Racial Packages

[Nightshade]

I have been doing a lot of work on my fantasy world and wanted to have some other opinions on the way I am handling the racial packages.

I am doing all of their abilities, modifiers, etc. pretty much as in FREd, however, if I have a statistic increase, I still allow up to 10 stat points increase over the new base that is given (so a race that has a base STR of 12 can get to 22 before hitting NCM).

However, there are these "racial" skill packages in the old Fantasy HERO. I don't know what the new one will suggest, but I never really liked these. What my plan is to make each race have slightly different Everyman skills (including humans) to reflect the different racial attitudes/necessities.

My plan is to make it so that you can pretty much play any race for free (i.e. everything balances out). For the Everyman skills, I wanted to have just the same number, so that it would be "fair".

What do you think?

Nightshade

[AnotherSkip]

Sounds good nuf ta print.

i do the same thing with Kingdoms in my campaigns (ie Desnarii has TF:Sleighs and Sleds and KS: History of Desnarii which is different than the Twin Duchies with TF: (specific type of riding animal) and Concealment, which is different from all the others.

[Shaddakim]

I'm adding the same to mine during a re-tooling my campaign is going through. I'm also revamping languages by adding regional human languages over and above Common, which is now a trade language, not the default language.

On a tangental topic to racial packages, does anyone have any suggestions on naming the non-human languages something else besides Elven, Dwarven, etc. ?

Put another way, is naming the non-human languages adding realism and value to a campaign or going into needless detail?

[Old Man]

I think it's a nice touch. My usual kludge is to define Elvish as some bizarre Earthly tongue, like Azerbaijani, then use Google to develop a small lexicon for it.

[AnotherSkip]

WOW!

i forgot something on my campaign im working on!

the Computer did not have a language writeup!
(the Book did however)
OOPS!


well i use the following system for the FH campaign I have been working on for over a year now.

Languages:
There are only 9 languages in the Common Empire
They are in order of usage:
Hizar - for humans
Tradespeak - the Common type toungue
Dre - for Dralasites (non-Dralasites may only purchase one point of comprehension)
Ch'kk - For Vrusk
Sole' - For Desnarii
Seven - For Yazarians
Huntsman -found only among Glabe/Lupus Peasants
Silent Hand - Mercenary/Millitary/Ranger sign language.

That should give you some ideas.

[AnotherSkip]

Oh, yeah, to answer your question
I think it can add to an experience, handled poorly it can be a problem.

Typically most people ignore it or have Comon be the default.

[Markdoc]

Languages can add a lot to a game and SHOULD (IMO) be well worked out in advance. I went to the "trouble" of developing a laguage table for my game world showing the development of the various major languages and language groups, so I know how they all relate to one another.

Note: I wrote trouble in quote marks be cause a) it was fun and b) it took all of oh, maybe an hour...

cheers, Mark

[Old Man]

I've always wanted to whip up an app that would generate entire languages, not just words, at random. It would include things like whether the language is syllabic or alphabetic, grammatical structure, tonality, particles, as well as a basic lexicon. And in my dreams I'm even able to have the app develop the written script for the language as well.

But I will never have that kind of free time...

[Markdoc]

If I recall correctly, Fitz generated a table which he could use to generate consistent-sounding fantasy names without them being obviously stolen from an earthly culture.

I also recall a town called Soosoosoosoosoo generated using said table.... :-)

cheers, Mark

[Nightshade]

In terms of language names, I did what most languages do here on Earth, the language is named for the country:

So, for Shildaria, we have Shildarian, for Vanar, Vanaran. For flavor, I also have my world version of Latin, Arawn, which is spoken in many dialects in many countries.

I will have to come up with a language chart someday. That would be very useful for my game.

Nightshade

[mudpyr8]

The way I handle races wrt stats is as follows:

Racial averages are assigned as +/- points. So, a strong race would get +2-3 STR, while a weak one would get -2-3.

Then, every race gets a Modified Characteristics Maximum Disad. For most races this would be 0. For others, it might be -5 or -10, but only if the maxima are significantly reduced/modified. This is especially appropriate for small races, but not of much use for big races unless they are exceptionally bad in some areas. I use the age disad as a guide, and essentially guestimate.

This is a suggestion from FH, and I think it works very well. Characters still have to pay double over 20, unless the maxima are changed. The fact that it is a mandatory disad is a fair compensation, without directly giving "bonus" points that is inevitably the problem with maxima changes.

For example. I create a "strong" race with +5 STR. I then say that as a rule, char max is racial average +10. Now a character of this racial type is created to have 25 STR. This essentially costs the char a total of 15 points, whereas it should cost him 20.... he essentially got 5 points for free.

Now, a fair idea might be to "balance" this by saying the race is especially ungainly. So, -2 DEX, for a total of -6 points, which basically balances out the STR increase. However, most characters will want to buy up their DEX, especially as a fighter, so this really becomes a futile exercise, especially if the race really isn't ungainly, they just aren't particularly athletic (e.g. Dwarves).

An answer would be to instead balance the maxima, possibly include the stat increase, and leave it at that.

So, +5 STR (max 20), +0 DEX (max 18). Combined with some other maxima reductions (e.g. PRE), you could make this worth a -5 Disad, but not drastically upset the point balance of the game.

The sense I got from FH was to avoid altering maxima drastically without some compensation, but avoid paying for it as a 1-for-1 increase since that forces characters to spend points they may not necessarily want to. Increasing maxima in response to decreases is *fairly* balanced, and doesn't monkey with point costs too much.

[mudpyr8]

LANGUAGES

Well, there's the realistic way and the heroic way.

HEROIC
Establish a common tongue. Make it "easy". Every adventurer must buy it, but the common folk do not necessarily speak it.

There is essentially 1 language per major cultural group (race or ethos).


REALISTIC
There may be a couple of common tongues. Not every adventurer speaks them. The common folk probably don't unless they are merchants.

There will be as many languages as the geography creates relative to cultural groups. This can get very complicated. Many dialiects will also exist, and in some cases may actually have fully diverged into their own languages (e.g. Dutch and German).

You need to decide how important/fun it is to deal with languages.

NAMING
The language name should reflect the culture. If your elves are called elves, then their language should be elvish. If your elves are the noldar and sindar, then the elvish languages might be sindarin and noldarin, with the term "elvish" representing the language family.

This also applies to the people. What does an elf call himself? Man? Sindar? Ehman? When they came into contact with other language speakers, what was the result? Were they named by the foreigners (Germans from Germania, but the germans call themselves "dutch", reserving the term germania for greater teutonia), or did the foreigners adopt the native name as a cognate (russian from russia, and they call themselves russki). Kind of like thinking of a tomato as a vegetable when it is technically a fruit.

Just think of how the cultural contact was made, and how that might impact the name. If the meeting was peaceful, chances are the naming will be more cognate than applied.

Also, think about the point of view of your cyclopedia. Are you providing the native names of the races, or the "common" names. Is there a slang term that is used often. Fundamentally, if you want to get crazy, you need to add a name matrix from one language to the other (i.e. list "elf" in the most common languages).

BOTTOM LINE: what will be fun? Don't overdo it if your players don't care.

[Shaddakim]

Right now, vis-a-vis languages, I am using different cultural names to indicate locations those people are from. (Russian names for one group, French names for the core part of the Empire, Hebrew names for the gnomes, etc)

In order to justify this "clumping" of names, I realized each region would need a seperate language/culture. These are currently overlayed by "Common", the trade language of the Empire (it comprises most of the continent, for the moment ).

I will put together a basic language tree to show relationships and will most likely borrow heavily from the real world tree in FREd. What I do not want to do is use the same names as the real world.

Markdoc reminded me of a website that has multiple name/word generators using different scripts. I think I will go back there and see what they have. I'll post the link as soon as I can find it again. Thank you to everyone for their time and input on my language question. Your comments have sparked many ideas. I now return this thread back to its original topic - Racial Packages.

[tkdguy]

My campaign doesn't have a "common" tongue per se. There are languages that the cultured elite favor at the moment, but they're hardly universal.

Maybe it's just me, but convenient though the common tongue and racial languages may be, I find the idea over simplistic. Even if nonhumans existed in the campaign, I'd make it so a Scandinavian elf and a British elf would speak different languages and may not even understand each other. I particularly hated the alignment toungues in the original D&D and 1st Edition AD&D. I got rid of those long before TSR trashed the idea in 2nd Edition AD&D.

You could use languages like Quenya (not Noldorin, that was changed before the Silmarillion was published) and Sindarin, but I would suggest regional dialects showing subtle differences.

[mudpyr8]

The issue of a common tongue is a sticky one. Depending on which era of history you look at there have been several "common tongues".

In the Roman empire it was obviously Latin. Today it is primarily English.

Now, these were still regional, but huge regions none the less.

In my campaigns the dominant culture/power is the common tongue.

I've run games with intricate language models and for the most part players don't really care.

First, the entire party needs to communicate, with each other and the npcs, and intricate language webs make that challenging.

Second, depending on the campaign, language should be a plot device more than anything.

The nice thing about Hero is that languages are cheap, but not too cheap. So running a game where you play a linguist doesn't require too many points.

Culture is learned, and the primary mechanism for that is language. Cultures will solidify along language barriers, and that should help drive your map of the world.

How that relates to race is up to you. I prefer to separate the genotypical information from the cultural information, so that I could have, essentially, american elves and german elves that would be culturally different, but physically the same. An american elf would have more in common culturally with an american dwarf than with the german elf.

Then of course you need to consider how much of being a particular race translates into culture. If all elves have nightvision, american and german elves may share a love of night-life, celebrated in a similar fashion, that no other american races enjoy. So, how much of culture is derived from the physical, as well as how much is derived from society?

MMMM, yummy food for thought. The danger is that you make your racial/cultural/social/professional packages too complicated and intricate and no one can understand how to make a character. My recommendation is to make your "templates" as stereotypical as possible, and describe possible non-standard variants that are developed on a case-by-case.