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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 4382136" data-attributes="member: 41584">One option to deal with possible PC backstories and / or the language issue would be to have some of the 'natives' turn out to not be natives at all, but the descendents of exiles from the PCs native country. Why were they exiled? Politically unpopular? Religious schism? Cannibal cultists? Lepers (who have since beaten their ailment, due to a strange herb in the jungle, which could cure the plague sweeping the mainland, but since the mainland left them here to rot and die, they aren't exactly in a rush to hand over their mystic herb to those jerks!). Maddened and / or twisted cast-offs of magical research from the arcane academy (island of Dr. Moreau!). Outcast ethnic group (half-this, half-that, born into a world where one half of their ancestry was untouchable or 'the enemy'). If it was a prison colony, or just a dumping grounds for undesirables, it could even be, D) All of the Above! And there could be actual natives as well, who live further from the beaches, with the various ex-mainlanders huddled in communities near where they were 'dumped' and fighting the natives, whom they regard as savages (somewhat ironically, since the 'savages' have much more advanced societies than these castaway dregs and discards of the kingdom-across-the-sea!). So there becomes a reason why the 'natives' first encountered would speak a relatively comprehensible dialect of the PCs native language, and would have maps and stuff to pass on to the PCs of where the natives have sacred burial mounds or mysterious totems or caves that they avoid or whatever. If some of them were kicked out for forbidden religious practices (perhaps involving self-mutilation, sacrifice and / or cannibalism), they might looks scary and 'subhuman,' and serve as bad-guys, despite their background connection as countrymen who got marooned. Some may have been fiend-worshippers (or nature loving hippies!) and interbred with their patrons, creating a village with strong hints of fiendish blood (or fey blood), creating villages of tiefling-like or 'feyling'-like (pseudo-elven) stock. If sent away by cold, clinical Transmuters, after being used as test subjects, they could have all sorts of physical defects, or possibly advantages, and some might even be the failed apprentices of those harsh masters, retaining minor sorcerous or wizardly skill, which they might use to lord over their mishapen kin, or gets them marked out for punishment and cruel treatment by their fellow former-humans who remember arcane magic only as the source of their current misfortunes, and enslave the failed apprentices who get 'cast out' with the rest of them (probably 'cast out' using some form of teleportation magic, so that new arrivals appear disoriented on the beach every month or so, when the evil wizards clean out their latest batch of transmutation fodder). This would be a good origin for a 'mongrelfolk' species, or a variation of human that has Hordeling/Slaad-like random physical mutations, or various sorts of half-human/half-anthropomorphic animals and / or vermin. Finally, whatever reason the castaways have come here (or reasons), some may be related to the PCs, either by family ties (oh hey, your grandad was my crazy great-uncle Fester, who was exiled for refusing to swear an oath of fealty to King Nutbar the Second! We're cousins! So, I guess we should stop kissing now...) or by some form of guild or religious affiliation (You serve the goddess of light? And you come from the continent? They purged us and burned our temples seven generations back, and you have been sent by the goddess to tell us that it is our time to return and march on those who oppressed us, to burn their temples and reclaim our lands! Wait, where are you going, holy one... You must lead us to our promised destiny!). After dealing with the crazies who have never fully adapted to their new home (or accepted that they really 'can't go home'), the PCs might welcome meeting the *actual* natives, who are, after all these years, understandly unwelcoming to paleskins coming from the beach with their metal weapons and their jibber-jabber meaningless words.</blockquote>

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