Mi ando xunyam fo showxa langbelta

Because I can't ever make things easy for myself, I've started running a second RPG campaign.

It's a sci-fi game this time, using The Expanse RPG rules and in that setting (albeit without any connection to the TV show or books), so it's a nice change of pace on the front—and it makes it harder to reuse any of the plot beats or influences from my 13th Age campaign, which is slso useful because it's for three of the same party members.

One of my favourite things in The Expanse is langbelta, the creole spoken by the inhabitants of The Belt and the Outer Planets. While the novels have just used a slap-dash approach of mixing words from various languages, the TV show hired a lingust to create an actual creole, with syntactical and grammatical rules governing it.

And because, as mentioned above, I can't ever make things easy for myself, I decided to learn how to speak it to give my in-game Belter characters a bit more flavour.

When I was studying French for A-Level, I found myself thinking in French during classes because that was easier for my brain than the two-step process of thinking of a thing in English and having to search for the words in French. I'm doing this again now with a constructed language designed for a science fiction TV show, and it's fun.

I'm noticing myself translating my thoughts, random sentences that other people say, TV dialogue, books… almost everything I'm encountering gets an internal langbelta pass.

Which is how I ended up translating the lyrics to The House of the Rising Sun into langbelta. I had to use English words for a couple of things that don't have official translations, as well as coin a couple of new compound words, and singing along take a little creativity, but it is more-or-less possible.

Da Imbombo da Sowng da Leva

Desh imbobo ere Seteshang Erosh
Imim du nem da Sowng da Leva
Unte im finyish du suchok fo walowda walowda beratna
Unte Got, mi fosho wang

Matna mi ta básengwala
Im ta xalte gut da *dzhing da belú da nuva mi
Papa mi ta *kasínyowala
Ere Seteshang Erosh

Deting kasínyowala du mowteng
Im bera kaxa ere kapawu
Unte detim im xush im bera
Detim im ando beve

O matna, showxa málimang tolowda
Fo na du lik mi finyish du
Na du livit wit papeka unte terístiting
Ere da Imbobo da Sowng da Leva

Mi tenye wang lek ere da seteshang
Da owta ere kapawu
Mi ando go bek fo Seteshang Erosh
Fo leta-go mi fongi fode

Desh imbobo ere Seteshang Erosh
Imim du nem da Sowng da Leva
Unte im finyish du suchok fo walowda walowda beratna
Unte Got, mi fosho wang

Or, back to English...

The Hole the Sun the Raise

There-exists (a) hole in/on Eros Station
(Non-specific third-person-plural) make name the Sun the Raise
And it (perfect aspect) makes problems for many many brothers
And God, I (certain-opinion) ∅ one

My mother (past) ∅ clothes-person
She (past) keep good the jean(s) the blue the new mine
My father (past) ∅ casino-person
In/on Eros Station

The-thing-that casino-person has need (for)
It ∅ just box in/on ship
And that-time-when he happy is only
That-time-when he ∅ (contibnuous aspect) drink

Oh mother(s), speak-to small-person(s) all-yours
To not do like I (perfect aspect) do
Not to live with sin and sad-things
In the Hole the Sun the Raise

I have one leg in/on the station
The other in/on (a) ship
I (continuing aspect) go back to Eros Station
To take-away me from-here to-there¹

There-exists (a) hole in/on Eros Station
(Non-specific third-person-plural) make name the Sun the Raise
And it (perfect aspect) makes problems for many many brothers
And God, I (certain-opinion) ∅ one

Since langbelta is a "zero-copula" languaue—it lacks a "to be" verb—I've used ∅ in the translation above to represent where, in English, that would go.

¹ The langbelta phrase "leta-go [X] fongi fode" is somewhat idiomatic, used mostly to mean "arrested" in the sense of the cops dragging you away, never to be seen again. "Wear that ball and chain" is similarly idiomatic for being trapped, in this case willingly, which I think I've managed to keep intact by making this reflexive.

13th Age

I'm trying to write an adventure (or actually, several) for a new tabletop RPG campaign that's going to start in a couple of months, and I am struggling.

My issues stem, I think, from how different the new system, 13th Age, is from the game I finished running last week, Monster of the Week. Where MotW is extremely light and relies heavily on improv, 13th Age is much closer to D&D's school of thought, with much more stuff to track moment-to-moment, especially once combat starts. The notes required for an entire arc in MotW feel like they'd barely be sufficient to cover a single scene in 13th Age.

While it should be easy enough to adapt the approach that worked for Monster of the Week into any other roleplaying system, in practice I'm finding it hard not to take things in a rules-heavy direction, with pages and pages of stuff written up.

Monster of the Week's missions - called "mysteries" - are largely self-contained and driven entirely by the players' investigations. The most amount of planning in a mystery is writing the six-point "countdown" of events that would happen without the players' involvement. Each location and character only needs a name and a role to indicate their involvement. I added a personality trait and "what this person knows" to my bystanders - a couple of lines, total, and almost no prepared dialogue.

Compare that to the eleven pages of stuff I've written for the first adventure in 13th Age - and that's not even all of it finished yet! I've got sketches of scenes and characters and places that would be more than enough to run with in Monster of the Week that I feel compelled to flesh out for this game. Monster of the Week's contemporary setting helps, as there's often a common real-world or pop culture reference for what a trailer park or a military base or someone's living room looks like, but a fantasy game demands (it seems) a level of ornate and detailed description that quite frankly I'm not sure my writing skills are up to.

Of course, it could just be a matter of the tools I'm using. Monster of the Week's lightweight setup lent itself perfectly to Trello boards, with columns to group cards for locations, bystanders and the monsters - but there's a separation between roleplay and combat in any initiative-driven that makes it too complex for Trello. Google Docs has been okay for making notes and blocking out the rough timeline for an adventure, but its layout encourages linearity, and I'm concerned it'll be difficult to jump between sections in the heat of a fight.

Hmm. Suddenly, I'm worried that I'm going to end up writing my own system to store everything.

No Magic, No Gods

One of the limitations I've put on this Fate campaign - really the only D&D staple that I'm disallowing - is that there is no magic in the world, and the Gods (if they exist) do not make their presence felt in daily life.

By and large that's not a major mechanical issue - you still hit things with swords the same way, and a religious character's motivations won't even change that much. It's just that his chosen deity isn't going to directly smite targets as a result.

But where it's led me to something of a dead end is in dungeons.

In your typical fantasy setting, an ancient temple or crypt is a tempting target for a PC of any alignment - magical items and the chance to slay a lich are tough rewards to pass up, whether you want to rid the world of his evil or steal it for yourself.

Without that supernatural element, it's proving difficult to find realistic non-meta reasons for these crypts even existing in the first place, let alone motivating players to bother delving into a mineshaft for the promise of... money? Being nice people?

In the end, money's probably going to have to suffice as a carrot on the campaign stick, at least to begin with. I'm hoping this experiment lasts long enough for the stakes to get raised a bit, giving the characters less self-absorbed reasons to get into the spirit of things.

World building

For years now, I've been trying to write an RPG setting for an on-again off-again group I've played with since the Realtime Worlds days. We played mostly D&D4e, but since starting up again we've played the start of a Dragon Age campaign and a couple of D&D Next games¹.

I'd been inspired to put this thing of mine together by a map I found online, from a published setting called Freeport. I'd originally envisioned something closer to a Grand Theft Auto mission system than the usual linear(-ish) tabletop quest progression, with the whole thing taking place in one city rather than the far-reaching adventures we'd previously played.

But then Realtime disappeared and we stopped playing for a while, so I put it on the back burner, occasionally having flashes of inspiration about the character and setting I wanted to put together.

The Dragon Age game we played put the idea back in my head, though; and when I found the Fate system, I was hooked on the idea of trying it out. Then last night was the first installment of our new D&D Next game, in a setting written (I believe) by the DM, which has really given me a kick to try and wrangle this thing into a usable state.

It's bloody hard, though - even though I'm building on top of the Freeport lore that already exists, there's a lot about the setting I want to change or just remove entirely. For starters, I want to kick it down the road a few centuries to more of an early-Victorian era rather than the Elizabethan age of pirates. I'm also ripping out magic (almost) entirely.

I'm still not sold on multiple player races; given the diversity of cultures in the real world, Humans alone seem like they should still offer plenty of character options. Though I do like the idea of amphibious Elves, for some reason - I want to split them between freshwater and seawater varities, like river and sea dolphins. And my first ever 4e character was Dragonborn, so I kind of have a soft spot for those.

What sold me on the Fate system is that it's much less roll-reliant than 4e was; I'm a notoriously low roller, and a shift to a mechanic that not only minimises the use of dice but also generally assumes success (with rolls determining the extent to which you succeed or face unforseen consequences) holds a lot of appeal.

There's also a lack of complicated stats to track; you get bonuses to certain skills, you have stunts that allow you to add more bonuses to those skills in certain situations, and you have character Aspects, which are like backstory hooks that can be either beneficial or a hindrance to your character's goals.

It seems a little more roleplay-heavy than the action focus of 4e, but the Dragon Age game got me into my character's head (disturbingly enough) more than any other game we'd played before, so I'm not as terrified by the idea as I used to be.

Still, coming up with an entire world is a daunting task. I'm hoping my enthusiasm for the system will drive me to actually get it together this time. The last game I ran was a 4e campaign that I now realise was a horrible railroading effort, so hopefully the move to a more collaborative system will let me relinquish control a bit.

I'm further in the process than I ever have been before. I have a proper notebook and everything, with colour-coded entries and postits of additional information (and rough NPC work). I have a broad sketch of the story planned out (to a point), and already having a city map to plan around means I don't have to come up with loads of new locations.

The next step is to try and write some actual encounters - figure out how the story starts, how the characters get pulled into it, and who's trying to do what on the NPC side. I'm really keen for it not to be a simple "here is the one big bad guy, go stop him" plot, but I've also got to keep in mind that I've never done anything like this before and maybe I should just start small.

¹ We're hopefully going to cycle between them; the Dragon Age game was really fun, and the arc we've played culminated in my character slaughtering most of a village, two other PCs being killed by the city guards and the fourth party member hunting me through a forest in the dead of night before I managed to kill him (I was left with one hit point).