KhorasForum

You just made my day!

I love this. This would make a great short story. 

Reading this topic again made me remember some ideas I'd like to share:

Maybe 10 years ago, some friends and fellow roleplayers and me went on a hiking trip, and late at night around campfire, we had a discussion about moral values of Orcs.

I claimed that "the history of Orc and Men is a history of misunderstanding".
I elaborated that Orcs are a bit like wolves...they have deadly weapons, so among themselves they develop a culture of NOT using them lethally.
Survival of the at-least-not-that-stupid...

So the Orcs have developed almost a language of its own in ritualized presentation of weapons. One way of holding a club could be translated as "I accept your claim on this territory, but will pass through it as I please", another gesture as "nobody defies my will".
Unfortunately, the rudest gesture of all Orcish gestures is - waving a bare hand. An Orc will translate it as "I do not consider you a warrior".
Unfortunately for those Humans that thought they'd be polite.

But Orcish reputation for attacking helpless travellers in wild fury has now been established as Human history.

I often thought that news/rumors about successful Huridian translation would make for a great adventure hook - or for a great background for a "sequel setting" some decades later!

I guess if Duthelm made serious progress, or even succeeded at translating, this might trigger a huge war, either with Duthelm attacking with new force, or by a huge anti-Duthelm alliance attacking.

Or rather the plot of the hapless commoner/thief/... stumbling upon a vital key to translation, not recognizing it as what it is, ending up hunted by agents from countless factions?

I guess if I was to implement such a setting, I would use the Mandalar (like I often would)....they guard the secret without knowing it, and now just about everyone wants to invade them...

Khoras is a world full of inspiration

Thanks for searching, David!  4 hours - I didn't mean to take so much of your time, but thank you - I appreciate it.

All good and I'll prepare my own interpretation :-).

Bad news, I'm afraid. Despite a thorough four hour search through the vault, I was unable to find it. That map may yet turn up one day, but not today. For now, you'll have to craft your own. Sorry about that.

One day I'm going to return to the Avisarr campaign and do a very thorough overall and update of the entire thing - with better maps, better graphics and so forth. But I have several big projects I'm working on right now that I have to finish first, so it'll have to wait.

Thanks, appreciate it!

There was definitely a lot of knowledge lost when the Sundering occurred and in the Great War that followed. The Alliance (and many of their contemporaries) had vast magical knowledge which was much more powerful than the magic of the current era. However, the Sundering, World Storm and Great War, including a backlash against wizards and magic in general, wiped out most of that "greater" knowledge.

Also, the Alliance used a magical writing system, Huridian, which survives today but is unreadable. It is essentially a "dead language" and has defied all attempts to translate it. Within those crumbling scrolls are mountains of lost knowledge.

And yes, as those who have been around the Khoras forum for awhile and read other conversations on the matter already know, there are two wizards who have successfully translated Huridian. Morlokk and Tolkarus. Each was independently successful in translating Huridian. Neither has made their achievement public knowledge.

I admit that the Races section of Khoras is a bit messy. In truth, that's because it is one of the oldest sections in the entire world, written when I was much younger. It certainly warrants some attention and some "clean up". I think it could be organized better. I will devote a monthly spotlight to it.

It'll have to wait a few months though, but I'll get to it eventually.

There was a map, long ago. A couple years ago, a friend of mine ran the Avisarr campaign on his group of players down in California. He asked about the map of the buried ruins and I looked, but couldn't find it at the time. Somewhere over the years, it got lost. I will look again and see if I can find it...