Today I will be digging a bit into the depths of my basement, to explain to those interested the story behind what I recently posted in the Many Waters blog. (Note: that blog post is now deleted for various reasons, but this post should not suffer much from it.)
Many years ago, when through winding paths I discovered the existence of tabletop roleplaying, I took the whole thing very seriously. In this I was joined by my best friend, who continues to be perhaps the purest example of a *role player* I know. That is why for the first campaign I ever GMed, there exist a substantial amount of documents revolving around his PC and her once-best-friend mortal enemy.
The campaign, made up as it was of us two and our respective little brothers (one of whom was probably too young and one of whom didn't care for the narrative style) crashed and burned rather quickly, so that the story never really developed. But I retained the things he and I wrote, through multiple computer changes, and recently found them again.
The exact nature of their relationship, weird and setting-specific as it was, need not concern us here; suffice to say that they were, throughout their youth, very close, until they by accident managed to bring supernatural calamity onto their tribe. For this trespass the friend alone was blamed, and cast out from her village, whereupon she was quickly picked up by slavers and sold into prostitution. The rest of her story may be taken from the above blog post.
But I am not here to talk about what happened, I am here to talk about the metadata. Keen observers with either psychic powers or eidetic memory will note that the names of both the PC (Raja) and the friend (Vaha) take the shape CVCV, and that the latter happens to be the Jalvaan word for "moon". The former happens to be a custom of their people (although of course the original specification called only for four letters). The latter is maybe more interesting.
Of course, the name of the character precedes the Jalvaan word by some time, given that I did not set about making this my first conlang until some time later. It is of note that Jalvaan was originally intended to be an extinct literary language (which explains perhaps why it was originally a strange fennolatin), the sort you would find magically inscribed stelae in if you went looking in the right places (so, in other words, the dialogue here referenced would never have happened in this way; they would have spoken something else instead). As Vaha always had moon-themed powers, I retconned her name into being taken from this ancient word for "moon". This would, of course, have required her to have a different original name, but that never materialized as the campaign died.
So, that was that. If you're still here, thank you for finding it interesting!
P.S. Vaha in fact even had a theme song.
Many years ago, when through winding paths I discovered the existence of tabletop roleplaying, I took the whole thing very seriously. In this I was joined by my best friend, who continues to be perhaps the purest example of a *role player* I know. That is why for the first campaign I ever GMed, there exist a substantial amount of documents revolving around his PC and her once-best-friend mortal enemy.
The campaign, made up as it was of us two and our respective little brothers (one of whom was probably too young and one of whom didn't care for the narrative style) crashed and burned rather quickly, so that the story never really developed. But I retained the things he and I wrote, through multiple computer changes, and recently found them again.
The exact nature of their relationship, weird and setting-specific as it was, need not concern us here; suffice to say that they were, throughout their youth, very close, until they by accident managed to bring supernatural calamity onto their tribe. For this trespass the friend alone was blamed, and cast out from her village, whereupon she was quickly picked up by slavers and sold into prostitution. The rest of her story may be taken from the above blog post.
But I am not here to talk about what happened, I am here to talk about the metadata. Keen observers with either psychic powers or eidetic memory will note that the names of both the PC (Raja) and the friend (Vaha) take the shape CVCV, and that the latter happens to be the Jalvaan word for "moon". The former happens to be a custom of their people (although of course the original specification called only for four letters). The latter is maybe more interesting.
Of course, the name of the character precedes the Jalvaan word by some time, given that I did not set about making this my first conlang until some time later. It is of note that Jalvaan was originally intended to be an extinct literary language (which explains perhaps why it was originally a strange fennolatin), the sort you would find magically inscribed stelae in if you went looking in the right places (so, in other words, the dialogue here referenced would never have happened in this way; they would have spoken something else instead). As Vaha always had moon-themed powers, I retconned her name into being taken from this ancient word for "moon". This would, of course, have required her to have a different original name, but that never materialized as the campaign died.
So, that was that. If you're still here, thank you for finding it interesting!
P.S. Vaha in fact even had a theme song.