[Mystara: Thorn's Chronicle] New Blackmoor thumbnail

[RobJN]

In going through my notes, I stumbled across this, which is partially gleaned from a posting over at the Piazza, and then what look like afterthoughts that I whipped up... um... afterwords.

Enjoy!

So, you're a scion of the royal family of Blackmoor (this is New Blackmoor, by the way, which lies in a complex of caverns along the rim of the ice-covered glass-sided crater which is most* of what is left of Old Blackmoor).

Cut off from the rest of the Known World by said ice, magical radiation, and the belief that nobody could have survived the catastrophe, you do what people do best: dust yourselves off and rebuild. Over the thousands of years, much is forgotten of the Old ways, stories become legends, and -- as a result of living underground amongst ice and lingering magical radiation, the people change slightly, shifting towards fairest-of-the-fair skintones, white, blonde, gray, and occasionally silver hair coloring.

Everything is hunky-dory for the most part, life carries on like usual, what with the earthquakes, oddly mutated monsters roaming about, and the constant incursions of Afridhi death cultists, intent on finishing what they began with the Great Rain of Fire: wiping out Uther's line and releasing the seals on the device holding their demonic sovereign and his host at bay, thus allowing them to enslave every last sentient creature on the face of the Known World. (everyone's got to have a hobby, right?)

So, in the darkest hours of the night, cultists breach the Newcastle. Alarms are sounded and the household is roused, but the King is grievously wounded holding off assassin's knives. He buys time while his only daughter, last of the line, flees with her handmaidens down one of the Lightning Roads, fading into so much gray mist, to arrive.... Elsewhere...

So (as we said in the beginning), there you are, scion of the House of Andahar, lost somewhere on the continent of Brun. How would you communicate? What kind of language drift can three thousand years of isolation wreak on a Common tongue?

Having seen (but not studied in any depth) the gaps in syntax, spelling, and meaning in just a few centuries worth of drift between Old English and modern English, I wonder how different an "Old Blackmoor" speaker would be regarded amongst the "modern" Known Worlders. Would there be any sort of similarity? One word in, say, 10? 5? 100?

Yes, I know there is the whole comprehend languages spell thing to iron out all those wrinkles, but perhaps one of the lingering effects of the magical radiation of Lost Blackmoor is that those such spells... simply won't work, sliding around the unfortunate like water around a rock along the riverbed.

For the Sake of Plot, I've posited that Old Blackmoorian is closer to Ancient Elvish than any of the modern tongues, and of course, there are only a few fluent enough** in the language to hold a decent conversation with the Scion. The written form of language for New Blackmoor is Ancient Elvish, as those books were nearly all they were able to salvage in the hundreds of years following the Great Rain of Fire.


* The blast centered on, but did not destroy, a device that has come to be known as Andahar's Bane: a conglomeration of brightly polished metal cylinders and spheres whirling about each other, chased by blue-white lightning, all of which surrounds a slowly spinning ring of silver and platinum as wide as a storm giant's shoulders. The silvery gateway yawns to darkness -- as though a portal to nothingness. It functions much the same: the portal leads to Nowhere, a dimensional void, tuned to perfect asynchronization with the demonic plane upon which the Afridhi's demonic patron lives, sealing it away from Mystara.

** Nobody fluent in Ancient Elvish, with Alfheim right around the corner?? Alas, yes, in my version of the Known World, the elves sacrificed themselves to seal the borders of Alfheim and contain Illodius' demonic horde. Some say the fortunate visitors to the Haunted Forests are those who do not return, as those who do are maimed in body, mind, and spirit.