Backstage: Kobolding notes
May 9, 2015 1:22:19 GMT
Post by lurkingkobold on May 9, 2015 1:22:19 GMT
Mostly for my own reference, but I figure it's also polite to have a cheatsheet for the weird stuff I'm doing and can't explain in character. Spoilers ahoy!
This character is a kobold from a basically-vanilla Dwarf Fortress world with my own not-very-fleshed-out magic system grafted on. She doesn't have a name, though she wouldn't mind using one if someone brought up the possibility. She's accessing the forum via a magic mirror that reads it to her and transcribes her responses. Other peoples' posts are both translated into the animalperson trade language and up goer five'd for her, and between that and the kind of comprehension issues you'd expect to see in someone who doesn't get to hear other people talking very often, a lot of the forum is just gibberish to her - she's kind of used to that, though, so it's not going to discourage her much.
(One comprehension issue that's come up is that she doesn't have the metaphorial-social idea of 'here'; if you say 'here' or 'this place' or anything like that, she's going to assume you're referring to the literal place where your character is, not to the forum.)
One thing I'm still trying to figure out is how she's not constantly replying to old conversation-bits. I'm playing it like she does have a reasonable amount of control over what bits of the forum the mirror reads to her - the scrying spell (like all spells in my system) was permanent, to turn the mirror into a magic item in its own right, complete with controls to allow the user to change what it shows, which the forum magic co-opted. A lot of the metadata isn't coming through, though - like, she's getting thread titles, but she's not getting any indication of how many pages are in a thread or what page she's on, or how long ago any given post was made. (She is getting (translated and up goer five'd) names at least on request, and can tell who's posting what by what voice the words are read in.) I think she might just have the option to listen to an entire thread from the start, or to listen to the last 6 or 8 or 10 (one specific one of those) posts, and only get to reply to a thread immediately after getting to the end of it. She definitely doesn't get notifications of new posts while she's speaking, and won't necessarily know that they happened right away after she posts - she has to listen to the updated thread again to get them.
I should probably also note that she's not an especially reliable narrator about things beyond her own direct experience - what she thinks is her local elves doing weird magic to their animals is really just domestication, and the other kinds of people do screw up their magic sometimes. (She tends to overestimate the usefulness of language, unsurprisingly. ^^)
This character is a kobold from a basically-vanilla Dwarf Fortress world with my own not-very-fleshed-out magic system grafted on. She doesn't have a name, though she wouldn't mind using one if someone brought up the possibility. She's accessing the forum via a magic mirror that reads it to her and transcribes her responses. Other peoples' posts are both translated into the animalperson trade language and up goer five'd for her, and between that and the kind of comprehension issues you'd expect to see in someone who doesn't get to hear other people talking very often, a lot of the forum is just gibberish to her - she's kind of used to that, though, so it's not going to discourage her much.
(One comprehension issue that's come up is that she doesn't have the metaphorial-social idea of 'here'; if you say 'here' or 'this place' or anything like that, she's going to assume you're referring to the literal place where your character is, not to the forum.)
One thing I'm still trying to figure out is how she's not constantly replying to old conversation-bits. I'm playing it like she does have a reasonable amount of control over what bits of the forum the mirror reads to her - the scrying spell (like all spells in my system) was permanent, to turn the mirror into a magic item in its own right, complete with controls to allow the user to change what it shows, which the forum magic co-opted. A lot of the metadata isn't coming through, though - like, she's getting thread titles, but she's not getting any indication of how many pages are in a thread or what page she's on, or how long ago any given post was made. (She is getting (translated and up goer five'd) names at least on request, and can tell who's posting what by what voice the words are read in.) I think she might just have the option to listen to an entire thread from the start, or to listen to the last 6 or 8 or 10 (one specific one of those) posts, and only get to reply to a thread immediately after getting to the end of it. She definitely doesn't get notifications of new posts while she's speaking, and won't necessarily know that they happened right away after she posts - she has to listen to the updated thread again to get them.
I should probably also note that she's not an especially reliable narrator about things beyond her own direct experience - what she thinks is her local elves doing weird magic to their animals is really just domestication, and the other kinds of people do screw up their magic sometimes. (She tends to overestimate the usefulness of language, unsurprisingly. ^^)