Memories of Connor's Adventures

Orlando the Adventurer pulled a Scimitar from beneath his Robes and smiled...

Tuesday 4 August 2015

Optional Rules: Generating Physical Height



Creating Diversity
Human physical height is a lot more diverse than you (or d&d) imagine. Its why we have stories of giants and dwarves. And now you can generate your own...just roll 17d6+5 inches for a range of 1'10" to 8'11". It provides you with options:
  • Doing away with non human races and turning them into isolated human cultures.
  • Running physically diverse humans alongside non human races.
  • Allowing height diversity for human and non human races (you might remember a two foot tall ogre named Toady hanging around duke igthorn).
Its all about diversity in the game.

Extreme Physical Height
While they like to tell us physical height extremes are genetic disorders and diseases it looks to be a family tree extending back thousands of years. This is indicated by a specific phonetic marker showing up in family mames.
  • Gheorghe  Muresan 7'7"
  • Sun MingMing 7'9"
  • Zeng Jin Lian 8'1"
  • Sultan Khosen 8'3"
  • John Aasen 8'9"
The Khoe-San are the bushmen of Namibia. While we might think the diminutive bushmen cannot be related to the family tree of the tallest people in the world we might consider physical height a weapon. Does anyone remember the warrior Conan the Barbarian being bred to the finest (female) stock. Imagine a time when the Khoe-San were very tall. Someone shows up and says lets take the tallest for our army thus depleating the tribe of their tallest (and the genetic pool of the Khoe-San). Those giant warriors are then bred to women in the east to create a warrior caste.

Khoe-San sounds a lot like the word Chosen, so lets assume that this exchange in millitary grade genetics occurs at a time when words are being created for European languages. Now, having seen a documentary some ten years ago in which the Hittite civilization in Turkey is generating proto-european words its not too far fetched to think the Hittites might have picked up some tall warriors from amongst the Khoe-San for their army as well as breeding stock.

The Short End of the Bell Curve
The use of phonetic markers revealed the Khoe-San family tree for great physical height So a similar approach may work in our search for a family tree for the origin of shorter genetics. Two potential candidates come up:
Jason Acuna
Peter Dinklage
The name of particular interest would be na-ge. If you have had the opportunity to read early issues of dragon magazine - in this case the articles on the ninja NPC and weapons of the ninja then nage teppo, a hand grenade or smoke bomb might be familiar. The phonetics, despite this Japanese link are protoindoeuropean in origin. Na-ge is 'death earth' and teppo refers to 'pottery/manufactured'. Potentially a pot of 'death-earth'.
Ninja comes from the protoindoeuropean roots: ni(ng)-atto or 'under orders of the father', the 'father' in this case being not a male parent, but rather a word for one who raises you like a cult leader or adopting parent who has raised young children to be assassins. So how has a Japanese assassin cult come to be west of china? Lets say they begin with a protoindoeuropean or indo-iranian origin before migrating into Japanese culture.

WTF?
You are probably thinking that Peter Dinklage and Jason Acuna are descended from a five thousand year old proto-japanese family/cult of alchemist-ninja dwarves peddling gun-powder to indo-iranians west of China. Currently Its speculation - But the apple rarely falls far from the tree. So what do we need to point further at a proto-japanese culture of diminutive genetics somewhere west of china?

The Ku Phonetic
In northern european legend gremlins, goblins, kobolds, bugbears, hobgoblins, barghest, and pooka represent a family tree of mischievous or malign creatures that find their origin in gobelin, kobolt, and ultimately Ku - a protoindoeuropean root phonetic.



The Ku as a Tribe
The Ku phonetic appears in several languages in the word Tribe as well as other similarly related words.
Su-ku (indonesian): tribe (people's place)
Su-iso-ku (Japanese): to gather
Zu-iso-ku (Japanese): tribe

Geographical Markers for the Ku
The nature of a phonetic is the people who use that phonetic do so to build more complex words. So when they build their dictionary, they include geographical words that include the use of a phonetic.
Several Japanese geographical words include the Ku Phonetic describing geography that isnt found on the islands of Japan.
Homeland
Alps
Jungle
Desert
Ravine
They describe a location bounded by Alps, jungle, and desert, with ravines. The jungles in India end at the desert in Afghanistan bounded by the mountainous Alps. Pakistan and the Hindu Kush sit in the middle. A homeland where one tribe became two and were ultimately displaced by other peoples - a people who were not considered humans by those who displaced them and yet they are.
Again it would require genetic analysis of various peoples to track the DNA and define the family tree in which short height in humans occurs.

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