Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Edymnion 06-28-06, 01:06 AM	Something that just came up for me that I don't remember having been discussed. In most (if not all) other settings, Draconic seems to be the defacto arcane language. All the wizards speak it, or can at least read it. If you run across an ancient tome of magical might, chances are its written in Draconic. But in Eberron, there isn't really a reason for this, and many good reasons why Draconic would almost be a restricted language (like halfling in default D&D, where they are "loath to teach it to others"). So, what language would things like scrolls and ancient texts be written in, if not Draconic? Would Elven become the new "arcane language" because of their history and the Undying Council? Goblin perhaps?
ArcTan 06-28-06, 01:50 AM	Wait, why wouldn't Draconic -- or a variant thereof -- be the arcane language? After all, the dragons were the original spellcasters, and all modern spellcasting is descended from the magic they taught the giants, and that was stolen from the giants by the elves. Sure, not a lot of people are going to be learning at a dragon's knee the Draconic that dragons use to communicate to each other *now*. But it makes a lot of sense for the _lingua franca_ of magic to be a debased, archaic version of old Draconic. I mean, it was my impression that this fact was why it was natural to give the dragons the place in Eberron that they have -- as the very very ancient original practitioners of magic. It accounts for both Draconic as wizard-language and dragon-blood as the reason for sorcerers.
Fordel 06-28-06, 03:59 AM	What ArcTan said :) Also, while the Elves are certainly long lived and have a civilization that spans thousands of years... they are still a tiny drop in the bucket in terms of longevity and influence (and the goblins even less so), when compared to the Dragons. Could even take it a step further and say Draconic comes from the Proteginer (sp?) Dragons. Language of Eberron, Siberys and Khyber. I'm half certain I read a side panel that said something similar about Sorc's, how they don't believe their powers come from any kind of literal draconic lineage, but rather from the influences of the Proteginer's (I really should look up how to spell that word).
taski 06-28-06, 04:55 AM	Wait, who says every arcane tome has to be in the same language? The way I see it, all it takes to understand the arcane principles is intelligence, experimentation, and time, meaning the arcane arts can be discovered independently, rather than always taught from one culture to another. Even if the underlying principles of magic are the same everywhere, not everyone in history were on speaking terms with each other, so why would they write in the same language? I see it as being very similar to mathematics; the Myans and Arabs had very different ways of writting the same formula of "Bob owes Joe 2 apples per quart of milk." The bardic songbooks of the ancient Dhakaani empire wouldn't make sense being written in Aereni or Draconic. I haven't read much about their having that much friendly contact with elves or dragons. And conversely, the traditional necromantic formulae in Vol's vaults wouldn't make sense being in Old High Dhakaani. Post-Xen'drik elven texts probably aren't in Draconic, considering how much they hate the dragons. The scholars conducting research for the Arcane Congress could even be using a system developed during Galifar's existence, nowadays the "common" system. Humans haven't had anywhere near as much help from dragons as the giants did. The dragons learned their lesson, and humans are basicly left to muddle through it on their own. It would make sense for them to have developed their own system for describing what their limited draconic vocabulary couldn't. Anyway, I vote for making the language ancient texts are in make sense for the cultures they came from.
Just another user 06-28-06, 05:32 AM	Something that just came up for me that I don't remember having been discussed. In most (if not all) other settings, Draconic seems to be the defacto arcane language. All the wizards speak it, or can at least read it. If you run across an ancient tome of magical might, chances are its written in Draconic. But in Eberron, there isn't really a reason for this, and many good reasons why Draconic would almost be a restricted language (like halfling in default D&D, where they are "loath to teach it to others"). So, what language would things like scrolls and ancient texts be written in, if not Draconic? Would Elven become the new "arcane language" because of their history and the Undying Council? Goblin perhaps? Actually there is an excellent reason for it. Dragon teached magic to giants, elves learned magic from the giants and very probably people in korvhaine learned their magic from the elves and from the giants ruin in xen'drik, else magic language being draconic make sense more than in any other settings. Of course when I say magic language I mean Wizardry, clerical and bardic magic are a total different case. (P.S. for what is worth, in my eberron wizardy is a relatively recent field of research for non-elves, born from research on Xen'drik artifacts and study of the dragonmarks, before the apparition of the dragonmarks magic users in Khorvaine were mostly bards, clerics/druids and the occasional sorcerer, non elves wizards were incredibly rare, artificers and magewrigth are very recennt development (more or less 1000 years for artificer, something less for magewright) that brought to what was a true "magical revolutions" in Korvhaine.
Zedium 06-28-06, 05:34 AM	I still think Draconic would be best language for anything related to the arcane. Why? Because it is based upon the prophecy, and the prophecy is basically the biggest magical thing in the whole world of Eberron. This also explains why almost all spellcasters can learn draconic, even though dragons are mostly seen as mythical beings in Eberron and some people maybe never heard of them. The language is just infused with the prophecy and magic and as such comes natural to spellcasters. And actually, the Dhakaan also learned their magic from the elves (probably through reverse engineering it), who in turn learned it from the giants, who learned it from the dragons, so their spells would still be in draconic.
ArcTan 06-28-06, 05:35 AM	Ordinary magical texts written in common tongues? Sure. Very very ancient artifact-level tomes? Probably in a very very ancient artifact-level language, i.e. the language of the Progenitors. A lot about magic has been independently discovered over time, but the ECS gives the impression that the greatest magical techniques have not been -- they've been preserved in very old texts, copied and recopied, and so on from way back in the Age of Dragons. That's part of what makes magic so interesting in Eberron -- it's one half "sparkly science", where any idiot magewright can learn a few simple spells and _everbright lanterns_ are on every street in Sharn and peasants in Aundair use _prestidigitation_ to clean their clothes -- and it's one half Occult, where powerful magic spells are viewed there the same way they are in our world -- forbidden, secret knowledge passed down and down and down from the very origins of civilization itself. After all, you do have to explain why the verbal components of a spell are never in a language an ordinary person can understand. If you buy into the idea of Truespeaking and Truespeech as part of how magic works, then as noted in another thread, Draconic is the frontrunner for the language group that's the source of Truespeech, with Draconic itself being a simplified, colloquial version of the old, original Truespeech. (This would be going with tradition, by the way, as Ursula K. Le Guin's _Earthsea_ novels have dragons be the natural Truespeakers of the world.)
Thanqol 06-28-06, 07:14 AM	My character in an Eberron game casts her arcane spells in Druidic, and prepares them from an Aureon's Spellshard she found in the marshes. Now, why it does that? I don't know ^^
Tyryt 06-28-06, 10:18 AM	Wouldn't Giant be a good language for it? Yes, Dragons did teach the Giants magic, but dragons arn't much for writing things down, they don't need to. Giants, on the other hand, would have written extensively since itw as they who were learning and passing it on to others and probably doing a whole lot of expiramenting.
DragonWatcher 06-28-06, 11:38 AM	I second the idea of arcane writings using Giantish as the base language. I remember reading somewhere that the Giants of Xen'drick were actually the ones who developed arcane magic as it is used today (and a much more potent form at that). While they may have learned some secrets of magic from the dragons, I have always understood that the dragons actually used magic differently than "modern" arcane casters. I still think Draconic would be best language for anything related to the arcane. Why? Because it is based upon the prophecy, and the prophecy is basically the biggest magical thing in the whole world of Eberron. The problem with this theory is that the prophecy isn't exactly written in draconic. Sure, the dragons might make notations, but the prophecy is spelled out in the movement of the Ring of Syberies, the stars, and the strange dragonmark-like patterns that form on the land. It's through these omens being interpreted that the prophecy is unveiled... not through some written instructions in any language. Or at least that's what I've taken from the bits that I've read.
yrogerg 06-28-06, 01:24 PM	Again, why not Draconic? It's the language of the prophesy, some would say. Dragons are the ultimate source of arcane teaching in Eberron, and among the few children of the progentors to walk the earth today, if you believe the legends. If you allow True-Speech, even as a concept, then Draconic could easily be a 'fallen' form of True-speech. The reason it's so important for spellcasters is that it's the closest known language to the language of the progenitors, the True language from which the world was created, and as such, it's a language with power behind it. This sort of idea- and indeed, the idea of True speech itself- is based on real-world Judeo-Christian mystical traditions which held that very old speech- that of Adam, or the name of God- in which naming things gave them identity, form and nature, and in which altering something's name changed its nature. This later gave rise to early modern Hermetic traditions, which held Hebrew in essentially the same place that Draconic is supposed to hold- the degerate form of a True, Original, Language. This concept was mined wholesale, AFAICT, by Ursula K Le Guin for Earthsea. But, it's also a good idea. Frankly, with that as the basis, Draconic as magic of language of magic in Eberron makes more sense than in a generic fantasy setting, where Dragons are supposed to be physical embodyments of the elemental forces of nature, and have little to no ties to the fundamental origins of magic and the world. Whether that means all texts that deal with magic are written in Draconic, I don't know. If you want to make Draconic the lingua franca of magic, that's fine either way, and for most texts, that's the sort of thing that could easily vary by culture and history. But at very least, it's an important language to know, in order to understand how magic works.
Edymnion 06-28-06, 07:00 PM	Well, in my Eberron at least, Dragons are not something you are going to see very often, if at all. They hold about the same level in my games that the gods hold in other games. They're out there, people know they're out there, and occassionaly one even shows up and does something. Other than that though, the dragons are over here, the rest of the setting is over there, and while the dragons meddle in humanoid affairs, the two generally do not meet. No one, in my games, will *EVER* get the chance to hunt a dragon in order to steal it's horde. Ever. There are no dragons flying around eating people just because they think humanoids taste good. And in my game, I've already decided that the special magic the dragons use, that they taught to the giants, was True Speech, the tongue of the progenitor wyrms. Totally independant system from magic. Given that the dragons are not going around chatting it up with the lesser races, and that they don't necissarily use the same kind of magic as khovaire, I don't think that Draconic is an appropriate arcane language like it is in other settings. I like the idea of Giant being the language, I just prefer to keep giant as one of those more or less lost languages, so that the PCs can run across it and actually have to work at figuring out what it says instead of just "Hey Bob, you took Giant as a language, didn't you? Get up here and have 'Malcor the Magnificent' read this stupid panel, would ya?"
yrogerg 06-29-06, 12:07 AM	::See below:: Incidentally, I agree with you about the role of dragons, to a degree. That whole 'rogue dragon' bugged the hell out of me. OTOH, White dragons tend to be fairly bestial, and they *might* be appropriate to use in that manner, to an extent, but they'd still be more concerned with power than loot. However, the dragons are not gods, and I would never use them in the same way. The dragons most likely to meddle directly in human affairs are the youngest and brashest of the Chamber, and are, frankly, easy pickings for the Lords of Dust on their own. I would say that that's the main reason you don't see many dragons around, but they definitely have a history of meddling -quite actively, in fact- in the affairs of other beings, from the Giants to the elves, and the members of the Chamber who aren't content to just spy on important parts of the prophesy are more than likely to give them a little 'nudge' in the 'right' direction. I guess my question is, why does the difference in role of dragons in Eberron from the role of dragons in generic D&D, where they do hoard loot and eat people and get killed by adventurers, make Draconic a less reasonable lingua franca for magic in Eberron, rather than a more reasonable one? I don't actually know enough about Greyhawk or the Realms to comment, but I never got the impression that dragons or draconic had very much to do with arcane spellcasters in those settings, at all, other than being a very old language.
yrogerg 06-29-06, 12:07 AM	See, the thing about Truespeech for me is that I don't see it as a wholly separate form of magic, and would never present it in a form where it wasn't closely related to standard arcane magic. Part of this is that the verbal components of the vast majority of spells and the fact that spells need to be written down and memorized for the vast majority of arcane spellcasters, as well as, more explicitly, the Power Word: and Symbol of: spells, have all seemed to be to be nods to this form of magic, which really does form the foundations for Western conceptions of magic. Ask any five-year-old how to make magic; they'll tell you that you need a hat, a wand, and to 'know the magic word(s)'. ToM even nods to this, when they call spells like 'command' and 'Power Word:' forms of lesser truename magic. Besides, if Truename magic were so totally separate, it'd be a lot harder for humans of Kourvaire to reverse-engineer the Giants' stuff, no? Not to mention the fact that the Aerenal definitely learned arcane magic from the Giants. Or else discovered all arcane magic entirely on their own. As slaves. Here's how I'd treat Truespeech, and how and why I'd tie it to Draconic and arcane spellcasting: The first dragons knew Truename magic, for they were the children of the progenitors. With each step, however, the speech became corrupted, and lost. Today, even among the Dragons, Truenamers are rare, and mostly only the oldest of Wyrms are fluent in True Speech, a phenomenon that some claim is further evidence that the Dragons have weakened with each passing age. The magic that they taught the Giants was the closest to this True speech, but even by then, understanding of Truespeech had faded, and while most of the Giants' magic is still beyond the ken of the races of Kourvaire today -being of truer magic, and thus greater power- enough of their magic is recognizably arcane that Xen'drik has been exploited by mages and artificers for its knowledge in the 'modern' day. When the elves revolted and fled to Aerenal, they took what knowledge they could, but this knowledge was dramatically corrupted by the thousands of years and fratured nature of what they could preserve. All remnants of truespeech were lost, and gave way to the baser, fallen form of the same language- one that the dragons spoke colloquially. Thus magic that the elves all use is recognizably arcane magic. Fortunately, the emphasis that the Aerenal placed on tradition and perfection of the techniques of their ancestors has ensured that the knowledge of magic has not degraded much further since the time of the migration, but the knowledge of magic that the humans of Kourvaire have developed has certainly been but a shadow of the knowledge possesed, and preserved, by the Undying Court. Truespeech, as available to PCs, comes from two sources: the dragons themselves, who might get an important player in the prophesy started down the path of Truenaming, or sheer accident, as both forms of spellcasting, and Draconic, share a common root, and a mistaken verbal component can lead to the rediscovery of the language of the Progenitors.
Splendide 06-29-06, 01:13 AM	I would say that there is no one magic language. Draconic: Genuinely old scripts, some human colleges trying to look conservative Giant: Scripts from Xen'drik Gnomish: Scripts written by Korranberg scholars. Elven: Stuff from Aerenal And of course, any new magic invented by people of a given race is most likely to be notated in that language. Draconic would still be a worthwhile language to learn if you're a wizard/artificer, similar to how, if you are a scientist today, learning English is a good idea. Its probably not essential, but its certainly wise.
ArcTan 06-29-06, 03:15 AM	And in my game, I've already decided that the special magic the dragons use, that they taught to the giants, was True Speech, the tongue of the progenitor wyrms. Totally independant system from magic. Given that the dragons are not going around chatting it up with the lesser races, and that they don't necissarily use the same kind of magic as khovaire, I don't think that Draconic is an appropriate arcane language like it is in other settings. As others have said, not only are there the Seren barbarians, but the Chamber is around and active. And KB has said that the majority of the Chamber's agents, even the top-ranking agents who know the Chamber's purpose, are mortals working for young dragons. Dragons should be distant and mysterious, yes, but not absent the way the gods are in Eberron. Humans ganging up on and defeating a dragon is still within the realm of possibility -- dragons still need to make deals with humans and have human henchmen in order to get things done in Khorvaire. And the nature of the Prophecy is that there *are* a bunch of dragons who still do think it's important to get things done in Khorvaire. So knowing Draconic is not so out of the question. The dragons can't be *that* distant, or classes like the Dragon Prophet would not exist, and human organizations like the Twelve wouldn't even know of the Prophecy's existence, much less take sides on whether to help or hinder it. But we're approaching this from a chicken-and-egg perspective, anyway. If Draconic *is* the language of magic, then it will be known as the language of magic, and people will learn it, even if not one single person has ever had a conversation with an actual dragon. Latin has persisted for generations in the real world because it's the language in which many classical texts were written, and the language for specialized fields like law, philosophy, religion and science for many years, even though, for all that time, it's been a dead language and the Roman civilization that spawned it has been dead and gone. People knowing that the language spellbooks are written in is called "Draconic" is like people knowing that the birthmark on a Deneith scion is called a "Dragonmark" -- the connection with dragons is a mythical, mystical connection based on half-remembered legends that only serves to connote that the language or symbol in question is of particular mystical import, not any connection with actual living dragons. I like the idea of Giant being the language, I just prefer to keep giant as one of those more or less lost languages, so that the PCs can run across it and actually have to work at figuring out what it says instead of just "Hey Bob, you took Giant as a language, didn't you? Get up here and have 'Malcor the Magnificent' read this stupid panel, would ya?" But if Giant is the arcane language, and everyone knows it, then arcane scholars will study it and develop a tradition around translating it. People won't learn Giant to speak with giants, but the vast majority of scholars *will* learn it in order to translate ancient writings. Think what it was like with the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Of course, we weren't able to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphics much at all till we found the Rosetta Stone. But Giant isn't that lost a language in Eberron, at least by the RAW -- Giant remains one of the default languages for modern-day, debased giant tribes to have, including those random hill giants you can find roaming around southern Khorvaire. Debased, simplified, greatly evolved version of Giant? Sure. But as long as it's the same language with the same lineage, it will be possible to work on decoding the one with the other. The reason we could read the Greek section on the Rosetta Stone is that, even though modern Greek is vastly different from the Greek that was spoken in the time of the Ptolemies, it's maintained a line of descent from that language and it's still possible to interpret one from the other. A language won't be completely lost unless the civilization in question has been completely conquered and assimilated into another, like the Etruscans and the Romans, or the Egyptians and the later Muslim empires with their insistence on making Arabic a _lingua franca_. You can rule that that is what happened to the giants, or that the destruction of the giant civilization was so thoroughgoing that they started over completely from scratch. But according to the default position of the RAW, modern Giant and old Giant are still both Giant. So no language can be as lost as all that. Actually, this argument works *better* for Draconic than Giant. At least, finding a community of hill giants and learning their language is probably harder than finding a random dragon to teach you Draconic, so Draconic will remain more obscure as a tongue. (Yes, there are other draconic races like the kobolds, but they're supposed to be quite rare and, anyway, kobolds live underground and stuff. Hill giants live in the hills.)
ArcTan 06-29-06, 03:34 AM	See, the thing about Truespeech for me is that I don't see it as a wholly separate form of magic, and would never present it in a form where it wasn't closely related to standard arcane magic. Part of this is that the verbal components of the vast majority of spells and the fact that spells need to be written down and memorized for the vast majority of arcane spellcasters, as well as, more explicitly, the Power Word: and Symbol of: spells, have all seemed to be to be nods to this form of magic, which really does form the foundations for Western conceptions of magic. Ask any five-year-old how to make magic; they'll tell you that you need a hat, a wand, and to 'know the magic word(s)'. ToM even nods to this, when they call spells like 'command' and 'Power Word:' forms of lesser truename magic. Besides, if Truename magic were so totally separate, it'd be a lot harder for humans of Kourvaire to reverse-engineer the Giants' stuff, no? Not to mention the fact that the Aerenal definitely learned arcane magic from the Giants. Or else discovered all arcane magic entirely on their own. As slaves. I think what Edy means is that the giants learned Truespeech from the dragons and then invented arcane spellcasting on their own. There's nothing wrong with that interpretation, but I don't like it much -- it directly contradicts the original setting, which specifically says the dragons taught arcane spellcasting and doesn't mention Truespeech at all, and my personal interpretation, like yours, is that Truespeech and arcane spellcasting are intimately connected as disciplines. I feel like a universe is more cohesive-feeling, less random and contrived-seeming, if things like magic are put together into the same system as much as possible. It seems like a cop-out to say that there's one way to create magical effects and, wait, here's a completely different way that has absolutely nothing to do with the first way and follows none of the same rules. This is why, for instance, I don't like taking away magic/psionics transparency, and acting like "psionic energy" is some completely different thing from "magic energy". Aside from crunch issues, it feels wrong to me, like it's emphasizing that this is something we made up rather than part of a coherent world. Tome of Magic seems to share this attitude -- at least, it tries very hard, in the long and quite well-written fluff for each section, to integrate each new kind of magic with Magic As We Know It. Pact Magic is just a very specialized form of the magical transfer of power and knowledge from a higher entity that ordinary spells can trigger through magic like _lesser planar ally_ or _contact other plane_ or _miracle_. Shadow Magic is the same as ordinary magic but it draws its power from the shadow-world rather than the ordinary world (or from the Plane of Shadow rather than the Material, Astral and Outer Planes). Truename Magic is magic that relies on only the verbal component of magic, all by itself, disconnected from its material, somatic and mental components. ToM specifically says that Truespeech is already integrated into arcane spellcasting. That all verbal components are at least related to Truespeech, and that the Power Word spells are specifically a very simple kind of Truespeech, and that Truespeaking is, in a sense, a "purified" form of what arcane spellcasters do, which is why it can so easily be inserted into an arcane spell to greatly increase its power. I picture arcane spells as "encoded" Truespeech of sorts, something that integrates bits and pieces of Truespeech with magical forces stored in the mind and in the immediate environment. By contrast Truespeech by itself interacts with the environment in weird and sometimes unintuitive ways, hence the weirdness of Truenamer utterance progression.
Fordel 06-29-06, 07:19 AM	Someone give me the cliffnotes version of what TrueSpeech is :P , the conversation blew past me pretty quick :(
yrogerg 06-29-06, 08:06 AM	Actually, this argument works *better* for Draconic than Giant. At least, finding a community of hill giants and learning their language is probably harder than finding a random dragon to teach you Draconic, so Draconic will remain more obscure as a tongue. (Yes, there are other draconic races like the kobolds, but they're supposed to be quite rare and, anyway, kobolds live underground and stuff. Hill giants live in the hills.) Well, you forgot a few, but I think they support this claim: lizardfolk speak Draconic, and hags and trolls speak Giant. And, lizardfolk live in deep jungles, and are often servitors of dragons (making them fairly inaccessable), and hags may not be common, but are at least very well-known, and at least one of them recieves some supplicants (the oracle one). Trolls know Giant as well, and as we all know, are extremly common, especially on the D&D boards. Someone give me the cliffnotes version of what TrueSpeech is :P , the conversation blew past me pretty quick :( Think of Truespeech as the primordial language, a language where the name of a thing is tied to its fundamental 'thing-ness', and where, if you know the right words and the right manipulations of words, you can change the world dramatically, as though through magical effects. It's basically casting, but skill-based, among other differences. It's from Tome of Magic, which is a very well-done book, and I recommend looking at. An blurb on Truespeech can be found here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060303a&page=8
Sereno 06-29-06, 09:28 AM	Well, in my Eberron at least, Dragons are not something you are going to see very often, if at all. They hold about the same level in my games that the gods hold in other games. They're out there, people know they're out there, and occassionaly one even shows up and does something. Other than that though, the dragons are over here, the rest of the setting is over there, and while the dragons meddle in humanoid affairs, the two generally do not meet. No one, in my games, will *EVER* get the chance to hunt a dragon in order to steal it's horde. Ever. There are no dragons flying around eating people just because they think humanoids taste good. While I agree that Eberron dragons should NEVER be big, stupid lizards sitting on a pile of treasure waiting to become XP for the next adventuring band to come along, I think you're shorting Eberron of some of its best features by practically removing the dragons to a "god-like" level. The setting even comes with a special organization of "interactive" dragons, The Chamber. This give an Eberron DM a perfect opportunity to use dragons as intelligent and manipulative actors on the Eberron stage that makes them so much more than XP and treasure waiting in a cave somewhere.... My PCs have already met a dragon, and they didn't even know it! :) They're currently getting involved in a conflict between two factions of the Chamber, and they don't know that, either! :)
Siran Dunmorgan 06-29-06, 12:50 PM	Someone give me the cliffnotes version of what TrueSpeech is :P , the conversation blew past me pretty quick :( If reality is a computer... Divine spells are programs run for you by someone else. Arcane spells are programs you write yourself in Java Infusions are programs you write yourself in C Truename effects are subroutines hand-tooled in the assembler. —Siran Dunmorgan P. S. This is a fascinating discussion. I want to do an essay on all of this, but I... don't... have... time. Darn th' real world, anyway. Remember that arcane writing aren't in any natural language: "discovered, not invented", in the language of Player's Handbook.
xxxsammaelxxx 06-29-06, 08:21 PM	Heh. (Note, My Eberron views Dragons as Edymnion does) This came up on the first day of our campaign. Everyone made there chars up and showed up at the table. I, as the DM, asked how many people spoke Draconic... 5 of 6 hands went up. I then asked for the name of the dragon who taught it to them. Draconic is a rare language in my world. While Kobolds and other lesser reptillian races do speak a variation of it, Its not the same draconic that the dragons themselves speak. Anyway, my system was that you had to have 'higher education' to select draconic as a starting language if you didnt get it as a base tongue, (so wizardy types basically) And the glorious days of the Age of Giants, was also a far different 'Giant' than is spoken today. A player with some kind of backstory involving Droamm, Xendrik or other large humanoid type area can take giant as a language, but its similarity to the actual 'Ancient Giant' is based on how much information the plot requires them to have. It actually has been a fairly successful mechanism for me to regulate the flow of 'Ancient Knowledge' during an adventure to the right amount to build suspense with the story, without the players feeling cheated that thier language choices were taken away from them. They still speak the giant that the Hill Giant lobbing Boulders at them from the shore is shouting, but can usually only get partial translations from runes and glyphs in ancient giant temples, much as we have cultural and language issues with Egyptian Hieroglyphics
xxxsammaelxxx 06-29-06, 08:33 PM	While I agree that Eberron dragons should NEVER be big, stupid lizards sitting on a pile of treasure waiting to become XP for the next adventuring band to come along, I think you're shorting Eberron of some of its best features by practically removing the dragons to a "god-like" level. I kinda Disagree here. While my Dragons are leaving claw marks in a LOT of my Eberron's happenings, they so far have been operating exclusively through agents. My players have met a dragon prophet, a dragon shaman, and a dragon disciple, and all have been mysterious enough about thier motives and purposes that has left my players wondering about the true nature of the Dragons in general. Like Muroni in 'GotEC', She showed up uttering cryptic remarks, accompanied the part,y then died suddenly in an unfortuneate encounter, leaving my players wondering to this day why she was there and what her real story/purpose was.
ArcTan 06-29-06, 09:39 PM	The problem with this theory is that the prophecy isn't exactly written in draconic. Sure, the dragons might make notations, but the prophecy is spelled out in the movement of the Ring of Syberies, the stars, and the strange dragonmark-like patterns that form on the land. It's through these omens being interpreted that the prophecy is unveiled... not through some written instructions in any language. Or at least that's what I've taken from the bits that I've read. My theory is actually that written Draconic is derived from certain patterns observed in nature, which is why it would be very counterintuitive and hard to read for someone raised on a traditional written script. Lots of big, intricate patterns that have to be read in full to interpret meaning. Part of this is that I do think the Dragonmarks should be seen as versions of written words in Draconic -- the Mark of Making being a form of the dragon word "making" or "to make". The dragons recognized the Dragonmarks as significant precisely because they matched symbols that they had long seen and recorded in various places in nature.
yrogerg 06-30-06, 10:01 AM	I kinda Disagree here. While my Dragons are leaving claw marks in a LOT of my Eberron's happenings, they so far have been operating exclusively through agents. My players have met a dragon prophet, a dragon shaman, and a dragon disciple, and all have been mysterious enough about thier motives and purposes that has left my players wondering about the true nature of the Dragons in general. Like Muroni in 'GotEC', She showed up uttering cryptic remarks, accompanied the part,y then died suddenly in an unfortuneate encounter, leaving my players wondering to this day why she was there and what her real story/purpose was. See, I'd have a problem with leaving it at that. Dragons fought on the side of the Coatls in the Age of Fiends, and still guard some sites were Fiends are bound. They had enough contact with the Giants to give them *some* form of magic. The dragons have attacked Aerenal, en mass, multiple times. Why would dragons suddenly take an entirely hands-off approach to the events of Kourvaire, and start working only through intermediaries? The appearance of the dragonmarks? A sudden and precipitous drop in their power? Metallic dragons, in particular, have that 'alternate form' ability that's designed specifically for passing in a humanoid population. Why is it good enough for the Rakshasas to walk among the citizens of Kourvaire, but not for the Dragons? And frankly, I see the dragon-based classes as things that would crop up near dragons, but I'd balk at using them as agents. Dragon prophets and dragon shamen are definitely appropriate for dragon-worshipers like the Seren, and Dragon Disciples, paradoxically enough, point to a significantly more... overt... interaction between Dragons and humanoids than seems befitting such distant dragons. This whole thread reminds me somewhat of this Penny Arcade comic (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/13) about DDO.
Siran Dunmorgan 06-30-06, 12:06 PM	With respect to the discussion of the appropriate language or languages for arcane tomes, it is necessary to distinguish two classes of information: First, there are texts that grant circumstance bonuses to Knowledge (Arcana), or that provide guides to the performance of arcane magic. Second, there are texts that contain actual magic, e.g. spellbooks and scrolls. Texts of the first class can be written in any meaningful language. The history of Eberron suggests that the most common such texts are written in Common for the use of magewrights, spell hands, and other such low-level practitioners of arcana. More in-depth texts on the subject may be written in Old Common, the language of many arcane traditions of Sarlona before the settlement of Khorvaire, and the Inspired purge of arcane magic from Riedra. I hold that there are those among the Arcane Congress and its philosophical allies who believe that the antiquity of a text is proportional to its importance, and that, therefore, Old Giant[1] is the most popular language of first class arcane texts employed by this school; many of the masters and most senior students also know Draconic, about which more shortly. By contrast, the Twelve believes that magic is pointless if obscured, and that therefore the majority of first class texts employed at that institution are written in Common. They may be translations of Old Common or Giant, or Draconic texts, but the edition one pulls off of the bookshelf in the Twelve's library is probably the work of a House Sivis scribe working in Common. Few arcane texts are written in Goblin, since the goblinoids have little tradition of wizardry: the closest approximation to first class arcane texts in Goblin are traditional songs employed by the dirge singers in their bardic song abilities. The difficulty with Draconic texts is that they are only vaguely phonetic: the prayerbooks used by the Church of the Silver Flame,[2] for example, are written in Draconic only in the sense that the letters of Common are used to indicate or transcribe spoken Draconic for humanoid vocal apparatus. However, this approach is not useful for arcane texts, in which many more subtleties of the language are required. The "correct" written form of Draconic is similar to that portrayed in the description of the observatory in Explorer's Handbook: complex glyphs etched by claw into whatever surface is handy. This is not a writing style easily emulated by humanoids or giants, and the books that one encounters written in Draconic are either composed by humanoids, with humanoid sensibilities regarding the placement of glyphs on the page, or copies of texts written by dragons that often include marginal notes concerning the depth to which particular marks were etched, and the materials upon which they are inscribed, both of which are important for complete understanding. Draconic is distinctly not the language of the Prophecy, of which more anon. The second class of arcane texts are written in a language called "Arcane Magic." Player's Handbook describes this language as having been "discovered, not invented" by practitioners of the arcane arts, and to be the same language employed worldswide, e.g. a second class arcane text—a scroll of charm person, for example—written by a mind flayer sorceror on Xoriat can be read with trivial effort by a first level student wizard in Aundair.[3] This is dramatically different from the obscurity and puzzles posed by reading and correctly interpreting—for instance—a treatise on the reagent properties of basilisk fluids written by a mage of the Cor'dran Empire. There may be some overlap between the language of arcane magic and truenaming, however, since I've never read the Tome of Magic, I cannot speak to this relationship with authority. I can address the relationship between the language of the Prophecy and other languages such as Draconic: there may be one, but if so, it's rather obscure. Recall that the dragons themselves are at odds over the Prophecy, and have been since the time of the Progenitors. If the Prophecy were easily read or interpreted by the dragons, this would not be a significant issue. We—humans—can see parts of the "written" Prophecy, and try—in our arrogance—to pretend that the Prophecy can be written. But the glyphs that appear on cavern walls, or form in the clouds, or in dew-drops on a spiderweb, or write themselves upon the flesh of the dragonmarked are the least part of the prophecy: the glyphs themselves are only a part of an entire complex of factors. Looking only at dragonmarks—whether written upon living flesh, on cavern walls, or in the Ring of Syberis—and trying to interpret the Prophecy from them is similar to trying to read a more conventional text from only the punctuation marks. Some meaning can be conveyed this way; the sequence "?" "!" "..." provides the emotional content of a conversation well enough, but only a relative handful of concepts are amenable to this limited set of representative glyphs. In conclusion, as always, it's up to individual Dungeon Masters to decide which languages are useful for arcane purposes. However, official sources and the history of Eberron suggest that the most common language of arcane texts in Khorvaire is Common, followed by Old Giant, Old Common, and Draconic, roughly in that order. The Prophecy is in another language altogether. —Siran Dunmorgan [1] The popular name for the written language of the Dranhya culture of ancient Xen'drik. The Dranhya were the peoples who preceded the better-known Cor'dran Empire in precedence; though they shared a spoken language, the written form of Cor'dran is not phonetic, and much, much harder to interpret; the typical glyphbook spends perhaps ten percent of its text discussing Dranhya inscriptions, and nearly half on Cor'dran. The spoken language of modern Giants is closely related, though modern Giants who are capable of reading and writing their own language are rare; those who do usually employ a simplified form of the Cor'dran glyphs. [2] Official sources tell us that Draconic is the ecclesiastical language of the Church of the Silver Flame. I don't recall if this information is from the EBERRON Campaign Setting or from Five Nations, but it is official. In this form, Draconic is probably the second most common language in Thrane, after Common, according to official sources. [3] Given that the "scroll" in question might actually be inscribed in pulsing red veins on a blob of dark green slime, the Aundairian student might not enjoy interpreting the the text, but that's not the point: the point is that she can interpret it, and with far less effort than she can correctly interpret Draconic poetry. P.S. I have no official source for the Dranhya culture. I'm making it up by analogy, portraying the relationship between the Dranhya and the Cor'dran as a much-simplified version of the relationship between the Maya and Aztecs in our world.
xxxsammaelxxx 06-30-06, 12:15 PM	Its a matter of personal preference I guess. Im not saying my players will never meet a dragon, just that they generally have more pressing matters to attend to then the random wanderings of my now 8th level group of players. There out there, but obsured in mystery. My players view them with fear, awe and respect, and getting a chance to see/meet one is a big long term goal for a few of them. Its not something i want to rob them of by telling them the bard thats been travelling with them since level 5 actually was a dragon in disguise. Getting off a topic a bit tho...Veering right to get back on track... My Arcane Language is mechanically un-named (ie draconic or giant doesnt give you free read magic or anything), but for flavour purposes, it is based on Ancient Giant in my world. My view has been that 'OUR' (the pc's) magic has come from the giants (via the elves) so that would be the written form it would use.
Edymnion 06-30-06, 12:38 PM	I see I need to clarify my statements on dragons being like gods. I said "like gods in other settings", I was specifically thinking Faerun where its not unheard of to sit down and have morning tea with your god. I was not referring to the distant detatched gods of Eberron, but the nearly greek-like pantheon of meddling gods in other settings. Sure, Zeus likes to come down and knock up the natives while shaped like a goat, but most of the time he stays up in Olympus running things. While you could run into a Dragon, and the very powerful most definately have contact with dragons, they are not something that the common folk ever see. The party is not going to be fighting dragons or really even chatting calmly with them any more than your average party in Faerun is going to be fighting or chatting with Mystra on a frequent basis. What you do run into is agents of the Dragons in much the same way you would run into the devoted high priests and followers of a god in other settings. My dragons do not interact with Khovaire in direct overt methods. They don't fly over the continent making joyrides taking pot shots at the dirt farmers. When they want something done on Khovaire, they don't just plop their big scaley butts down in the middle of the palace courtyard and lay down their decrees. They are schemers, manipulators, working from behind the scenes and through their operatives to get what they want. My Dragons believe that direct action within the Prophesy is a bad idea, so they take indirect action instead. Are whites on the stupid and aggressive side? In their youth, yeah, but even a white gets suitable intelligence with age. So, they use whites for the same thing khovairians use the big strong and stupid people for, guard duty. I'm a big fan of the idea that meeting a Dragon in Eberron should invoke the same sense of awe as meeting a god in Faerun does. And that the dragons actually have a more or less unified culture in Argonessa, that they have a civilization and social structure that rivals if not surpasses that of Khovaire. That the traditional image of a dragon living in a cave lair would be the same as a human caveman living in a cave. If anyone watches Stargate SG1, I pattern my Eberron dragon personalities a bit after the Asguard. Superior, aloof, and all around mildly annoyed at having to lower themselves to interacting with inferior beings.
yrogerg 06-30-06, 03:09 PM	double-post
yrogerg 06-30-06, 03:12 PM	I see I need to clarify my statements on dragons being like gods. I said "like gods in other settings", I was specifically thinking Faerun where its not unheard of to sit down and have morning tea with your god. I was not referring to the distant detatched gods of Eberron, but the nearly greek-like pantheon of meddling gods in other settings. Sure, Zeus likes to come down and knock up the natives while shaped like a goat, but most of the time he stays up in Olympus running things. While you could run into a Dragon, and the very powerful most definately have contact with dragons, they are not something that the common folk ever see. The party is not going to be fighting dragons or really even chatting calmly with them any more than your average party in Faerun is going to be fighting or chatting with Mystra on a frequent basis. What you do run into is agents of the Dragons in much the same way you would run into the devoted high priests and followers of a god in other settings. My dragons do not interact with Khovaire in direct overt methods. They don't fly over the continent making joyrides taking pot shots at the dirt farmers. When they want something done on Khovaire, they don't just plop their big scaley butts down in the middle of the palace courtyard and lay down their decrees. They are schemers, manipulators, working from behind the scenes and through their operatives to get what they want. My Dragons believe that direct action within the Prophesy is a bad idea, so they take indirect action instead. Are whites on the stupid and aggressive side? In their youth, yeah, but even a white gets suitable intelligence with age. So, they use whites for the same thing khovairians use the big strong and stupid people for, guard duty. I'm a big fan of the idea that meeting a Dragon in Eberron should invoke the same sense of awe as meeting a god in Faerun does. And that the dragons actually have a more or less unified culture in Argonessa, that they have a civilization and social structure that rivals if not surpasses that of Khovaire. That the traditional image of a dragon living in a cave lair would be the same as a human caveman living in a cave. If anyone watches Stargate SG1, I pattern my Eberron dragon personalities a bit after the Asguard. Superior, aloof, and all around mildly annoyed at having to lower themselves to interacting with inferior beings. Okay. I think on that basic level, we're in agreement. Dragons, and particularly the Chamber, mainly influence the setting as schemers and manipulators. The should be the reason that, even if you can find a cleric who's willing to resurrect a PC for money and 'a favor later', you should be a bit concerned. Of course, one thing to keep in mind is the natural variations between the dragons: The most intellegent dragons: Golds, Silvers and Reds, are much better at this sort of machination, particularly with the help of the metallics' alternate form abilities. However, not all dragons are created equal; true, the rest of the metallics are pretty bright, as are the Blues and Greens, but Black dragons are slower than most of the rest, reaching Int 10 in the young stage, and White dragons don't reach average human intellegence until the Adult stage. If you use a point-buy system, it's likely that your INT-8 barbarian is still going to be as smart or smarter than a White until then. So, if there is room for the maurading, bestial dragons, it is there, and there alone. Though, as I said, I see them more concerned with gaining and collecting power, not treasure, even in those cases. One issue differnece between the way that you see dragons and I do is that one constant in Dragon society is a strong independence. Most dragons are solitary in nature, living alone. They seldom dwell with other dragons, and the few who bother with 'lesser' creatures mainly use them as servants and servitors (like the lizardfolk). They may confer and consult with each other on occasion, but they serve no one, and so I picture the young whites nontheless being allowed to go as they please, on the grounds that there's very little harm that they could do to the prophesy, particulary if they're not kept 'in the loop'. I also suspect that not every dragon- not even every super-intellegent dragon- buys into the whole 'prophesy' thing, and a number are probably too busy pursuing other interests to care about the Chamber. So, while I'd leave room for white dragons, and possible black dragons as well, to behave in this manner, I'd make sure to put them in remote places (as per their favored environments), and make them extremely, extremely, rare. And yes, later in life, whites and black dragons that work for the Chamber would probably take to guarding important locations like the one in Q'Barra. But, I do agree, none of this 'any type of dragon can go rogue for no reason at any time, and start eating villagers' nonsense. But again, I'm still wondering whether you think Draconic makes more, or less sense as the lingua franca of magic in other settings. It always seemed to me that a very powerful rationale was written right into the setting, between the progenitors, the prophesy, and the very active role of Dragons with the Giants and Elves. True, individual DMs can take it or leave it as they choose, but the rational still seems to exist, strongly, and my philosophy is generally to try to look for reasonable explanations that leave as little alteration to the rest of the material as possible.
Siran Dunmorgan 06-30-06, 05:39 PM	The preeminence of Draconic as the lingua franca of magic in most settings is a consequence of the tendency of real-world magicians (and the people who study them) to regard older texts as being intrinsically more important than more recent works on the same subject. The belief is that the closer one gets to the "source" of things, the more accurate the text.[1] In most worlds, Draconic is the oldest known language, and therefore texts written in Draconic take precedence in the study of the arcane. In the real world—lacking dragons—practitioners of the arcane place a similar reliance on Latin, Greek and Hebraic texts, with a few venturing into Sanskrit, Classical Egyptian, and Sumerian, this latter being the oldest written language of which we have yet found evidence.[2] I believe that in Eberron, this characterizes the attitude of the Arcane Congress, and of groups of wizards philosophically aligned to it: among such groups, yes, Draconic is probably the language of choice. This perspective is opposed by the Twelve, who do not regard the antiquity of a text as evidence either of its authority or of its accuracy. They agree that the arcanists of Xen'drik were capable of amazing feats, but the Twelve themselves are more interested in replicating the effect than they are in quibbling about the authenticity of the language in which the description of it is published: they have explorers and scholars in their employ who know Old Giant and Draconic, and much of their occupation is translating giant texts into Common for the benefit of modern researchers. Among the Twelve and its adherents, the most popular 'magical' language is Common. Draconic itself is hardly a 'hidden' language, given that every reasonably intelligent Priest or Priestess of the Silver Flame can speak it fluently. —Siran Dunmorgan [1] This perspective is opposed in the real world by magicians such as R. J. Stewart, who believe that actual understanding is an important principle in magical practice, and that one's native language is usually most effective for understanding. [2] The oldest Sumerian writing is only a little more than five thousand years old. For a sense of scale, consider that the arcanists of Xen'drik were in their heyday ten times longer ago than that; or that the Empire of Dhakaan existed as a coherent political entity for more than twice the entire span of human history in the real world.
yrogerg 06-30-06, 06:44 PM	The preeminence of Draconic as the lingua franca of magic in most settings is a consequence of the tendency of real-world magicians (and the people who study them) to regard older texts as being intrinsically more important than more recent works on the same subject. The belief is that the closer one gets to the "source" of things, the more accurate the text.[1] In most worlds, Draconic is the oldest known language, and therefore texts written in Draconic take precedence in the study of the arcane. In the real world—lacking dragons—practitioners of the arcane place a similar reliance on Latin, Greek and Hebraic texts, with a few venturing into Sanskrit, Classical Egyptian, and Sumerian, this latter being the oldest written language of which we have yet found evidence.[2] Well, it's even more than that; as I intimated, one view, which held traction among a number of early modern mystical traditions was the idea that antiquity not only related to authenticity, but that older languages were more *essential*, more *powerful*, due to its closer relation to said 'source'. This is why alchemists, for example, made significant use of Hebrew script. Using draconic in a similar way carves a fairly natural niche for Truename magic in Eberron, as the language of the progenitors. However, this is mostly a point of agreement between you and I. My point, however, is that the antiquity argument holds in Eberron just as much as in any other setting; the only non-draconic-speaking race that's walked on Eberron quite as long as the dragons have been the rakshasas. Moreover, by creating an organization and a powergroup for the dragons, giving them a mission, and explictly making them and the progenitor wyrms the source of arcane knowledge and arcane talent in the world, I always thought Draconic made *more* sense, as there's a whole lot more to point to than it just being a *very old* language, one that coincidentally also happens to be spoken by these lizards with wings that hoard treasure and breathe fire that the heroes spend a lot of time killing.
ArcTan 06-30-06, 07:51 PM	The second class of arcane texts are written in a language called "Arcane Magic." Player's Handbook describes this language as having been "discovered, not invented" by practitioners of the arcane arts, and to be the same language employed worldswide, e.g. a second class arcane text—a scroll of charm person, for example—written by a mind flayer sorceror on Xoriat can be read with trivial effort by a first level student wizard in Aundair.[3] I interpret this as part of the arcane qualities of the writing itself, though. Arcane writing, for whatever reason, has essential magical properties and holds magical power within itself. Hence the whole mechanical issue of memorizing/preparing spells from the spellbook, being able to cast a spell from a scroll, etc. I believe it was stated somewhere that two wizards' spellbooks may have completely different ways of notating the same spell in arcane writing, and that a wizard therefore can't simply use another's spellbook if he finds it -- he must laboriously scribe it into a form that he can use. I'm not sure how this bears on the whole language argument, except to say that arcane writing, like Truespeech in _ToM_, is probably a far more complex, precise and hard-to-learn language than any common language, and that if Draconic is related to "magic language", Draconic glyphs bear the same relationship to arcane writing as spoken Draconic does to Truespeech -- a simplified, debased version suitable for everyday conversation that doesn't cause things to explode when you say the word for "explosion". By the way, I really do enjoy the depth and complexity you're putting in your homebrew descriptions of Eberron languages and cultures. The successive dynasties of Giants and the comparison to the Maya and Aztec I particularly enjoy, especially if there's an implication that the slaveholding, world-destroying Giants were an aggressive power that superseded an earlier civilization and conquered its remnants, as with the Mexica and the ancient Maya. As with modern-day Mexico, the surviving pockets of Giant culture might be more likely to come from the satellite Dranyha settlements held in thrall to the Cor'dran capital, which would have born the full brunt of the Draconic invasion, just as most of the modern-day Mayan peoples survived the initial Spanish invasion and it was mostly the Aztec rulers at Tenochtitlan who were slaughtered by conquistadores.
yrogerg 07-19-06, 01:32 PM	Incidentally, there was a PrC in Races of the Dragon- the Dracolexi- that reads like it was the precursor to the idea of Truespeech: it gave draconic characters the ability to speak certain Draconic words to create spell-like effects. The flavor definitely reads like most of the Truespeech flavor, and gives credence to the idea that draconic was used largely with the thought of it being more primordial and more charged-with-magic than the other languages of the world well-in-mind. Like I said, I see Draconic as relating somewhat to how magic works, rather than just being another old language that some texts are written in. The Giants used some form of magic, yes, and even more powerful magic than exists today, but with the flavor I'm suggesting, Giant just wouldn't have the magic *potency* that Draconic would, and that's why Draconic is the lingua franca.