Official ICE Forums
Systems & Settings => Shadow World => Topic started by: tbigness on April 01, 2016, 08:58:13 AM
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I know this is still a ways away from now but it would be great to have a Shadow World supplement or book for Races and Languages of Shadow World. This would do multiple things for RMU:
1. Give Racial descriptions in one book and where the races originate from
2. languages that are most spoken by the races and languages in different regions of Shadow World
3. Could have expanded talents that are Shadow World specific
4. Common types of names for races
5. Allows for cultural flavor for each race as well as prejudices
6. Gives cultural weapons and armor
7. Describes usual clothing that is worn (most people will be around the same in the culture i.e. Toga, Kilt, furs, ect... will always be the fallback or comfort clothing for different races)
8. Belief system for each race (religion, naturist, domination, ect...)
9. Art work for typical looks of each race
Note this should be for playable races only within Shadow World and not a Monster or Creature Law.
What do you think?
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We do have the player guide, but my one big gripe with it is that the list of languages is different than the one in the book, which makes for some confusion.
Maybe they could clean that up and supplement it with some of the additional information you describe above, and issue it as Player Guide, 2nd Edition. I would buy it.
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Yeah I have the players guide but it is just information about SW and not much for races with stats and descriptions of each. Also there is no indication for where they are in the world (like a map of the continent with an arrow pointing to it). I was disappointed with the descriptions and there were very few languages for me to give my Players for language development. It was more of a broad "Welcome to Shadow World" this is what you can expect, kind of book.
I am looking for a Guide for races, to include: Stats, Physical features, Cultural beliefs, Cultural garb and equipment (weapons, armor, mundane items common), language spoken commonly, common type of name, Picture of what is common appearance.
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Races & Cultures has a bunch of stuff, but I'm unsure as to how canon it's considered.
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I think this is a great idea, and something that one of you avid SW people could take on with me as editor. I'm not sure how far along RMU is, but a lot of this is system independent so could be assembled immediately.
TKA
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It's certainly something that I'd love to have.
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When I did the SW player guide, my original idea was that there would be a player guide for each region (e.g., Jaiman), which would contain both detailed races as well as cultures for each region. In fact, I even have a draft (now several years old) of a new Jaiman book and Player guide to go with it.
But, life happens. Someone should do it.
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Our GM did a tome of races on Jaiman!
I can ask him if he wanna share that!
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There is a lot of information distributed in several publications. RMFRP Races & Cultures, RMSS Underground Races, the Master Atlas 1-4, Powers of Light and Darkness and of course "big books" on Jaiman and Emer. Even the Bladestorm Sourcebook and Bestiary add to SW with regard to Folenn.
I'm not sure if there is so much "new" material needed. Consolidating the information in these books is a lot of work, but would prove ultimately very helpful. Especially with regards to canon.
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In our group our GM made a "tome of races"
It would be awesome with a official version of this, maybe made or gathered by users here and checked of by Terry or whoever "owns" Shadow world!
@Matt Hanson Would you be able to share that jaiman book with us here so we maybe can use that to build a new one of sorts :)
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It would be very helpful with just a 2 page pdf providing racial bonuses and talents for RMU.
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When I did the SW player guide, my original idea was that there would be a player guide for each region (e.g., Jaiman), which would contain both detailed races as well as cultures for each region. In fact, I even have a draft (now several years old) of a new Jaiman book and Player guide to go with it.
But, life happens. Someone should do it.
I'd like to see this go forward. I also started a new edition of Jaiman, with all the dungeon layouts and artifact info removed (to be re-published in other books), but planned a lot more detailed info about all the regions, so it is more of a general guide and not about dungeon adventures. But have not looked at it in awhile. Been working on other projects. But the Player's Guide was hugely successful, so maybe we should consider this.
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Terry, great to see you active in this thread. Would it be possible to throw together a table with updated racial stats for RMU? (Player races)
My group is in the middle of launching a campaign (RMU/Shadow World/Jaiman) and we would love to preserve your vision of how the various races should be handled. As it stands today we'll have to bodge something together and there is no telling if we will end up even close to how you'd do it.
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It has not been reviewed by Terry or Matt but here is our conversion I posted up a few months ago.
http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15879.0;attach=3666
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It has not been reviewed by Terry or Matt but here is our conversion I posted up a few months ago.
http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15879.0;attach=3666
Glad to see that some races get an Intuition bonus in Shadow World. I've never quite understood RMU's decision to treat Intuition differently than all other stats and not give any races a bonus or minus in it. It contradicts all earlier versions of Rolemaster was well as Shadow World.
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Thank you for the link, the new race creation rules does create a bit of a mess though. :/
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Thank you for the link, the new race creation rules does create a bit of a mess though. :/
Yes it doesnt match up, but we did these in early beta 1 when we adopted the RMU stat bonus system. If anyone wants to make changes I can post the excel version.
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I probably would try my hand at making them all conform to the RMU racial creation rules, so I can use them for my campaigns; unless of course one of the developers is planning to do this? I think it would be great, and necessary if RMU is going to support the Shadow World setting.
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I've done my own take on the races for RMU. I ended up giving them more development points just to they had the flavor of the RMFRP versions. I told my players that they should pick the Shadow World races as they are inherently more powerful than the base RMU ones...
I've converted the following: Duranaki, Myri, Sulini, Yinka, Y'nari, Laan, Erlini, Shuluri, Laori, Haid, Numari, and Jameri.
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It's fairly obvious that race creation rules as presented in RMU is very different compared to previous editions.
My personal view on the matter is that races have been significantly nerfed compared to previous versions. Since races are strictly point based today, it would be easy to generate RMU versions. The elephant in the room is obviously how many DP to use for generating the new races.
RMU RAW use 50DP, how many DP would be the right amount in order to recreate the Shadow World Races and preserving the right flavor?
Highest # of background options used to be 6, increasing DP to 60 wouldn't be a big stretch. Is more than 60 needed?
In I.C.E. #6400, 4th edition Master Atlas, Loari elves for RMFRP the net stat bonuses are +9 with 3 background options. In RMU the net stat bonuses are +8 with 0 bonus DP. Resistance mods seem to be roughly on par. Exchanging 1 background option for 10DP would give us a 34 DP difference.
Eyeballing the net difference for a Shay I get something in the 31DP area.
Using 80DP instead of 50 feels a little excessive? (60% net increase)
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A small followup.
I did a quick and dirty comparison of the races found on Jaiman.
Average cost of...
Humans | 37DP
Half-Elves | 99DP
Elves | 49DP
Assuming Half-Elves have the same racial abilities as Elves (30DP).
Adding 10DP/Background Option.
Humans | 87DP
Half-Elves | 139DP
Elves | 79DP
The average Half-Elf would appear to be vastly more powerful. Humans and Elves seems to be fairly equal but still much stronger than the RMU versions (80'ish DP vs 50DP). So, 80DP would probably be the absolute max DP value for Shadow World player races. As long as all players use the SW specific races, it shouldn't create any apparent imbalances. Yes, they will be slightly stronger than RMU RAW but I doubt that would be game breaking in any way?
Any thoughts on this? How many DP do you think would be appropriate?
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Too late to edit my previous post, some more accurate numbers. (1BO = 10DP)
Humans | 39DP @ 5BO (89DP). Range 0-73. Very wide range here.
Half-Elves | 84DP @ 4BO (124DP). Range 82-87.
Elves | 51DP @ 3BO (81DP). Range 45-56.
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Assuming Half-Elves have the same racial abilities as Elves (30DP).
Half-elves dont have the same racial abilities as elves. From the 4th edition Atlas they don't have any of those specified for elves. They only get the resistance to extremes/hot/cold, longer lifespan (gain energy from exposure to sunlight if Ky'taari).
Mal
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I would love to see this forwarded. I am starting a campaign but languages are sticky with the races of different areas. Looking to Start in Norek but don't know the primary languages in the area.
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Can we get a list of languages in this world?
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RMFRP Races & Cultures does list the automatic and allowable starting languages for Shadow World races which might be helpful. In many cases it's just "native regional language" though, there's not a list in that book of all the regional languages.
With regard to adapting the races to RMU, because the point balances (and talents) are different, they aren't going to be exactly the same as other editions, but a difference of a few pluses here and there is not going to undermine the concept or role of the race. I don't think it's a big concern. What's likely to be more of a challenge is that the number of language ranks (which in RMU come from the culture, not the race) is quite a bit lower for many cultures in RMU than they were for some races in RMSS. When we adapted our RMSS campaign to RMU, we redid the characters in RMU but we ended up just granting all the characters 20 additional language ranks. Even with that boost, some characters (especially elves) needed to purchase a lot of language ranks to get up to the same levels they had in RMSS, and some languages they might have had at very high levels (10-12) might have been reduced to 8-9 ranks instead.
As alternative to just throwing a lot of extra language ranks at all the characters, it might be worth rethinking how the languages work. For example look at the elven languages. According to RMFRP R&C, we have Dyari, Erlini, Linaeri, Loari, and Shuluri (not to mention a host of other sylvan languages like Centaur, Nymph, Lennai, and Dryad). These five languages are the native languages of the five types of elves. As written, each one has to be developed independently but it stands to reason that they are related languages and share grammatical structures, word roots, and other features to varying extents. They probably are more like American English, Cockney, and Scots than they are like English, Chinese, and Russian. I don't know Shadow World to say which ones are related and how closely, but I'll take a guess that Dyari and Shuluri have diverged more while the remaining three are more closely related. If we wanted to represent that relationship, you could say for example a Linaeri speaker operates at their number of ranks minus 3 in Erlini and Loari, and minus 5 in Dyari and Shuluri. Now a Linaeri (who starts with 8 written / 4 spoken in Linaeri) gets some ability to communicate with Erlini and Loari (5 ranks) and some rudimentary ability in Dyari and Shuluri (3 ranks) without purchasing four other languages (although they really aren't getting anywhere in the written forms of those languages without purchasing some ranks). Also, the Linaeri gets some benefit if they boost their Linaeri ranks up to 10 (which otherwise is not going to make much difference in play vs 8).
Making that actually work requires mapping out the relationships between all the languages. Probably you have regional languages with relationship to the racial languages, and relationships between racial languages where they are not necessarily related races but have interacted a great deal over history (e.g Erlini to Centaur or Dryad).
This is something I did in my setting but it's not really something that can be done in the RMU core without implying something about the setting (it's easy to make up racial languages but the core doesn't have any regions to have regional languages for). Personally, I think it's kind of interesting because languages tell you something about the history, who is related to who and how did they interact in the past, but I don't know how much of that is defined for Shadow World.
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The language question is actually a good one for Shadow World given that most races are actually bio-engineered races that, at one time, were slaves to the Althan and probably used a common language (probably not Iruaric since the language requires partial telepathic ability for complete fluency). But More than 100000 years of isolation can alter languages radically, and migrations create surprises in the linguisitic map (especially if you forget that languages, most of the time, are cultural constructs, not racial ones).
But barring that, there is evidence (from the Master Atlases) that Iylar, Loar and Erlin languages are very different from one another. Furthermore, there are differences between variants of those languages (Emeri-Elven and Muri-Elven are listed as examples, but I would assume that at least two, and possibly three other Erlin variants would exist on Jaiman alone - one for Urulan of they do not speak Muri-Elven, one for the Mah-Ilari elves of the north (and possibly another, now dead variant for the Jaimani Elves of Lu'Nak), and possibly one for the elves of Remiraith.
I would also assume that Shulur is widely different from the others because of the specific communication needs of the Shuluri. I would assume that most Shuluri speak another language when they want to communicate with strangers (and the language of the Kinsai would be a prime candidate given the proximity, with Erlin - being the closest the world has to a "common tongue" - being a distant second). Loariki is, for all purposes, a fabricated language, and it is probably specific to one Loar culture (I would suspect Namar-Tol). It would be odd if the language spoken by the emerian Dyari was close to Iylar, given the widely different geographical origins of the people.
And elven languages are the easy part, because elves are immortal and language changes would only occur very slowly. Mannish tongues, on the other hand, would diverge from any common root much quicker - and I seem to recall that one of the Master Atlases indicates that there are "at least seven major variants" of Rhaya, the "common mannish tongue" of Jaiman, which is probably a distant relative of the language the Shay spoke before they migrated to Jaiman to escape the yoke of the Masters of Emer in the Second Era. In Tanara alone, there are at least five different spoken tongues - not including Rhaya or Erlin.
The way I resolved that explosion of languages was, as Jdale suggested, to create a "language map" with each language being connected to the languages it was related to, with a number associated with the connection - this number indicated the number of ranks "lost" when trying to use a language as a basis for another. It was interesting to see that, for instance, learning Old Emer (a dead language) was likely efficient as it was connected to several languages (at least four different languages in Haestra, plus one in Reandor) - it was similar to european Latin in a way for most south european languages. It also showed, for instance, that the language spoken by the Zori of Jaiman was completely different from Old Emer (which is the root of all the languages spoken by the Laan in Emer) even though Zori and Laan are basically the same race... but with very different histories and cultural origins.
Overall, the map covered 66 languages and all of Jaiman, Emer and Kelestia, plus 10 magical languages. Of course, it is not canon in any way (my version of Kulthea having drifted from the official one during the twenty years I've been GMing it), and I did not map minor variants, but it helped (my players, mostly).
As a matter of fact, the idea of language map was borrowed from Danger International (HERO system in the modern world), which included one for real-world languages. There was also one in the "Time of the Dragon" supplement for the Dragonlance D&D setting (a setting I used for a RM campaign, incidentally).
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Would you be willing to post your map, MisterK? A good language map is something I've always wanted -- especially one that could note how many language ranks you lost when you tried to use your knowledge of Shay to understand something written in Old Emer. That would be really great!
I do have in my Rolemaster files a very simplified version, created by I'm not sure whom, of the language tree for Kulthea. I can send it to anyone; just pm me if you want it.
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I did a bit of work on this a few years ago, but never got to a visual language tree. An overview plus attached document.
Language Issues
The nature of the Shadow World setting, the number of races and cultures and the expected effect of isolated evolution implies that languages will often be very different, even among tongues with common roots. Communication should have an impact on the game and could become an obstacle for the party. Otherwise just declare all languages similar (engineered Althan language with varying dialects) or create a McGuffin (plot device) to bypass the issue: universal translator, player with telepathic ability.
Shadow World does have one genealogical effect on languages: the Elvish languages have remained relatively unchanged for 100,000 years (due to Elvish immortality and the nature of the language). While most mortal races will never learn the higher Iylar tongues, Erlin is quite common and closest to a “universal” language on Kulthea. However, language can create flavor and challenge to a well-run game. Learning languages should be worth the effort (in skill based systems like RM).
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I also found this in my Master Atlas files--a language translation matrix. I never got around to filling it in, but the idea was a quick reference for similarity between languages for skill comparison. If someone wants to fill it it that would be great!
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Nice summary!
I very much like the idea MisterK outlined of characters using other languages at a certain rank penalty if they try to use a related language, like for example someone trained in Old Emerian trying to converse in Itanian (a descended language). So let's say someone was rank 8 in Old Emerian, and we judged that meant they had facility of rank 5 in Itanian. Now what would happen if that character tried to gain more fluency in Itanian? Would we start them at rank 5? It is the eternal question of what to do to raise fluency in a similar skill.
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Nice summary!
I very much like the idea MisterK outlined of characters using other languages at a certain rank penalty if they try to use a related language, like for example someone trained in Old Emerian trying to converse in Itanian (a descended language). So let's say someone was rank 8 in Old Emerian, and we judged that meant they had facility of rank 5 in Itanian. Now what would happen if that character tried to gain more fluency in Itanian? Would we start them at rank 5? It is the eternal question of what to do to raise fluency in a similar skill.
Tangent, but my world had related languages. If you spoke one at 7, you understood the other at 3. I always allowed characters to start developing the other language at 3 just based on what we see in our own linguistics with (say) the Romance languages. If you wanted to, I supposed you could start them one rank lower (2 in this case) if they were trying to learn the language, but I always figured if you were going to require languages (and not have Common), you should make it reasonably easy to learn them. But I also required teachers (it could be a party member who spoke the language) when a PC tried to learn a new language.
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For an RMU optional rule, see http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=18963.0 (http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=18963.0)
But my answer is the same as intothatdarkness's.
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So let's say someone was rank 8 in Old Emerian, and we judged that meant they had facility of rank 5 in Itanian. Now what would happen if that character tried to gain more fluency in Itanian? Would we start them at rank 5? It is the eternal question of what to do to raise fluency in a similar skill.
In my opinion, you would start at the beginning, but with a cost reduction until you reach the point where the equivalence is no longer useful, after which you would have to pay the full cost.
I also attached the Language Map I used as a .png file. I can upload the source .ppt if anyone is interested, but as I said, it reflects my own vision of Shadow World and certainly is not canon, so I guess it is more useful as an example than as a true source.
In order to make understanding easier:
- boxes around groups of languages indicate language families.
- green-tinted languages are emerian. Light blue are jaimani. Deep blue are kelestians. Light pink are magical languages. Diagonal slash and cross patterned boxes indicate dead languages.
- I used a 5-rank (base) language expertise rating (similar to MERP), not a 10 rank as in RMSS/FRP.
- the dotted lines indicate marginal cross-pollination (a few words carried over from one language to the other), but no real correlation.
- some of the language names I invented when there was no reference in the official books. I changed a couple of names (Kinaa, for instance, is what is called Loariki in the Master Atlas).
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I also attached the Language Map I used as a .png file. I can upload the source .ppt if anyone is interested...
If you could that would be great! Files can take a long time to get approved on these boards; it might even be better to add it to these forums' Vault/Downloads>Shadow World>Addendums, Appendices and Glossaries.
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I just want to say, MisterK was kind enough to send me his language map, and it is wonderful; truly a great resource! I don't care that it might not be canon, because it is so useful: it has the various languages and language families grouped and connected to one another by lines that indicate (in numerical values indicating rank penalties) how closely they are related. This is exactly what I was hoping for.
So I recommend that anyone interested in the relationship between Kulthean families mark this page for later use, so that when that file gets approved, you can download it. I'm putting it on my GM screen for when I GM Shadow World!
If this map could be made canon, I would love to see it added to the Shadow World Player's Guide.
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I would very much like to get a copy of that language map as well.
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I uploaded the map in the Vault as Hurin suggested (I had to convert the ppt file to a pdf since the ppt format is not allowed in the vault). A moderator has to approve it before it can be accessed there.
Anyone who wants it before that happens is welcome to send me a message / mail including the email address at which they wish to receive it, I will send the files directly as I did for Hurin.
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Thanks very much MisterK! I know it will be of great use.
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Just wanted to note that it looks like that file from MisterK has been approved; you can see it a few posts up. I don't yet see it in the Vault (downloads section of the forum), but in case people didn't know, you can access it a few posts above this one.
Thanks again MisterK -- it is a great game aid!
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Thanks for bumping the thread. That's a great chart. Now I want to do that for my setting. I think I will superimpose it on the map though, since my language familiars more or less correspond to geographical areas. (I think that is less true for Shadow World but the mapped part of my setting is smaller.)
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Thanks for bumping the thread. That's a great chart. Now I want to do that for my setting. I think I will superimpose it on the map though, since my language familiars more or less correspond to geographical areas. (I think that is less true for Shadow World but the mapped part of my setting is smaller.)
It depends on the language - some of them are specific to a regional area (or even a specific ethnic group within that regional area), adn this is especially true for the old Loremaster Campaign Modules (Tanara and Mur Fostisyr, where each racial group basically had its own language). However, when you zoom out, the "main" languages tend to migrate and be tweaked and twisted regionally - this is basically what happens to the variants of Old Emer and Shay in Emer, and Rhaya in Jaiman (with Rhaya being initially a variant of the Shay language)... and all Erlin elven variants.
About Erlin: my take on it is that it is a language with much higher fluidity and variability than the other elven languages, because of the Erlin mindset. the Erlini, while technically immortal like the other elven races, are in tune with nature and live in the "now" with a much greater intensity than the Iylari, and tend to "go with the flow", adopting what works and discarding what doesn't. As a result, their language, which might have been uniform in the beginning, has been much more affected by regionalisms than the Iylar and Dyar languages. This has been reinforced by the fact that there is often very little need for literacy in the typical Erlin world, while the Iylar cultures are completely dependent on literacy (In fact, I think it would not be much of a stretch to say that the written form of Erlin is mostly used by humans, with Erlini using Iylar more readily when they want to get something written. Incidentally, since it was much simpler and "down to earth" than Iylar, it was much easier to learn for humans, which often adopted it as a 'trade' language regardless of its racial origin.
It is likely that the language of the Shuluri could have mutated in much the same way... except that it is very environment-specific and most land-based races have no use for it (that, plus the fact that Shuluri cultures are fairly isolated because of their dual home environment nature, drastically limits the geographical migration of the language and, thus, its actual variability. However, two Shuluri cultures from different parts of the world would likely have trouble understanding each other except for basic concepts - once again, the lesser emphasis on the written word would remove one of the main linguisitical anchors).
What I miss from the early Loremaster campaign books (linguisitically speaking) is the section on languages. Language is not merely vocabulary - details about sentence structure, use of modal forms, emphasis on ideological concepts, and so on, are very interesting because they help picture a culture and open a window on how they think and what is important for them. The language of the Syrkakar in the Iron Wind module was perhaps the best example of it, even if it was too short for my taste. By comparison, the linguisitic addendum in the Master Atlases were fairly bland - sure, I could pick a few words and build my own names, but it gave me nothing about the people who spoke the language, which was a shame. If that kind of section could be inserted back into campaign modules, I would be a happy dragon indeed :)
[one of the interesting side effects of the MA linguistic addendum, about the Loariki language, was that it convinced me of two things: one, that I absolutely needed to rename it - to Kinaa, as it is, and to ignore the provided lexicon which sounded awfully like 'greek for dummies' and would have made my players scoff at the very least. And second, that the Loari most certainly had constructed their own language from scratch at a much later date, having used Iylar before for a long time, and this language was designed to provide technical and scientific precision and sentence concision, which were of paramount importance for scientists and engineers and could not be achieved by the flowery, multi-modal, and layered structure of Iylar, the "language of beauties", more useful for literature, poetry, and restitution of the myriad nuances of emotions].
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