Hi All
Yes, it's that part of the week again - Question time!
Skip the quote to get to the question!I've put the background in a quote so you can easily pass it by. It'll be incredibly boring for most - even I almost fell asleep writing it!
I use the Sean Wijbrandus character sheet. I know the fav is Jonathan Dale's sheet but thanks to the Mac's version of Excel not liking the macros, I'm unable to step the character development to the next level. Sean's allowed me to do that (simply because it had levels as columns so I can keep going level by level for my player characters).
I've heavily edited this sheet to suit my purposes specifically to use for my campaign and my players. I've learned quite a lot (more than I wanted to) of Excel in the process and I've since added the new CC Armour by the Piece rules and this week, I also added in all the player characters and stats for all the races listed in the Races & Cultures book. I may add this beast to the Vault (but I may start it from scratch as some of the current parts of the sheet are manually fudged but I can do them a lot easier now and most of it would just mean copying some of the tables over anyway).
What I haven?t initially added in correctly to the Races are the Shadow World languages (although I've simply converted them to Sean's original languages) - all of the race's other info have been correctly reproduced.
The reason I've said the above is because I've gone through a lot of trouble to edit the sheet this far, it seems silly to not finish it properly! And the bit I'm missing is the Shadow World available languages (although I've just bought a cheap first edition Master Atlas which may tell me more) and the languages from the Races & Culture's book.
So before I started to edit (or start to create my new Excel sheet from scratch) I wanted to get it right.
The Essence Companion and the Mentalism Companion have different rules for languages to the core RMFRP rules. I've not read all the Nomenist info as we've no Essence users in our party currently but I've gone through some of the other rules that effect all characters like learning languages. I'm liking the Language Tiers (p36) as well as the Professional Languages (which it lists the specific Essence practitioner's discipline but I'm going to add more for other pertinent professions like Thieves and for our campaign world I'm adding more for the different Guilds too). Magical Languages (same page) also need adding for the spell users to get more power to their spells. The Nomenist's skill in the Primal Tongue is based on the Tier's learned in the other languages.
The Mentalist Companion splits languages into different categories which group similar languages together with the root language being the category. It also adds a very nice Language Development chart (page 58) which looks at the different language development of a culture and cross references it with how isolated they are.
I like all of the above ... but Im not sure how to integrate the Mentalism's language rules and the Essence's language rules. The way it's going, it may need a huge excel sheet just for languages.
- How do other people deal with Language in their game - does anyone use either of the 2 new approaches or do you stick with the core RMFRP (or RMSS) language rules?
- How many 'Magical Languages' do you use?
- How many 'Professional Languages' do you use?
- What grouping do you use for the available languages if you use the Mentalist Companion's root language categories?
- Are all the different race's languages of Shadow World covered in the Races & Cultures book or are there more to add?
If I'm going to submit this to the Vault I may have to leave the communications category blank to allow people to use whatever options they want to use but any insight on the above topics would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.
