I'm bucking tradition just a bit with a few items of worldbuilding. I notice that many fantasy settings, for both gaming and for fiction, do things differently than I'm going to do. In fact, in the past, I've often done differently. I'll be referring to what I did in the Mk. IV iteration of the setting, as a matter of fact, to compare and contrast with where I'm at now.
The first is the calendar. Some settings, like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, for instance, use calendars that sound all fantasied-up, with renamed days of the week, ten day long weeks, months that are unfamiliar, and a big tale of years stretching back tens of thousands of years. Tolkien, on the other hand, certainly did the latter (maybe not tens of thousands, but thousands) but otherwise used normal days of the week and months. The more I think about it, the more I'm in favor of familiar time-keeping. While it may add some color to talk about dates with weird names of days and months, it never means anything to your readers or players. It's kinda like trying to force the metric system on Americans; sure, we can understand it, but we can't really envision it, so it won't catch on. If you tell me that a city is a certain number of kilometres away by car, that means absolutely nothing to me until I do the conversion in my head to miles. I've kind of rebelled more overtly recently against the globalist nonsense that's tried to push that system on us, and refuse to talk about kilometers, kilograms, meters, or what have you in any fashion at all whatsoever. It's just not worth the effort to learn a new system to make somebody else happy, nor is it worth the effort to try and convert what that actually means in my head every time. The same is true for days of the week and months of the year. And honestly, those long tale of years type chronologies, with all these ages of this and ages of that? Does anyone really care? Does it even matter? I suppose some people sometimes like them for their own sake, but I'm much more leaning towards just having maybe half a dozen dot points in order with vague order of magnitude distance in the past. Because, honestly, otherwise, who really cares? It's not likely to matter, and if you just want facts to "namedrop" on occasion to give your setting depth (like a reference to the cats of Queen Beruthiel—shout out to Tolkien) just make up the name-drop already; you don't need to put it in context with a detailed chronological history.
I didn't always think this; this is where I've gotten by experience, struggling to make stuff actually work and having to admit that it either distracted from what I was trying to do and confused people at worst, or added nothing of any value at best.
The same is true for money. For DH4, I actually came up with a quite detailed and realistic approach, where different political entities minted their own coins, which had their own names, and their own weights and purity and which therefore weren't necessarily interchangeable on a one to one basis. Now, I couldn't use this stuff now because DH4 was heavily focused on a pseudo-"Thalassocracy of Aragon" type vibe, and I don't want any of this pistoles and pieces of eight and doubloons kind of thing going on anymore, because I'm now using Robin Hood or Ivanhoe era Anglo-Saxons instead. Even then, this was mostly meant for color; in an actual gaming environment, I never intended to treat money as anything more complicated than the default D&D-like gold pieces, silver pieces and copper pieces, where they represented dollars, dimes and pennies respectively. Anything other than that; unless you have a really unusual group who likes worrying about exchange rates of different coins and spending time on those kinds of tasks that most groups will find too banal to want to worry about, is worrying about a color element to the point where it becomes a tedious chore, and should be avoided.
The last one is languages. I really haven't given (yet) any thought at all to languages for DH5, and while I did obviously have languages for DH4, they never actually made their way into the rules. And this is an easy thing to over-do too; there's a reason why going all the way back to Tolkien, he defaulted to almost everyone speaking Common, so that characters could talk to each other, because stories in which characters couldn't communicate didn't tend to be very interesting stories, even if it was realistic after a fashion. Again, my DH4 languages won't work, because I'm not having a pseudo-Spanish as my "main" language. But let's look at what I did there, and see how much of it could be ported into DH5?
Terrasan (Standard Dialect): name list drawn mostly from Occitan, Catalan and a bit of Portuguese to give it that Spanish-like sound without sounding like it just comes from southern California. Not that southern California isn't a strange and alien place to most normal people, but... y'know.
Terrasan (Northern Dialect): name list drawn from minority languages of Italy, mostly—like Ligurian, Sardinian, etc. so they were similar but had a slightly different cast to them. In terms of actual language use, though, this was never meant to be more than color in the names used and maybe the fact that I'd describe someone as speaking with a strong northern accent.
Terrasan (Eastern Dialect): this worked the same as North Terrasan except that the namelist mostly came from Romanian. As Timischburg gradually emerged, the language of the peasant underclass would probably be represented by names from this language, although how often they'd actually speak it in the public square is TBD.
Balshatoi: a totally foreign language; my namelist had Russian and Old Norse names on it, and it was mostly supposed to mimic the rising Rus ethnicity in the 10th century or so.
Hamazin: This was associated with the Baal Hamazi nation, and therefore the kemling nationalisty is most likely to speak it, although it's probably the native language of most drylander humans as well. Given the politically fractured nature of the Hamazin speakers, it probably comes in multiple dialects too. Most of the names come from a combination of old Egyptian words and names and old Elamite words and names. I could us this pretty much as is for the kemlings and Baal Hamazi in DH5 too.
Tarushan: Tarush Noptii was a nation in DH4, that's been replaced by the similar but not exactly the same concept in Timischburg. I used mostly Hungarian names and words for this namelist, and I could mix them in a bit with the pseudo-Romanian of East Terrasan for the same purpose; the peasant underclass of Timischburg.
Sylvan: This namelist is mostly made up of Georgian names (the Caucasus Mountains country, not the southern US state), and I used it frequently for my woses. In DH5, the woses wouldn't have their own language, and they would probably be most thickly found in Timischburg, therefore speaking a Timischer language.
Qazmiri: I had al-Qazmir as a pseudo-Persian state, using Persian and Arabic names. I now have the jann acting a bit more like the Kurushat of DH4, and using names more properly associated with them instead. I know, I know... City of Brass and all that normally has a kind of Arabian Nights romanticism about it, but let's face it; we know too much about the Middle East and MENAS in general to see it as romanticized anymore. I'm just not interested in including any calques of their culture anymore.
Kurushi: This is the language of Kurushat, and I use Barsoom and Barsoom-like names here. (Why not? the jann are red too, right?) This is a bit interesting, because Kurushat was originally a hobgoblin empire that went through a number of changes over time to emerge on the other side as the northern western region of the map; kinda sorta bordering on Baal Hamazi, the politically unaligned Boneyard wilderness area, and coming into contact with the westernmost Hill Country towns. This isn't the entirety of Kurushat, but these represent colonial city-states that are in the region and that would be from Kurushat in DH5.
Kvuustu: I now transliterate this as either Kavoost or Cavoost, because the hillmen are the most likely to refer to it and it's an unintelligble mess of consonants and weird vowels to the typical hillman. But the language itself comes from an old language generator file that I have somewhere (if I can still find it, that is.) I'd mix this up with some Lovecraftian Dreamlands type names, and have it be the language of Lomar and Zobna and the Cursed in general... when the Cursed don't just speak Timischer, which they probably do if they live in Timischburg. Ironically, because the Cursed aren't really anything like them, I initially devised Kvuustu to be an orc language, but it later became a Neanderthal language, and... well, it just got kicked around a lot.
So out of the DH4 language list, I can retain Hamazin was a de facto kemling language, Kurushi as a de facto jann language, Kvuustu as a de facto Cursed language (at least from the Curseds' own native lands) and the underclass language of Timischburg.
The hillmen just speak what is represented with English, and would have pretty typical early Medieval English (Anglo-Saxon) and/or Scottish/British (Cumbric, Welsh) type names; pretty familiar stuff to us, but without the really Norman influence. I wouldn't use the really exotic Cumbric, Welsh or Scottish names, but I probably wouldn't use really common names like John or Robert without giving them at least a little bit of a spelling facelift to sound just a tad less banal. (I certainly would not entertain the Forgotten Realms custom of just replacing all of the vowels with y's and adding gratuitous apostrophes either though.)
And the Timischer upper class use German names, to represent Timischburg as the eastern, Transylvania-including part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire during the time of Bram Stoker's Dracula. So my list of languages spoken normally on the face of the world would include High Timischer, Low Timischer, Hill-speech, Hamazin, Kurushi and Kvuustu. Although it doesn't necessarily make total sense, I'll have Hill-speech be a kind of common; not terribly unlike the position of English in Western Europe today. Most people speak at least a smattering of it, and almost everywhere you go, you can find locals who are fluent in it, albeit probably with localized strong accents.
D&D also has "supernatural" languages; the language of dragons, demons, angels, elementals, etc. I'll probably grab two that I used to use in early DH4 before I kind of forgot about them, and assume that they exist, although few people know these languages, and for that matter, many people don't even know that these languages exist. There could be other languages spoken "off screen" in DH5, and in fact there probably are (orcish at the very least comes to mind; maybe Normaundian and a few others, but I'm not interested in digging in to any of them at the moment.)
Infernal: This is the primary language spoken by those from the Realms Outside, although myriad other tongues exist amongst this diverse breed as well. In addition, this is the language of magic, so a smattering of it, at least, is known by any practitioner of the arcane arts. Perfect fluency in this language, on the other hand, is almost impossible for any mortal to achieve. Because of this, it takes two skill points to earn this language, not one.
Despite that, it was always very fashionable in Baal Hamazi, where the demonic taint of their bloodline was a source of pride to the ruling caste, to speak Infernal natively, and many noble houses took great pains to ensure that their children didn't hear any other language until they were five years of age. Some households still speak Infernal in the home, and it is still a living language of some importance in some of the successor states to Baal Hamazi, and amongst the hamazin in particular.
Dagonic: This is a bizarre pre-human language, remnants of which float around on isolated and moldy standing stones and other areas. Intriguingly, it appears to have originally been a underwater language. Few people on the surface can even make an attempt to learn it, due to the challenges of speech that an underwater language had to have overcome, and the language itself is only known from very scanty and fragmentary remains, making fluency all but impossible for even the most dedicated scholar. Roleplaying note: Because of the difficulty in learning this language, it takes three skill points rather than one to do so. Also, for all intents and purposes, it is a written language only, not a spoken language, since there are no speakers that anyone knows of at all, and how to pronounce the language is anyone's guess.
And finally, that list predates my use of the Microlite ruleset. Referring to skill points to learn the language is a d20 houserule, after all. How do I do languages in Microlite? I think for Dark•Heritage, at least, at character creation, I'd let characters roll a d4, modified by MND score (but never able to go lower than 1 or higher than 5) be the number of languages you know, and you can pick them from the list. I wouldn't adapt the colorful rules about how many skill points it takes to learn Infernal or Dagonic, if someone wanted to do so, but I would insist that each player who picked one of those languages explain how they learned it, since you can't just go buy the Rosetta Stone program for Dagonic or Infernal.
I'd probably also insist that everyone pick Hill-speech as a language, since it serves as a Common tongue. In fact, I'll probably just drop the Hill-speech label and call it Common already. Going back to my discussion on why not mess with days, weeks, months and coins because it just confuses players/readers, I'll use the same convention and not create a new name for what is basically just Common.
No comments:
Post a Comment