Here's my two cents worth on skills.
Drop the intelligence modifier to the initial number of skills and add one or two extra skills to wizard. Your ability, or lack thereof, to ride, climb, swim, balance etc. shouldn't be indirectly derived from your intelligence.
Consolidate Disable Device and Escape Artist with Theft.
Consolidate Climb and Swim into Athletics or some such skill.
Consolidate Knowledge (history, local, nobility, and religion) into Knowledge (social).
Consolidate Knowledge (arcana, parts of dungeoneering, and planes) into Knowledge (supernatural).
Consolidate Knowledge (geography and nature) into Knowledge (nature).
Consolidate Knowledge (engineering and parts of dungeoneering) into Knowledge (artificer).
As I see it, consolidating the knowledge skill can only help the game, plus dark ages "knowledge" tended to cover much broader subjects than they do now. It also mitigates the loss of skills a typical wizard would suffer due to my first suggestion.
And as a final touch, drop "Knowledge" and instead call it "Lore" to give it a bit more of a fantasy feel.
RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Consolidate Climb and Swim into Athletics or some such skill.And as a final touch, drop "Knowledge" and instead call it "Lore" to give it a bit more of a fantasy feel.
I like that. Combining the knowledge skills sounds good. I make a couple changes though.
Add survival to Lore (Nature) for tracking in wilderness. If you know a lot about nature you should be able to survive in it.
Add Lore (Urban) and use for urban tracking and survival. You could make survival type checks in a city or town to find a church's beggers kitchen, noblility handing out charity or where to find discarded food (dumpster diving)
Change Lore (Dungeoneering) to add underground tracking and survival, which would be harder than normal due to conditions.
Making a Lore (Social) skill and using it instead of Know (History), (Nobility) and (Geography). These skills areas are all subject to change and by combining them perhaps entice players to train more often.
I always saw Know (Local) as kind of useless anyway. I have always ruled it was good for one area, such as a large city, a small kingdom, etc.
I would think Arcana, Engineering, Religion, and the Planes should all remain separate though. These all require specialized areas that don't combine with anything else real well.