Tuala Morn Discussion

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Very cool. What's that celtic-style font you're using for the header?

 

It's called Gaeilge2, and you should be able to find it for free with a Googling. I did play with the character scale and spacing, so the font doesn't have quite the same lovely narrow look "out of the box." I was inspired by the heading font in the book for that.

[Steve Long]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

The header font in the book, for those who are interested, is called Alba (or sometimes Alba Text); it's available from the Scriptorium (http://www.fontcraft.com/csa/fontcraft.php) as part of their general package of Celtic fonts. (For that matter, they have a lot of great fonts in general.)

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

The header font in the book' date=' for those who are interested, is called Alba (or sometimes Alba Text); it's available from the Scriptorium (http://www.fontcraft.com/csa/fontcraft.php) as part of their general package of Celtic fonts. (For that matter, they have a lot of great fonts in general.)[/quote']

 

Nice stuff. I just wish I had that kind of money to drop on fonts or anything else at the moment...

[Steve Long]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Yeah, Scriptorium fonts aren't cheap, but they are often worth the money. We use some other fonts from there, like (IIRC) Vafthrudnir, which is the cover font on the FHGs.

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Yeah' date=' Scriptorium fonts aren't cheap, but they are often worth the money. We use some other fonts from there, like (IIRC) Vafthrudnir, which is the cover font on the FHGs.[/quote']

 

We'll see. I'm a week and a half from an interview for a job in Britain that would, along with being a lot of fun, make me three or four times richer than my current adjunct professorship. The fonts may go on the wish list...

[teh bunneh]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

The header font in the book' date=' for those who are interested, is called Alba (or sometimes Alba Text); it's available from the Scriptorium (http://www.fontcraft.com/csa/fontcraft.php) as part of their general package of Celtic fonts. (For that matter, they have a lot of great fonts in general.)[/quote']

 

Holy frijoles! That Celtic Spirals font is something I've been looking for for a long time! Thanks Steve!

 

Bill.

(Now I just have to talk the little bunny into letting me use the credit card...)

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Like rock'n'roll, this thread will never die!

 

Another tidbit I cooked up. I mean this file to contain any house rules I work out for a TM campaign, but right now all that's in it is some thoughts on figuring einech for PCs (and selected NPCs, I'm sure).

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Very true. I think that offers some intriguing possibilities for setting design for gaming' date=' if you pay attention to it. You can create all kinds of social and cultural differences in what we (as Americans) would consider a [i']very[/i] small area if you pay attention. You don't necessarily need a world the size of Greyhawk or Ambrethel.

 

Modern American concepts of appropriate national scale are very much shaped by the innovations in transportation technology over the last hundred and fifty years: steam engines, railroads, internal combustion, aircraft. The vast majority of human historical interactions have occurred within relatively tiny areas, reachable in reasonable time on horseback at best, often only on foot depending on the landscape. Truly large nations and empires have generally required massive engineering feats to establish a thorough, reliable road network, as with the Romans, and/or highly organized dedicated communication systems, such as the Mongol horse-messenger service.

 

Heck, the whole action of The Lord of the Rings covers an area equivalent to a fraction of Western Europe.

 

EDIT: as a point of comparison to Steve's comment on game world design, the famous Talislanta setting packs an incredible array of nations, races, landscapes and climates onto a continent barely 1500 miles by 1000 miles.

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Modern American concepts of appropriate national scale are very much shaped by the innovations in transportation technology over the last hundred and fifty years: steam engines' date=' railroads, internal combustion, aircraft. The vast majority of human historical interactions have occurred within relatively tiny areas, reachable in reasonable time on horseback at best, often only on foot depending on the landscape. Truly large nations and empires have generally required massive engineering feats to establish a thorough, reliable road network, as with the Romans, and/or highly organized dedicated communication systems, such as the Mongol horse-messenger service.

 

About the only thing I think you missed is water travel, which both speeds and cheapens travel and can significantly modify the exchange and communications picture for even small-scale societies...but even then, long-distance contact simply can't be as frequent or as intensive as communications and transportation have allowed over the last 150 years or so.

 

For a low fantasy world, this means that intensive interactions across a vast geographical area may actually be "unrealistic," although all bets are off as you move toward a high fantasy setting.

 

Again, I calculate Tuala Morn as about 850 miles east-west and 600 miles north-south. That's bigger than, say, France, but doesn't come close to the total land area occupied by Celtic speakers during the Iron Age...and I'm not convinced that we shouldn't be talking about an "Iron Age temperate European interaction sphere" rather than Caesar's Celts and Germans anyway. The setting is small enough to seem credibly "realistic" while being amply large enough to be well-supplied with things for PCs to do.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

About the only thing I think you missed is water travel' date=' which both speeds and cheapens travel and can significantly modify the exchange and communications picture for even small-scale societies...but even then, long-distance contact simply can't be as frequent or as intensive as communications and transportation have allowed over the last 150 years or so.[/quote']

 

I was subsuming fast, reliable water travel under "steam engines," although sail improved marvelously after the invention of the compass and astrolabe to allow navigation out of sight of land. Doesn't help a lot inland, though.

 

I fully agree with the rest of your post.

[L. Marcus]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Again' date=' I calculate Tuala Morn as about 850 miles east-west and 600 miles north-south. That's bigger than, say, France, but doesn't come close to the total land area occupied by Celtic speakers during the Iron Age...and I'm not convinced that we shouldn't be talking about an "Iron Age temperate European interaction sphere" rather than Caesar's Celts and Germans anyway. The setting is small enough to seem credibly "realistic" while being amply large enough to be well-supplied with things for PCs to do.[/quote']. . . As a pro -- what was the difference between the Celts and Germans?

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

. . . As a pro -- what was the difference between the Celts and Germans?

 

Pre-Roman era, pretty minor, about the same as between Gauls and Britons. IRRC they were all the same ethnicity; the Teutons had not yet migrated in numbers south from Scandinavia to displace the Celts from the German region.

 

EDIT: There were encounters around the first century BC between Romans and early "proto-Germans" or Celt-German mixed peoples, such as the Cimbri: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cimbri

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Pre-Roman era, pretty minor, about the same as between Gauls and Britons. IRRC they were all the same ethnicity; the Teutons had not yet migrated in numbers south from Scandinavia to displace the Celts from the German region.

 

EDIT: There were encounters around the first century BC between Romans and early "proto-Teutons" or Celt-Teuton mixed peoples, such as the Cimbri: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cimbri

 

Yeah, what he said.

Catch the time period right and most of continental europe was some flavor of celt. Some of the best artistic celtic imagry we have comes from Denmark, f'instance, and the earliest image we have that could be considered a "Horned God" depiction comes from a neolithic cave painting in France.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

This Wikipedia page includes an illustration showing the distribution of the Celtic peoples, about a third of the way down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celt

[Steve Long]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

what was the difference between the Celts and Germans?

 

The former can play basketball in Boston.

[Markdoc]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

. . . As a pro -- what was the difference between the Celts and Germans?

 

They were similar, but culturally and ethnically different groups. There were many different celtic tribes, but they had linguistic and cultural linkages which they acknowledged even at the time, while regarding the Germanic tribes as foreign. It's generally thought that "Germanic" comes from the proto-celtic word "ger" meaning beside or neighbour, while names for remnant celtic areas suchs as wales and walesia comes from a proto-german word "walitch" meaning foreign.

 

The Celts had over-run most of Europe and the Balkans by the last 500 years BC. To add to confusion, by the time of Rome's rising power what's now Germany was in fact full of celts, so the Germannii are in fact celts

 

However, classical civilsations knew of Germans and regarded them as different from the celts: Strabo and Posidinus both write of them as different peoples in the first century BC. The Romans did the same. The Germans, based on linguistic and grave-find studies, originated in the area around the Baltic and southern Scandinavia and started to expand into Southern Europe in the period 300-200 BC, coming into contact with the Romans around 1 BC. As they did, they acquired some trapping of celtic and roman culture, but remained culturally distinct. As Roman power collapsed the germanic people, expanded into Europe over-running France, Spain, Italy Britain and (yes!) parts of North Africa. Celtic culture was eventually either suppressed or pushed to the margins (Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Britanny, Celtiberia, etc, etc).

 

cheers, Mark

[Curufea]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

I've always thought of the proto-Germans as Goths.

[James Gillen]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

I'd actually heard that Celts had gotten as far as Asia Minor (modern Turkey), and that one of the provinces there was called "Galatia" in honor of the Gauls (Celts).

 

JG

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Pre-Roman era, pretty minor, about the same as between Gauls and Britons. IRRC they were all the same ethnicity; the Teutons had not yet migrated in numbers south from Scandinavia to displace the Celts from the German region.

 

EDIT: There were encounters around the first century BC between Romans and early "proto-Germans" or Celt-German mixed peoples, such as the Cimbri: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cimbri

 

I'd modify that answer; there's a good reason to argue that group identities during the Iron Age weren't really "ethnic" in the first place. Ethnicity as usually defined in anthropological circles develops in an environment of competition and conflict. A good example is the ethnic concept of "Native American," or whichever synonym is preferred; it would have no reason to exist if there were no "other" (European-Americans) against which it could be contrasted. There was a brief, shining moment when at least a Gallic ethnicity might have developed: the Roman conquest. Caesar's remarks about the danger of a Gaul united in spirit seems to indicate that he was afraid of exactly that. But he won, and the opportunity didn't really come to fruition.

 

But Simon James develops such arguments better in The Atlantic Celts than I should bore you by doing here. Other than that, basically, you're right. No matter how much Caesar wants to draw a boundary along the Rhine and say that Celts or Gauls are on one side and Germans are on the other, it just doesn't work. Rivers may make good political boundaries, but they never were very good cultural boundaries in the first place; they promote interaction rather than discouraging it. There probably were linguistic differences, but language is only one tool that can be (not must be) used in ethnic constructions. Caesar's claim that Germans only herded animals and didn't grow crops is simple nonsense when one looks at the archaeology. (And Caesar repeats the same bit of nonsense in distinguishing between his alleged continental immigrants living on the coast of Britain and the "indigenous" people in the interior.) It's fair enough to say that the further north one goes in Europe, the less political and economic hierarchy is visible, but economic and political development aren't necessarily the whole of culture. What I see is a broad continental "palette" of elite culture--which chiefly aristocracies in different places worked with to differing degrees according to local taste and economic means. It's not totally different from the Middle Ages in this respect: German, French, and English feudalism were not identical, nor did the aristocracies of those countries even necessarily speak the same language except when diplomacy called for it. But you can recognize the trappings and values of the medieval church and aristocracy wherever you go to one degree or another, because elites all over a continent found them useful in maintaining and expressing their power. It can create a misimpression of uniformity if you look no further, but in fact it masks tremendous variability.

 

Enough blather, though. The reality as I see it is that Celts and Germans weren't very different in a lot of ways...except when they were.

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

I'd actually heard that Celts had gotten as far as Asia Minor (modern Turkey)' date=' and that one of the provinces there was called "Galatia" in honor of the Gauls (Celts).[/quote']

 

I don't know that it was in their honor--the term derives from the Greek Galatae, which is congnate with the Latin Gallae (Gauls) and probably derives from an Indo-European root meaning "stranger" or "enemy." Probably nobody would have called themselves something like that. But yes, there was a Galatia around Ankara in Turkey, which was settled by Celtic speakers in 278 BC. The Galatians made themselves a huge pain in the arse for neighboring kingdoms because they kept up the habit of raiding and hiring themselves out as mercenaries for most of a hundred years before the Romans managed to smack them down hard enough to make them stop (after that, it was usually just the Romans hiring them as mercenaries). In fact, you'll even find them in the New Testament, although the Letter to the Galatians tells you little about their origins.

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

I've always thought of the proto-Germans as Goths.

 

That's also the consensus among people writing books with titles like The Early Germans (Malcolm Todd). There's often some acknowledgement that at least some of the people Caesar calls Germans might have been Germanic speakers, but even the word "German" may have Celtic rather than Germanic linguistic roots. But as far as people (or at least migratory elites and warrior retinues) who provide the foundations for the medieval Germanic states, you're right, that's the Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Invisigoths, and all their lot. (Not to be confused with Franks, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Alemanni, etc., etc., all of whom were also Germanic-speaking...God, this ancient group identity thing gets complicated!)

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

That's also the consensus among people writing books with titles like The Early Germans (Malcolm Todd). There's often some acknowledgement that at least some of the people Caesar calls Germans might have been Germanic speakers' date=' but even the word "German" may have Celtic rather than Germanic linguistic roots. But as far as people (or at least migratory elites and warrior retinues) who provide the foundations for the medieval Germanic states, you're right, that's the Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Invisigoths, and all their lot. (Not to be confused with Franks, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Alemanni, etc., etc., all of whom were also Germanic-speaking...God, this ancient group identity thing gets complicated!)[/quote']

 

Not to mention the Perky Goths, Mopey Goths, Emo Goths, Witchy Goths, Cybergoths...

 

I start gotta hang around more normal folk again,

 

 

 

like historians

 

 

or reenactors.

 

This creature of the night thing occasionally gets old....

[EvilDrPuma]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

Not to mention the Perky Goths, Mopey Goths, Emo Goths, Witchy Goths, Cybergoths...

 

I start gotta hang around more normal folk again,

 

Nah. None of the interesting people are normal.

[James Gillen]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

In fact' date=' you'll even find them in the New Testament, although the Letter to the Galatians tells you little about their origins.[/quote']

 

Well, that's the most familiar reference.

 

JG

[L. Marcus]

Re: Tuala Morn Discussion

 

That's also the consensus among people writing books with titles like The Early Germans (Malcolm Todd). There's often some acknowledgement that at least some of the people Caesar calls Germans might have been Germanic speakers' date=' but even the word "German" may have Celtic rather than Germanic linguistic roots. But as far as people (or at least migratory elites and warrior retinues) who provide the foundations for the medieval Germanic states, you're right, that's the Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Invisigoths, and all their lot. (Not to be confused with Franks, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Alemanni, etc., etc., all of whom were also Germanic-speaking...God, this ancient group identity thing gets complicated!)[/quote']. . . I thought it had beenrejected by the historical community, but it appears the Goths might actually have originated in Sweden -- at the time of their archeological appearance at the mouth of the Wistula, there was a discernible depopulation of Ostrogothia.