I Hate Myself and Want to Die (or, Frog-People World)

Not really.

But I did just spend an hour drafting a post only for it to disappear into the ether. All the way through, I noticed that the autosave function in Blogger was not working - presumably due to some sort of connection error. But I blithely carried on regardless, and these are the consequences. I hit 'post' and the carefully crafted post I had written simply disappeared. It is not in 'drafts'. It is not in 'posts'. It is gone for good.

To write the whole thing out again would be soul-destroying. So let's do something else instead.

I went to the zoo the other day, and took some photos. Perusing them later, I thought that, put together, they would make an interesting framework for a fantasy world along the lines of Pars Fortuna, which John Stater created by randomly generating an entirely fresh set of races-as-classes for a total revamp of B/X D&D. (I believe the full list he came up with is here.)

The idea here is simple. You know elves, dwarfs, half-orcs, halflings, kobolds, and whatnot? They're all gone. It's a blank canvas. There is going to be a totally new setting with totally new races as PC classes. Here they are:

Tolo-tolo (poison-arrow-frog people): These frog-like humanoids excrete poison, and are fearless, brazen and impetuous for all their halfling-type size. Have excellent saving throws and bonuses to AC and ranged weapons, but lack the intelligence or patience for magic.

Mbalam (lizard people): These are slow-moving unless provoked, resilient, but possessing deep knowledge of powerful forest magic. Something like a mixture of dwarf and magic-user - a tough spell-caster which advances in XP levels very slowly (or perhaps, like an OD&D elf or 2nd edition dual-class human, alternates between fighter/magic-user as it goes up through the levels). 

Ngulu (jungle hog people): These are cleric-types - useful in a fight, tough, but imbued with a spiritual strength and innate wisdom which allows them to tap into the spirit realm to commune with the Gods. 

Mbote (okapi people): Akin to an elf, these are somewhat slowly advancing, but potentially immensely powerful, fighter-mages - mysterious, stand-offish, and cruelly beautiful. 

Teenu (skink-people): Immensely fast and agile, the Teenu practice a kind of teleporting magic which allows them to perform blink-like leaps from one place to another without having to traverse physical space. They are fragile but deadly - expert backstabbers and ambushers but extremely delicate when forced into a corner.

Nioka (blue viper people): The Nioka are a race of cleric-assassins, followers of a pantheon of death gods who bestow on them great power in the practice of murder. They have very high INT and WIS bonuses, as well as saving throws, and access to various necromantic spells. But they have few HP and cannot survive for long in a fair fight.

Wolo (golden frog people): These are a blessed race, marked out by their gods with their golden-hued skin. Those who adventure are like paladins - powerful in combat, particularly against the undead, but slow to advance and rare in number. 

Mayele (green toad people): The Mayele are wise and ruminate over the deep insights which their ancestors had into the workings of the cosmos. They move slowly, eschew combat, and have few other talents, but possess vast psychic strength and many strange new spells.

Truche (cassowary people): These are strange, sad, and slow - but deadly fighters. Occupying a niche a little like a dwarf, they combine shyness and pessimism with mighty force.

It occurs to me, however, having written all of the above out, that what we are really looking at here is a world with frog-men at its centre. In this reading, frog-men are the default race, as are humans in B/X or BECMI, and therefore the Tolo-tolo are something like fighters, the Wolo are like clerics, and the Mayele are like magic-users. Then the other races are identified with a single race-as-class.

This obviously suggests a tropical, jungle/swamp environment. But it also suggests a civilisation built by different types of frog-person. This speaks to me of tree-cities, or perhaps floating swamp-cities, or even semi-under(fresh)water cities. It also speaks to me of lost ruins, jungle caves, and tiankeng sinkholes. I like it, and I recommend visiting a zoo near you with your phone and a working thumb in order to come up with something of your own. 

Say Goodbye to Felix - It's Dragon Talk

I was recently discussing with two friends, as one does, the important matter of whether a human being could communicate with a red dragon. Could a human learn a dragon's language? And could a red dragon learn a human's? More broadly, is cross-species communication in a fantasy world possible at all? 

This is both a more simple and a more complicated question than it appears. 

First, clearly cross-species communication is possible in the world which we live in. You communicate with your dog. You may even communicate with your cat - who the hell knows with them, though? Famers communicate with their cattle and sheep. Honeyguides communicate with hunter-gatherers in Africa. And so on. Clearly, the appropriate question is not whether some communication is possible between a human and a red dragon (or an orc and an elven cat, or a duergar and a desert troll, or an ogre mage and a tabaxi, or...), but whether and to what extent that communication can take place through speech.

Second, the issue may be an irrelevance if the setting operates on fairy tale logic. Nobody in a fairy tale fails to communicate with anybody else. Wherever they go, and whoever they encounter, the main character(s) can understand and be understood.

Third, there are lots of nuances. We might want to interrogate:

• The Chewbacca Problem. Chewbacca can understand what is said to him, and Han Solo can understand Chewbacca. But the two are not physically equipped to make the relevant sounds in each other's languages. That works in Star Wars, but is it plausible? Are we satisfied that it is possible to make sense of sounds linguistically if we are not able at least in theory to vocalise them? My feeling is that the answer to this question is yes, given enough time for the ear to become accustomed to those sounds, but I have no reason to assume this beyond gut feeling.
• The Conceptual Problem. Languages are not just made up of nouns. They are figurative and rooted in feelings and emotions. Consider: 'I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow.' Would that sentence make sense to a creature that does not have a concept of 'hope', such as an orc or kuo-toa may indeed not? What concepts to do orcs or kuo-toa have that we lack? 
• The Inferential Problem. Languages rely on inference, and cultural embeddedness, to work. Consider: 'I've been sitting around waiting for a response to my email for months.' Have you really been literally sitting around waiting for a response, or have you just been waiting? We all know that the turn of phrase is figurative. What about creatures which literally do not sit (because they have a snake tail, like a naga) or which do not sit when waiting? And what kind of inferences would be necessary to understand the speech of dragons, or bullywugs, or ixitxachitl? 
• The Embodiment Problem. Languages are spoken by physical beings with bodies, and this affects not just the act of speaking (we have mouths that can only produce a limited range of sounds) but also how we express ourselves. Consider 'I have a good grasp of X now.' To an animal which does grasp things, that makes sense. What about to one which doesn't? Does an elven cat understand 'grasping' and why that would mean 'understanding'? 

The interesting question for me is whether a 'common tongue' is a remotely plausible concept. Clearly, it is useful to make a game work. But how confident are we that humans, orcs, elves, dragons, giants, trolls, wraiths, demons and locathah would share enough thought processes to be able to come up with common language that contained anything other than simple nouns? It seems likely that all of those creatures could find agreement on things like what a rock is, what grass is, what death is, and so on. But would nuanced communication be achievable at all?