Spoiler warning: if you are going to play in my campaign Red-Blooded Earth-Men, reading this thread will materially diminish your enjoyment thereof.
If you go ahead anyway, please do not convey spoilers to the other players. If you do, your character will be skinned alive, and I will not give you any cheesecake.
In about a month I am going to start a new campaign that will involve PCs from Australia mysteriously transported to a completely re-imagined equivalent of Barsoom (Mars, in a famous pre-Golden Age sci-fi series by E.R. Burroughs). Unlike Burroughs, I will not be granting them convenient telepathy. So they will start out not speaking the local language, and will have to learn it by immersion during the early part of the campaign. Eventually (after a language-immersion montage!) I will use a translation convention, with conversation in English being taken as representing conversation in the Martian common tongue. But for the first session I would like to have representative bits of "Martian"† to jabber at the players. I'd like to keep this consistent, so one of my bits of prep is going to be to construct a brief "Martian" phrase-book, containing the few dozen phrases that Martians are most likely to say to a number of large, hairy, pink-coloured barbarians in ragged AIF uniforms and toting strange weapons. In case this matters, I see five likely courses the PCs might take from the initial situation in the campaign: they might settle in a remote village that they have rescued from slavers; they might be enslaved; they might join the slavers; they might join a cadre of elite household troops on a special mission who are among the slavers and directing them; or they might fall in with an ancient engineer and flee with her a thousand miles along a ruined canal choked with desert sand, and then travel steadily through inhabited country as her companions and bodyguards.
Obviously I'm going to need "Martian" words for much of the stuff in GURPS Bio-Tech and GURPS Ultra-Tech. What other phrases ought I to have at my fingertips? Suggestions please!
† As a bit of an in-joke referencing Leo Szilard and the Fermi Paradox, I am going to represent "Martian" by translating phrases into Hungarian. I doubt anyone will notice.
If you go ahead anyway, please do not convey spoilers to the other players. If you do, your character will be skinned alive, and I will not give you any cheesecake.
In about a month I am going to start a new campaign that will involve PCs from Australia mysteriously transported to a completely re-imagined equivalent of Barsoom (Mars, in a famous pre-Golden Age sci-fi series by E.R. Burroughs). Unlike Burroughs, I will not be granting them convenient telepathy. So they will start out not speaking the local language, and will have to learn it by immersion during the early part of the campaign. Eventually (after a language-immersion montage!) I will use a translation convention, with conversation in English being taken as representing conversation in the Martian common tongue. But for the first session I would like to have representative bits of "Martian"† to jabber at the players. I'd like to keep this consistent, so one of my bits of prep is going to be to construct a brief "Martian" phrase-book, containing the few dozen phrases that Martians are most likely to say to a number of large, hairy, pink-coloured barbarians in ragged AIF uniforms and toting strange weapons. In case this matters, I see five likely courses the PCs might take from the initial situation in the campaign: they might settle in a remote village that they have rescued from slavers; they might be enslaved; they might join the slavers; they might join a cadre of elite household troops on a special mission who are among the slavers and directing them; or they might fall in with an ancient engineer and flee with her a thousand miles along a ruined canal choked with desert sand, and then travel steadily through inhabited country as her companions and bodyguards.
Obviously I'm going to need "Martian" words for much of the stuff in GURPS Bio-Tech and GURPS Ultra-Tech. What other phrases ought I to have at my fingertips? Suggestions please!
† As a bit of an in-joke referencing Leo Szilard and the Fermi Paradox, I am going to represent "Martian" by translating phrases into Hungarian. I doubt anyone will notice.
