Re: Conlangs in RPGs...

On Mon, 15 Jan 2001, Eruanno none wrote:

> My langauge I am intending to put into my story and all my RPGs ( video and
> paper+pencil ).
Yeah--Chevraqis is at heart a story-language, which means I don't feel
quite as obliged to do something New and Neat and Experimental with it;
it's meant to be quasi-naturalistic, or at least naturalistic enough that
if I can ever finish _Origami Souls_ and sell it to a publisher, a
conlanger or linguist won't automatically go "BLECCH!" at the
foreign-language phrases, names, etc.

> I really have never been able to play a pencil+paper kind of RPG and would
> love to learn how.
> Namaarie,
> Eruanno
Easiest way is to hunt down a local group of roleplayers--er, where are
you, BTW?  considering the multiplicity of home-locations I always forget
where people are from!--and ask them if they're willing to take on a
newbie.  In the U.S. I've found that walking around with the Player's
Handbook from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons will inevitably lead to a)
random people asking me, "Don't you know that's Satanic?" <snort> and b)
roleplayers coming up to chat with me, since AD&D, even if it's a lousy
system, is one of the most-recognized (I suppose these days the White
Wolf games and so on would also do).  If you hit a game/hobby store
(assuming they exist--they don't, per se, in South Korea), they may also
have advertisements by local gamers, or know people they can put you in
touch with.

If that doesn't work, you can try play-by-email games online;
http://www.pbem.com updates its listings regularly.  Many of them have
setting/background information on some website; some require that you're
already familiar with the system they're using (e.g. AD&D, Das Schwarze
Auge, Shadowrun, whatever), some are willing to teach newbies their
system, and some are run "freeform" (without mechanics).  While people
used to tabletop often find PbEM painfully slow (since everything has to
be written out, it's *much* slower than tabletop), it's not a bad way to
get your feet wet.  It probably saved my gaming sanity while I was in
Korea (there are roleplayers among the U.S. military, but I didn't have
base access anyway).

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
YHL