Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Not dead, just on a break

The Frozen Kingdom will continue in a couple months when work gets less stressful.
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Thursday, November 24, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 9

Chapter 9 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.

This chapter picks up right after the end of chapter 8. Two rival gangs, The Smiths and The Guardians are preparing to battle in the Guardians' underground brewery-fortress. The party have allied with one side or the other to gain access, but the fight itself is not their concern.

Within Barreltown is rumoured to be the third of Valasir's libraries and another crucial piece to uncovering what happened to freeze Tannock in ice and what the would-be queen Zerith Amastatica is really after.

After the RP-heavy eighth chapter, this chapter swings the focus back to combat, dungeoneering, and puzzle-solving.

The Bestiary has also been updated for chapters 8 and 9.

Download

Chapter 9 - Barreltown: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

Level 4-5 characters. Estimated playing time: 2 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Monday, October 24, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 8



Chapter 8 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.
In this module the party continue their quest by traveling south into Koldar and the City of Ardan Castle. There they must deal with the locals to discover if Välásir's third library is even in the city, and where to go to find it. There's a great deal of potential side-tracking in the city, places to see, and characters to interact with.

This is the longest chapter in The Frozen Kingdom so far, and probably the longest of the entire 13-ish chapters in the whole story. The length is attributable to the large number of potential side-tracks for parties to go on as they scour the city looking for clues as to where the next library is located. Players on the direct path could be done in under an hour, whereas players who explore more or find a lot of dead-end paths will take several hours. Those dead-ends all have their own challenges and rewards, though, so I like to think of them as "optional encounters" rather than true dead-ends. DMs running this module will have to read their players and decide how big a trip to make of their time in The City of Ardan Castle.

Note: At time of publishing (Oct 24th), the bestiary has not been updated yet with blocks for NPCs from this chapter.

Download

Chapter 8 - Ardan Castle: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

Level 4 characters. Estimated playing time: 1-4 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, August 18, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 7


Chapter 7 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.

This picks up right where Chapter 6 left off, with the party heading upwards into the ruined city of Skyperch in search of where Valasir may have hidden the rest of the spell that froze the kingdom.

Download

Chapter 7 - The Ruins of Skyperch: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

Remember that the party gained a level at the end of chapter 6 but that new level should not take effect until they have taken a long rest.


Level 3-4 characters. Estimated playing time: 2 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, July 14, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.

Thus we enter the "Road Trip" part of the story.

The party must now travel to the dwarven town of Kor's Geode in search of another of Välásir’s libraries. Getting there is the easy part. Once there they must somehow convince the city's tyrranical leader to grant them access to the ruined city atop his mountain where the library is believed to be.

This also introduces the first of a series of sidequests concerning Merle Raddelle if the party chose to keep her alive and bring her along. Merle's story largely runs in parallel with the main plot as she comes to understand her powers and the world at large with the party's help. As the story progresses we will see more of these.

Download

Chapter 6 - Kor's Geode: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

This module has highly variable playtime depending on what the players choose to do in Kor's Geode. If they miss or ignore the sidequest and jump straight to a successful strategy for getting to Skyperch the chapter could be done in an hour. If they do the sidequest and choose to sneak/murder their way to a solution then it could take much longer.

Level 3 characters. Estimated playing time: 1-4 hours.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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Thursday, June 16, 2016

On Constructed Languages

Just as Tolkien gave us our modern definitions of Elves and Dwarves, he also gave us on of the best examples of fantasy constructed languages. Since the beginnings of tabletop roleplaying there has been a long tradition of GMs and world builders making up languages. I'm writing this article about my experience with the process of formally designing and building a language. I'm going to try and avoid using technical terms as much as possible.

Background

Years ago I embarked on the traditional language-construction quest to build a Drakoni language as an outshoot of my work on Drakoni culture. More recently I put some examples of romanized Drakoni words in articles on this blog.

Below is an example of formal edict written in Drakoni and Elvish (in Teredahar, Elvish is the primary language of trade, thus English is used for all Elvish writing) modeled off of the Rosetta stone.
 
The same message written in Elvish and Formal (boxy) v2 Draconic. Click for romanization.


I have used Drakoni for a few years in my normal Pathfinder group's stories. The Frozen Kingdom only has a few examples of the Drakoni language so I could have just stuck with the same version I have been using (version 2, technically). However, recently someone with a formal background in speech and linguistics joined my circle of friends. She has agreed to help rework Drakoni as a properly-modeled, internally-consistent, and usable language.

Physically Speaking

The first step was just working out what sounds a Drakoni can actually make. For Mac's concept art I described the Drakoni as having crocodile-like features. Typically dragons are drawn with shorter, more iguana-like features. Various other fractional-dragon races are portrayed with wildly differing facial structures and different kinds of tongues that impact what kinds of sounds they can make. We had to settle on the shape and position of teeth, lips, and tongue and how flexible they are. In the end we decided that:
  • A Drakoni's tongue is in-between a crocodile and an iguana. It's broad, flat, and unforked but long and flexible enough that all Drakoni can touch their noses with their tongues. They can make a wide range of tongue and throat-based sounds.
  • Their teeth are triangular, spaced out, and stand in two rows such that some sit outside of the lips when closed. This makes sounds that use the lips over the teeth like "f" and "v" impossible to cleanly make and requires using a stiffened upper lip instead of the top teeth to make sounds resembling "th". As a result, these sounds are rare and sound "lisp-y" when made.
  • Their lips aren't able to make an "O" shape. 

Evolution

Just as lifeforms change and evolve over time, so to does language. I'm assuming you know English if you're reading this (Hello, users of Google Translate) so I'm sure you know that languages pick up features over time mostly from other languages. For Drakoni, it was previously established that it evolved from an older Draconic language (no surprise there) so we started with what that older language was like.

Dragons aren't the most sociable creatures so it was probably very simplistic. Lots of hissing and growls and forceful words. This gave us an evolutionary starting point for the language of their smaller, more sociable offshoot race. Drakoni have ancestry from lizardfolk who are commonly depicted as being social, living in tribes, and doing trade. Drakoni doing similar would have evolved their language include more diverse sounds and convey more information. The swear words probably stayed close to the original Draconic, though.

Selecting Sounds

The next part is a bit arduous. I had to go through the 80-ish words that exist in v2 of the language and try to sound them out based on the newly-detailed understanding of Drakoni anatomy. This often involved sticking fingers in my mouth or holding my lips in different places to try and tease out what sounds you can make with those teeth and lips. I used the International Phoenetic Alphabet and Wikipedia's interactive sound tables to take a first pass at classifying the noises and then my linguist friend helped clean the data up.

Having clear IPA classifications meant we could now agree on how a particular string of sounds would add up to a word and how to speak words written in Drakoni. Not every language uses all of the sounds possible for its speakers to make, so we looked at anatomy again and decided that any sounds that might be possible but difficult to make are only found in loanwords taken from other languages. For example, we decided native Drakoni speech has an "n" but no "m" sound. "Magik" for instance in Drakoni is a loanword from Elvish.

At the end of this process we had 5 vowels and 28 consonant sounds. Three of the consonant sounds are made in ways that are less natural for Drakoni to make, so those are foreign sounds added to the Drakoni language over time. Knowing which sounds are common in the language and which are not is important when it comes to creating the language's vocabulary and written components.



In Part 2

Now that we know how Drakoni speak, the next step is to turn it into an actual language. In the next part I'll cover how the grammar, syntax, and writing system for Drakoni v3 were created.

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Wednesday, June 15, 2016

The Frozen Kingdom, Chapter 3 Updated

Chapter 3 of The Frozen Kingdom has been updated following playtesting.

Download
Chapter 3 - The Girl from the Glacier: Google Doc | PDF
The Frozen Kingdom Bestiary: Google Doc | PDF

Changes to this chapter were relatively light and focused on clarifying some of the exposition and balance changes to the two skill challenges presented in this episode. Most notably players with middling investigation skills are more likely to get information that is potentially incorrect rather than no information at all during the search of the city skill challenge.

The Frozen Kingdom Chapters

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