Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Prophecy and the skill of the player.

So I decided to put the player skill tenet of Old School to the test last night. With this bit of prophecy in an ancient elven tongue.

Alates tuhka draakon tulekahju poeg puud kasvamas. Ta läheb välja ja tulevad omal.

Poja lõvi ei kummardame isand madu ja loosungi lohe saab unfurled ja hobune peab olema poolaastaga.

Lääne-ja Ida peavad häda ees, kord ja tulevaste kuningas on hammustatud poolt madu ja silma pistrik hakkab himustama läände, langevad mõlemad jättes draakon koos kaheks osaks vähem.

Uroboros rullitakse pikast pimedas ja kuristikku ja impeerium kasvas. Viimati sundered ja impeerium langes. Pistrik levib ta tiivad ja tarbib kõik.

Võimas tamm varjupaikadele all oma lehte. Poeg puud peidab paljusid augustamine silmis jahi pistrik.

Lõpe Salakarit kohta bosum kohta Tiethoir tuleb ehitud banner iga koos Falcon silma kunagi magada.

Tema nimi tuleb Syrivald

Ja üks kannab nime järgi poeg puu ja tõde peab olema tema poolel.

Üle saali tõe ja ringid maailma tähtsaim sõna hävimatu.

Of course they google translated it in a heart beat. But that just made an already cryptic prophecy more jibberish. Part of the adventures in the upcoming weeks will be to find the books needed to translate this "ancient" dialect of elvish into something that make more sense.

The best comment of the evening was by Tim of Gothridge's character Ashling when the mages of Syrivald's Conclave offered to help translate it.
I translated it just fine, whoever wrote this just wrote jibberish.

4 comments:

Phersv said...

I used Finnish instead of the correct Baltic version and the result gave only a few legible words ("cannabis" for "kannab"!).

I guess Heraldry is necessary to interpret some of the animals?

Anonymous said...

And very interesting gibberish it is, but not very helpful to post at length if you're not also going to post a translation for your readers. (As most of us probably do not read "ancient elven.")

One question though, did you ask the players how their characters "Google translated it"? Not aware that was a standard clerical spell...

dfvsdvsd said...

I think "Google Translate would be an awesome 2nd level cleric spell ;)

Robert Conley said...

The idea here was to inject a element of the players actively doing something. If it was back in the day likely I would take a foreign langauge dictionary and translate it word for word and grammar be damned.