sunlight on our skin, and low amounts of either in women result in moderate to severe birth defects and crippling childhood deformities at rates that quickly rise, and were still very common early last century.

Inuit are darker skinned than Nordics because they ate far more meat in their ancestral diet, and meat is a source of Vitamin D. Same thing with the rice-eating Asian cultures being lighter skinned than similar latitudes in Africa and Australia where wild hunting was more common. Add in common ancestral work clothing and you get rapid skin colour optimisation that rapidly dominates breeding rates vs less optimised women.

It's still a medical thing where migrant populations can have high rates of neural tube defects despite an excellent diet, and mandated food supplements are fairly common for white people countries closer to the equator than Germany.

Which is all about melanin production, with multiple independently evolved copies of the genes for it. And also Eumelanin production, which is the red-head gene that counteracts melanin function.

So some places, Eumelanin dominated, other places damage (oh, so sorry, picky bastards) to the Melanin genes dominated. Other places, not warm enough to grow wheat at that latitude, northern Europe's kinda unique there.

And yes, going out of your way to breed with animals who have visible genetic damage is a hard road of shortened life expectancy. Look at white dogs, white horses, white cattle, passable as crossbreeds and otherwise a really bad idea. I don't imagine it would have worked well for sexual selection in humans.

Or he thinks white people are the "default" and all the dark-skinned people are mutations of that.

The default is basically Middle-Eastern / North African. They have essentially the same melanin production set as chimps, while darker people have various extras and lighter people have damage to some of them, or the red-head thing (same gene as red-furred primates, Orang-utan have the same one) that combines with damage or extras for different tones of red.


But that's all going from memory, so I'm sure there's plenty of nits to pick again if anyone cares.

The only things sexual selection can change quickly (inside ten thousand generations)

Good old peacocks, developing that wasteful tail overnight, and totally not being bred by humans for even bigger ones. You know what's a survival trait? Being hand fed by the dominant species on the planet. See also roses, bananas, british bulldogs, etc.