Regions & Languages Tool
Table of Contents
The Regions & Languages tool is mainly used in two ways: Character Creation and NPCs interactions.
Character Creation #
During character creation, you will choose a region and a realm or tribe. This will provide you with details about the society, pantheon, native language, and its associated scripts. If there are multiple native languages available, they will be displayed below the first one. Additionally, languages that are part of the same family as the primary language will be listed on the right, offering a bonus if chosen as secondary languages. You will also see listed, just below the native language, the languages for which you get a regional bonus. This information becomes particularly relevant when it comes time to allocate skill development points, as it appears within the corresponding area of the associated window.
So let’s say you are creating a character from the Orbáal Kingdom, you see that his native language is Orbáaler and that the regional languages that he has boosts for are Járin and Hârnic. You can also see Hârnic in the same-family boosts on the right, so the languages choices might look something like this.
NPCs Interaction #
Another use of the this tool is when a player character encounters a NPC and language might be an issue. Say one of your PC named Tovâr, who is a scholar from Chélemby, arrives at a port in Orbáal on Hârn. Tovâr wants to ask a longshoreman for directions. Tovâr speaks Chéler with a ML of 63. First you set the language that Tovâr speaks in the lower left part of the tool.
Then you select the Hârn region and the Orbáal realm. This tells you that the longshoreman speaks Orbáaler, which is a language that Tovâr does not have a skill for.
But this also shows that there is mutual intelligibility between their respective languages. The longshoreman has M3 for Tovâr’s Chéler while Tovâr has M2 for Orbáaler. Looking at the table on the right we see that a longshoreman probably has a language index of 3-5, so with M3 mutual intelligibility this would bring the index down to 0-2 for a rather limited conversation if they were to speak Chéler.
On the other hand Tovâr has an index of 6 so M2 brings it down to 4. We see that Tovâr can express himself in Orbáaler just as well as the longshoreman, but probably with a noticeable accent (depending on ELO, see page 77). Tovâr can start asking his questions without a problem!