The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Señor Leetz

Quote from: Stryker25B
Normally I spend my time poking around these types of forums without ever really getting involved, but the description of your setting was enough to get me to read the entire thread, and then to join CBC.

Why thank you sir.

Quote from: Stryker25B
HOW are the leaders of present-day Grindelrath keeping magic-users in check? It's all fin and good to tell a powerful wizard "Stay in your tower- or else!" but there has to be a definite, serious threat to back up the "or else" with. And I'm just talking about the former heroes here. Obviously an evil wizard popping up here and there would be the sort of reason to call the characters from their remote guild training areas, but what about the good-aligned mage who resents being oppressed by the nobility's lies?

I'm leaning towards have the magic-users of the setting all being a part of a single college or brotherhood, that, in addition to their own dark goals, search for any potential magic users, and give them the ultimatum: Join us or die.

As for the potential good wizard, the wizards college (or whatever) will have a near monopoly on arcane knowledge. Without books and study, you simply cannot harness magic, so farmer Jim cannot say, "I want to be an adventurer and a wizard!" and do it.

As for the characters, they may be exempt from the wizard college's purge/recruitment, but they will practice their own form of magic, namely anti-magic magic.

BUT, that is just a thought. This setting has really only gelled in the last week or so as an evolution from another setting, so I'm up for anything thoughts or suggestions. I know what tone I want, but besides that, I'm still shooting from the hip.

Quote from: Stryker25B
Perhaps this sort of "he who has the most power makes the rules" scenario would fit your setting?

Yes!

Well, you could go the Dragon Age route and have a Circle of Magi that enjoys a Church-granted monopoly on the practice of magic, enforced by fanatical Templars with anti-magic capabilities. Alternatively, you could have magical ability stem from a pact with a supernatural entity, and argue that, as spirits and monsters are driven ever deeper into the wilderness, it becomes increasingly difficult to contact such creatures and gain their cooperation, resulting in a steady decline in magical activity. Witches and wizards thus live deep in the woods, because that is where their familiars feel most safe, and they are all suspected of diabolism, because devils are the only entities that actively seek out mortals to form pacts with them.

Why does magic have to have any moral significance? Why can't it simply be dangerous in the way that plutonium is dangerous? Yes, it is difficult to fathom and confers miraculous powers to those who unravel its secrets, but it also emits strange energies that derange the mind and body, and this has absolutely nothing to do with how the substance is used.

Quote from: Humabout
Ha! I get what you're saying, for sure, but I'm still uneasy jamming them into a slavic-looking/sounding language.  It might prove necessary, or I might just say the heck with it and leave it like English - god only knows how you actually pronounce the words.  For now, though, I'll just use my shorthand (it's short for me; I made keyboard hotkeys for all of those symbols in Word).

More words!

[spoiler]
Fire - huŋ
Hot/To Heat - dri
Home - fiǩ
Town/Settlement - źair
Path/Walk - daul
Mill - tauǩiŋ
Wind - đu
Rock - kair
Stone - łeśe
Gold - fët
Silver - čïrüž
Tin - jaiź
Copper - fauďün
Iron - ňivük
Farm - gumin
Market/Trading/Meet - taul
Bear - seź
Owl - sirü
Dear - süźdrä
Wolf - vloźla
Boar - kïžňä
Jay - čëś
Seal - maukan
Oak - haz
Aspen - faułta
Spruce - trëšä
Pine - rïmǩjëv
Mine - mïjëtäz
Water Mill - źëtauǩiŋ
Windmill - đutauǩiŋ
Orchard - sežgumin
Mill Town - tauǩ
Walled Town - riǩtäz
Castle - śüriǩ
[/spoiler]

Are concatenated vowels like au and ai diphthongs, and if so, how are they pronounced?

Quote from: Humabout
Thank you for the applause and suggestion.  I can totally understand what you're getting at.  My reasoning for not doing just that immediately is mostly because this is initially intended to create names for places in the world.  For that, I really only need a shorthand for the sound that I can easily type and read, and hopefully, transliterate into something that other English speakers can read.  For flavor's sake, a unique orthography would add tons to be certain, and I'll put that on my to-do list.  But for now, I need names for fjords, cliffs, caves, cities, straits, etc.

Of course, once I get all of that hashed out, along with enough syntax and grammar to cobble together place names, I'll tackle the orthography and make a really spiffy looking map, and eventually, other extra-spiffy handouts.

With regard to a simple phonetic English, that's sort of my goal, but some of the phonems don't have standard english representations.  Even if I use Ch, Sh, and Th, there's nothing to represent the S in "vision," the TH in "then," or the N in "onion."  And there's no good example of an unvoiced velar fricative or dark L in english; those would require their own symbols.  I'd love some suggestions for them, however.  My other stumbling block is where two syllables meet, such as wrods like athok, which looks like ath-ok, but might be at-hok.  What opions are there to avoid such ambiguity?  This was my reasoning in giving each phonem its own symbol, and just using diacritics to expand my symbol library.  Of course, all of these reasons are just arguments for a unique orthography, as you've suggested....

Japanese romaji utilizes an apostrophe to resolve ambiguous syllables (or, more precisely, moras). For example, the name Jun'ichirō is parsed ju-n-i-chi-ro-u, and not ju-ni-chi-ro-u. So one might have ket'ha and ketha, mad'ha and madha, nis'ha and nisha, etc.

Quote from: HumaboutI wonder how transliterating that into a more English-looking script would apear.  It'd definitely lose its Eastern European look, but would it end up just looking like gibberish?

How about a Polish-influenced orthography:

ï > í
ü > ú
ä > á
ë > é

č > cz
ď > dz
đ > d'
ǩ > ch
ň > nj
ŋ > ng
š > sz
ŧ > t'
ž > rz

So čëňüǩ (just a random word I made up) becomes czénjúch; kaďä (ditto) becomes kadzá; đižëš, d'irzesz; etc.

And a spoken sample?

Quote from: sparkletwist
Your orthography gives a strong "Slavic" feel to your region. If that was intentional, then it has accomplished its goal-- but if your audience is English speakers, they may not have any idea how to pronounce your placenames. Really, it's often hard enough to do that with just the unadorned 26 letters of the alphabet.

I was going to say it looked vaguely Hungarian, but it definitely has a broadly Eastern European flavor to it.

Quote from: Humabout
I didn't say I intended to develop the various languages independantly and then use the comparative method across them all.  I'm looking at making the one local language and then using the opposite of those sound laws you mentioned to generate its parent language.  Then use the parent language to make other languages in the region.  I could later do this again to the parent language to get a protoparent language for the continent.

Ah, my bad. I misread what you had posted above. Are you familiar with the zompist boards? The owner wrote The Language Construction Kit and The Sound Change Applier. Very useful for conlanging.

Truth be told, you're probably better off devising the parent language first, and then evolving the daughter languages. Doing it the other way around requires you to essentially reconstruct the parent language using the comparative method, which is...problematic, if the history of Proto-Indo-European scholarship is any indication.

An easy way I've found to construct a (family of) naming language(s) is to settle on the phonology (set of available sounds) and phonotactics (patterns by which sounds are assembled to form words) of the parent language, then generate a set of roots. A compact list of roots can be extracted from Sona's table of radicals. Once you've compiled a set of roots in the parent language, you can derive new words and then mutate them according to various "sound laws" to produce cognates in the daughter languages.

Why not call them genies?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinn#Etymology_and_definitions

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_%28mythology%29

In my own setting, I divide spirits into three categories, characterized by their attitudes toward mortals: (benevolent) angels, (malevolent) demons, and (ambivalent) genies. Fairies, totems, elementals, and other such entities are all genies under this schema.

The Conlanger's Library.

Quote from: The_Weave05I have a setting that I've been developing for several years now thats based off a sort of Jungian dreamscape. Its one of my prime enjoyments because I have to purposely think outside of the regular scheme of how things might work, which is surprisingly tough. One of my latest thoughts regarded the "gods" of the setting, which are essentially the physical manifestation of cultural memes. In other words, they're created from humanoid kind's collective thoughts. It would take an immense amount of collective thought to give a meme a physical appearance (to prevent there from being millions of memes for every small group of like-minded thinkers), but then I wondered: why should this stop at memes?

So from there I've been contemplating the repercussions of allowing whatever is collectively believed to be, well, made true over time (like the gods). For instance, because the vast majority of sailers believe in the tales of the kraken, the kraken thus becomes a real thing.

I've been giving this some thought and I don't think I can work it all out on my own without creating some guidelines... I understand that things can get crazy real fast with this idea, but it nonetheless interests me.

So I ask, would anyone be willing to help me with this? Give some scenarios where this might be interesting, or where it might get crazy? This isn't set in stone, but I see it as a sort of creative thought exercise for myself. What do you guys and gals think?

This sounds very much like the metaphysics from Mage: The Ascension.

Orgone. One could attach the suffix -ule (from Latin -ulus/-ula/-ulum, a common diminutive ending) to produce orgonule, meaning a unit of orgone.