Kingdoms of Kalamar: Ask the Emperor!

[Mark Plemmons]

Seeing sage Nightfall's similar thread gave me the idea to take his idea and run with it, although for the KoK setting instead. This is not a competition thread, just another on a theme.

So... any questions? Just put them here and I'll see what I can do!

 

[buzzard]

OK I'm thinking about playing LKoK one of these days (well, actually once I have enough exp from DMing to start at 3rd level). I have the character worked out statwise, but I don't know where to base him. I am thinking either human or dwarf who hails from a place where the populace is opressed by wizards (of the evil variety, preferably).

I've read the Kalamar book, but it's been a while. I suppose I could go over it again, but I'd like to have some help focusing on a few choices to narrow my search.

So what places in the world are run by evil wizards?

buzzard

 

[MerakSpielman]

Hey, Mark, good to see you.

I have a quick question. I'm DMing a Kalamar game with 5 players (and a 6th NPC), and most of the players do not have a language in common (and only one has an intelligence over 11, and she picked Draconic). In the interests of playablity and having fun, I just ruled that everybody in the party can talk with everybody else with no penalty. I certainly didn't want the Kalamar language system to make the players unable to communicate!

I'm wondering if you thought of this before. I mean, by the rules, this party would have a hell of a time getting anything done. Do you think my solution will mess up the feel of the world at all?

Second Question:
The Atlas goes into great detail describing which roads are 1st class, all the way down to 5th class roads. But I couldn't find anything suggesting what practical difference it made to travel on the different classes of roads. I went ahead and drew up a chart giving bonuses to the better roads and penalties to the worse roads (though I made sure that any road would be faster than no road at all). Is there supposed to be a practical difference? Why or why not?

Thanks! I'm having great fun in Kalamar! I'll be posting a Story Hour on the Kenzerco boards at some point.

 

[Voadam]

Any thoughts on more pdf stuff to come out? I would love to have dangerous denizens in a cut and paste friendly format.

 

[Desdichado]

I have a quick question. I'm DMing a Kalamar game with 5 players (and a 6th NPC), and most of the players do not have a language in common (and only one has an intelligence over 11, and she picked Draconic). In the interests of playablity and having fun, I just ruled that everybody in the party can talk with everybody else with no penalty. I certainly didn't want the Kalamar language system to make the players unable to communicate!

I'm obviously not Mark Plemmons, but as an amateur linguist who has tried to incorporate material like this in campaigns in the past, I've ruled that the players all need to have a chargen session together, and they need to be able to 1) communicate with each other, and 2) have a reason to work together, or at least not work against each other (I can help provide this too.) While this does tend to limit the options, if everyone does it together, they can all settle on something that everyone's happy with rather than me simply cutting off options on my own.

For Mark: I'm aware of the Kalamar setting since it's publication under the 3e rules -- what's the history of the setting prior to that? My understanding is that the setting, in many ways, fits better into a ruleset more like Harn or somesuch. If so, what are your comments on other systems that Kalamar would work well with?

Oh and kudos on the setting; in many ways it is right up my alley in terms of the "historical" feel, the spread of languages and ethnic groups, etc.

 

[Nightfall]

Mark,

I take no actions or anything. I will say it's like Picasso said. "Good Artists copy. Great artists steal."

And the rest of us just do what we can. So yeah folks KoK questions, toss to Mark.

 

[shadow]

As a linguist, I have been somewhat bothered by the question of how to pronounce all the names in the KoK campaign setting. If it were Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, I wouldn't care to much and pick whatever pronunciation suited me. However, with the pseudo-historical realism in Kalamar, I am trying to keep some consistency and a degree of uniformity for pronunciation.

 

[MerakSpielman]

As a linguist, I have been somewhat bothered by the question of how to pronounce all the names in the KoK campaign setting. If it were Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, I wouldn't care to much and pick whatever pronunciation suited me. However, with the pseudo-historical realism in Kalamar, I am trying to keep some consistency and a degree of uniformity for pronunciation.

I recently ran into a problem attempting to transcribe the names of different kingdoms into Svimozhish. Not all letters are present in that alphabet, so I did a lot of "best fits." Not that any of my players speak it or will notice, but it bothered me. I presume that each language has it's own name for different countries, and the "Merchant's Tongue" names on the map aren't really supposed to be directly transliterated into the alphabets in the campaign book.

 

[Desdichado]

I recently ran into a problem attempting to transcribe the names of different kingdoms into Svimozhish. Not all letters are present in that alphabet, so I did a lot of "best fits." Not that any of my players speak it or will notice, but it bothered me. I presume that each language has it's own name for different countries, and the "Merchant's Tongue" names on the map aren't really supposed to be directly transliterated into the alphabets in the campaign book.

But that's half the fun! I've been reading about how Prakrit Kroraina was transliterated by the Chinese into Loulan, for instance, or the complex interactions of how the *tukri, spelled in MSM as Yuezhi, known to the Sogdians as the Tugri and the Greeks as the Tokharoi are all supposedly the same people -- it's the stuff like that that makes settings like Kalamar so alive to me.

Not that Kalamar has a good guide for transliterating, but coming up with the best fits on your own is half the fun!

 

[qstor]

I'm not an expert by any means. But I know that Kalamar was published around the time of 2e. Not sure what system it used.

I think any generic system like GURPS, HARN, Hero or d6 would work with Kalamar. Some of the creatures like the ones in Dangerous Denizens would take a lot of tweaking to get converted to those systems but I see how you could go backwards to 2e with the D&D Conversion Manual.


Mike