Conlangs For Your Missions

[Asis]

Hello all,

 

First off, let me say that I am very, very new to DarkMod, but have played all three of the Thief games. I am a great fan of the original trilogy, and even the newest one has its merits, but I feel it doesn't hold up to what the old three established. Dark Mod, however does, and I wish to help with modding it, though I am not at all talented with modelling or animation.

 

What I do have, however, is some knowledge of the ancient societies DM's lore is based on. I am also a worldbuilder and conlanger by hobby, and would be interested in possibly creating constructed languages for our Pagan tribes. I would like to help people with history, lore and backstory, and would very much appreciate being pointed in the right direction for that sort of thing.

[demagogue]

You want the Universe wiki articles, particularly the one on Pagans.

To answer your question though, the wiki doesn't go into too much detail, so there's quite a bit of latitude for mappers to build their vision, and it's actually up to mappers to define the world and fill in some blanks consistent with the wiki narrative.

 

I've made a conlang myself once (inspired-by mix of Choctaw, Hebrew, & Japanese, and now thinking about Mayan for the writing), and did some world building for it, so if you want to talk about it in this thread I like to talk about stuff like that.

 

I believe the pagans are meant to be loosely like the Germanic tribes to the Roman Empire, with emphasis on nature worship, old gods, and natural magic. In my campaign vision, I was thinking culturally like native Americans to distinguish them from the Thief Pagans, because I really didn't like the "looksies" manner of pidgin and thought the Native American manner of pidgin commands a lot more respect (and maybe not unrelated my conlang made for another purpose was built off Choctaw grammar). But that's just my personal vision and I think not the most consistent with canon. I don't know what a Roman-era Germanic tribe pidgin would be like (old Anglo-Saxon epic style of English?), but if you want to stick closer to the original worldbuilding paradigm you could look into that... Good luck.

[Asis]

Hi Demagogue,

 

The idea wouldn't be to fill in too many blanks. Instead. it's more like a plot hook from an RPG sourcebook — you get some details, but you're also given freedom to build on, play with and mess around with them. The idea is to maybe give something people can mess around with for fan missions, or even scrap and rewrite completely if they have an idea better than the one I came up with. The closest analogue I can think of is something from the White Wolf style of RPGs, in terms of flexibility.

[Springheel]

I've never had much success trying to write a script for our pagan vocals, specifically because I'm not great at creating pidgin English. If you could come up with something that sounds good for our pagans, that would be great.

[Asis]

Springheel, I'd love to have a go at it.

[VanishedOne]

Has a pagan language/pidgin been settled upon?

 

For the readable I'm writing just now I'm not necessarily concerned about using it (making the mission internally coherent will be more important than keeping it consistent with the Bridgeportverse, and TDM's pagans seem to be a diverse lot anyway), but if future players are going to absorb expectations that in TDM pagans sound like such-and-such, and future voice sets will exemplify that sound, it would be useful to know about that when I'm using something that sounds different.

[Springheel]

As far as I know, no progress has been made on this front. However, since pagans are made up of completely diverse and unrelated groups, I don't think consistency is something you need to worry about.

[stumpy]

I base the pagans I use on the information like this

http://paganwiccan.about.com/od/wiccaandpaganismbasics/a/elements.htm

but with some variations.