No detailed rules on any of them as they will be found on more rules oriented sections of the documentation, but I have compiled the list of skills that will be used on the Dystopian Destinies system and the Clashlands Setting. What's more, this list is actually based off the teaser skills lists from 4th edition and not the old 3.5 skill list. I have marked in *s all the skills that look like they will be in 4th edition, with the exception that I have renamed Dungeoneering to better fit my concept of the skill division and where Dungeoneering would actually fall in my skills tree. Note that the list I've seen from 4th edition may be by no means complete, but unless their skills jive with my list and just need a couple name changes to match their list, I will probably stick with this list of skills.
Now, about languages... The reason I bring this up is because I haven't gotten to the portion of the source material where I flesh out the languages, as that will come with lots of other background material. There may not be a comprehensive list of languages in the land until I am ready to selling books, but rather teaser lists, but none the less, my inclusion of Linguist in the list of skills got me thinking that this point deserved fleshing out, along with the introduction of the skill. So...
After giving it much consideration and thought, over most of the time I have been playing D&D (about 30 years) and giving it serious meditation lately, I decided how to deal with my distaste for the concept of a common tongue and how I interpret it. Though I never cared for the concept of a common tongue in the first place, it does have it's place in a cinematic, magical game of high adventure. I feel it is artificial and even from the few serious attempts to explain it, it is totally artificial and more an aspect of magic than a language. So, what is the common tongue?
Common Tongue is not really a language, so much as a psuedo-psychic phenomona. It does not matter what language a person actually speaks when speaking in common, but rather their intent to communicate it universally rather than just between those that speak a particular tongue. It is a result of the desire to communicate and not actually a language in itself. As a result in a realm where magic is all powerful and everywhere, and the gods are everywhere, it can go without saying that the ability to speak such a language of tongues is possible. And for that reason in my realm there will be a common tongue, and outside of the realm, everyone knows how to speak it, but.... It is not universal in the realm in which I will be placing the Clashlands setting. Anyone from the realm can speak it the moment they leave the realm, even just to barely seperated transitory realms or just past the threshold of portals and conduits but in the realm itself, common is not intuitive. It can be spoken with the aid of magic, psionics and divine blessing but it is not natural. None the less, when it can be spoken in realm, anyone is likely to be able to understand it.
All that said, on the common tongue, the reason I decided that my realm exists this way goes right to the root of the flavor I am trying to capture... Clashlands is called what it is because it is supposed to be a dystopian fantasy setting where extreme opposites are in conflict everywhere, from the inter-relations between races, to the political parties to the very foundations upon which the schools of magic are formed and I could not see a way to have that full flavor when something like a common tongue was... uhm... common. Miscommunication is an important part of fostering conflict, and clashlands is intentionally a land of conflict... The gods of the realm themselves have gone out of their way to design it as such. Auqora Prime over the years has become a miniature transitory realm of it's own in ways, and shares links with other places like the City of Doors, Spelljammer, as well as places like Castle Perilous... If it's a place of interdimensional portals, it probably touches the realm of Auqora Prime and in particular the planet Auqora's Jewel. The realm is one of it's own laws, though. Just as the City of Doors has certain principles on it that differ from other realms it touches so too is Auqora Prime unique in it's own ways, and that uniqueness comes in the fact that the local gods run an inside club where they will put down differences to immediately expel outsiders that challenge them, but when they aren't protecting the realm as a whole, treat the whole realm as a great warzone where mortals play out their differences for them. It is a land not of harmony but of fundamentalist prejudice and conflict. Clashlands will not be a fairytail realm... it will be Dystopian Steampunk Meets D&D with a strong flavor of Rome at it's worst.
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For the near future I am going to try to be pumping out more source material stuff... Most likely more background stuff behind character design, like stuff on the magic, races, feats, etc. and then eventually when all the other details are available, the core element of classes and character creation. This past week I been tied up with other business, though and that hasn't ended yet. I will be busy most of tomorrow as well (but am busy in when I have the time). I have a photoshoot to go do for a friend and business associate, and then I have to do prep work for an online game I've joined up with as a player in Fantasy Grounds to get a feel for what it is like from the player's point of view. This post was delayed several hours from when I first posted the skill list and edited it into the master index, because I had an appointment I had photowork I needed to do today that I was already running a little late for when I finished editing in the skills list. That photo work is all with me behind the camera. I may be posting stuff to my poorly maintained photo blog soon concerning my recent picture takings. I've been kinda down on the photo work for months now and I like having something to do with my cameras again.
Anyway, until next post, I will continue hashing out what I can of my system and posting as I finish portions. If I were to lay bets, I'd say to expect something on commodities or the ecosystem next but I flip flop between portions of the rules I'm working on so much that I would not garrauntee it couldn't be some other section I finish first.
Sociable
Thursday, April 10, 2008
About Languages and Skills...
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2 comments:
So is the main problem the "mechanic" of a common language or is it the details behind it?
I look at common like a trade language.
Look at Languages like Undercommon I think thats the underground common trading language. I mean you have Drow, Mindflayers, Bugbears, and other denizens under the earth, undercommon is an easy way for them to trade.
But maybe the "common" language is a certain language, and if you don't have it, you don't, and you're screwed.
Lets says your party comes across some desert raiders, and they decide to trade for much needed supplies. After a while, going through certain signs and languages they find that they speak Ignan, the fire elemental language and the whole region speak it and hence is the main trading language in the fiery desert land they inhabit.
Look at Draconic. That maybe the main language of all intellectuals, reserved for those within upper echelons of thinking. The Ogre Magi might not attack the group after the wizard speaks to him in Draconic and it surprised to find such a well minded individuals. With that, the Ogre-Magi waves off his fellow ogres form the fight and have an opportunity to talk?
But I sense now this may not be the issue you had with common language...
I could write all day in answer to this one and never touch on the whole extent of the issues I have with common or the many different angles one can view it, but in a nut shell, it's too artificial. It's not a mechanical thing but a conceptual one. In at least 6,000 years of human civilization (I believe it's really closer to 15,000+ years), we have never in our world developed a common tongue. We are (supposedly) one race on this planet, and now pretty much globally connected for over a century, and we still don't have anything resembling a common tongue. We have languages that are intenationally common, like English and French, but nothing that could actually be looked at as a common tongue - The language that everyone speaks.
With this in mind, there is no way I have ever been able to stomach the idea of a world even more split up by conflict and with a multitude of races, some of which wouldn't give each other the time of day, developing a common tongue without it being some sort of a magical effect.
The idea of language spreading out through the cosmos to also have common is just... Uhm... Far fetched.
The only way one gets around this is to call it magic or some sort of a universal conceptual constant, and this I really don't have a huge problem with, but it still wouldn't quite fit in my realm.
About the ONLY way I can even see getting around the inhibitions I have around a common tongue is in the biblical story of babel and the what if scenario of there actually being a common that our local head god in charge decided to block us from being able to know it and maybe most of the multi-versal cosmos doesn't have that limitation. But, this still loops back to the arguement that it would be some sort of magical universal constant in this case and not a true language in the sense of a learned form of communication. What's more, the gods in the realm of Auqora Prime are just anal enough to have their own tower of babel incident to prevent the use of such a language there as well and regardless of the exact rationalization for why it isn't found there, there still wouldn't be a common language in the realm.
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