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[coffeyfiend]

Could you please explain a bit about the words in parentheses in Table 2.1 of the Adventurer's Forge? Do these affect game play?

[Darkfather]

Originally Posted by coffeyfiend

Could you please explain a bit about the words in parentheses in Table 2.1 of the Adventurer's Forge? Do these affect game play?

They can. Table 2.1 is the birth language table for adventurers whose race does not have an automatic racial tongue. When a language is mentioned with some sort of parenthetical note, it means that the language is spoken in one of its dialect forms. For example, Brazilian Portuguese and Continental Portuguese have some significant differences in slang, while some phrases that make sense to a British person do not to an American. When the dialect is mentioned at all it means that the languages have different enough versions that there is at least some chance of miscommunication (for example in the heat of battle) but careful and considered communication by two individuals will likely be ok.

In practical terms Southern Celestial is the high version of the tongue, as is Great Nevari the main version of that tongue. The Nevari from the Grabbian lands is different enough to cause confusion, but close enough that traders do not need translators. A speaker of Celestial from the Inland Sea speaks a corrupted form of the language (Lake) with many Dagorian and Sedusi loan words, but the core grammar mutually intelligible.

[Darkfather]

The history of Virdea was developed like a board game. I was trying in 1983 to make sense of a group of notes from some short stories I had written, and to develop some sort of back story for the game, when I hit upon the idea of making it into a game of its own. In this game each race started at one or more locations, and had a set of characteristics like tendency to expand, birth rate, change of cultural factors, conservatism, favored environment, and the like. Each race could occupy a hex in various ways from creating a nation to simply gathering resources from it.

Often races would penetrate the same places but not go to war - so the Celestials, a minor human tribe who drifted down the coast from the east of Virdea, got shoved into a swamp then had a tribe of a race (the Haguni) making a large ocean move, and a hybrid language would destroy the old language and even the cultural template, and a new one would arise (and the races would remain stable partners, rare because I did not build that in as a high probability, but it worked out a few times).

When cultures lightly occupy the same hexes, there would be drift in cultural factors like language. So the new hybrid language of Celestial (formed when Haguni and Human settlers spend several generations relatively evenly sharing the same space) eventually makes its two roots go extinct. The new culture group of humans and haguni leave their swamps, and their culture moves through the nearby regions even when their people do not. Eventually the culture was nearly detached from the race that spawned it, another outcome I did not count on. In some places though the culture in the form of the language would bump up against another stable and larger language group and a stable boundary would form where the language would hybridize rather than be replaced or form a polyglot conglomeration.

That long story is the reason I eventually started referring to the hybrids as simply being dialects. A mix language of 80% Celestial, 12% Dagorian, and 8% Sedusi is still in my mind Celestial, just with borrowed words. (In other cases the languages do not mix, they remain separate, and instead get used by different populations - a polyglot assembly).

[Ewen O'mally]

Is there a universal language? Or should PC's take linguistics and learn a similar language?

[Darkfather]

Originally Posted by Ewen O'mally

Is there a universal language? Or should PC's take linguistics and learn a similar language?

There is no universal language, although trade, a pidgin with limited syntax, is very common. It is probably good for any group to either have access to a nice range of languages, but also make sure there is a group language. Hired hands can be invaluable as translators.