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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5426416" data-attributes="member: 3820">It brings a lot more immediacy to the opening, yes. When I skim it with my "player eye", I get a general idea of major threat groups in various locales outside the Empire. It does stress that everything interesting is happening outside the Empire, mind; that would tend to imply that PCs will want to spend little time in the Empire itself, and therefore you might want to be careful about the amount of word count you expend describing life within the Empire that is not itself dripping with plot hooks that imply intrigues, skirmishes and other adventures that might take place there.Also, I hope you'll take this criticism in good spirits, because really it's an utterly subjective matter, but be sure to get a second eye on some of the made-up fantasyese names. For example, I see the "Zapathos" forest and I immediately think of "Zapatos" -- not everyone is necessarily going to think "oh hey, shoes!", but some will. Similarly, although you may be able to immediately visualize the pronunciation of, say, "anhiyawen," a lot of readers will have to stop dead-center in the middle of the sentence and go over that word a couple of times. It will break the reading flow until it becomes second nature, and for some readers it may never become second-nature. Making up your own terminology is very tempting, but it can be a bar to players feeling at home in a setting if you don't use it carefully.When you're dealing in made-up words that bear no relation to obvious real-world terms, it's often a good idea to have alternate terms you can use for them. It's something I often had to do with Werewolf: even though "Garou" was pretty easy to remember (especially as it came from "loup-garou"), I encouraged writers to alternate between "Garou" and "werewolves" and sometimes "the People" to keep from seeing too much repetition in a given paragraph. This'll help the flow, and also help players come to grips with what the words mean: if you alternate "anhiyawen" with "animal-men" and "beastfolk" in a paragraph talking about them, it'll be a useful reminder as well as cutting down on repetitious language. Ultimately it also give the players a good choice, as well: do they prefer to use the clearest English definition of a race, or do they adopt the terminology? That's what happened with us: some people preferred "Garou," some "werewolves." (Although it probably helped that "Garou" is actually quicker to type...)</blockquote>

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