Necropolitans, episode 77: We do have a great working relationship

Jaal and Iris apply the left- or right-hand rule, whichever they remember at the time, in Episode 077: We do have a great working relationship. I'm sure consistency isn't important.

I sneak in some linguistics fun here. Having devised an ancient Dwarven civilisation that the PCs have no historical record of at all, it made sense to me that the human civilisations that developed after them - recovering from the cataclysm of Earthfall - would naturally borrow their writing system. Thus, the ancient forms of Dwarven are also ancestral to the not-quite-so-ancient human script used for the Jistkan language, which eventually became many of the modern dialects of "Common". At various points in the campaign where very ancient languages appear, I also apply penalties or otherwise make it difficult for even Jaal, who as a wizard can know just about every language, to immediately understand everything.

I'll be honest, part of me frankly dislikes the ease with which RPG characters can normally pick up languages (or get around it entirely using magic, which is trivial by about 3rd level). It detracts from the mystery of the ancient world, for me, and there's also an aspect of my own language-learning experience crashing against suspension of disbelief: I don't care how intelligent a PC is, they simply cannot learn twenty languages fluently in the space of a few months, that's not how languages work. We've all got our quirks...

When I say "the guy from 3,000 years ago" I actually mean "5,000 years ago", but there was confusion about the current campaign date for a while.

"Are you actually telling him you want to become a lich?" - recurring questions for Jaal.

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2. Episode 001: Character Generation
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4. Episode 007: Screaming blue murder from his waist (start of Castaways)
5. Episode 023: Everyone knows that mummy octopi are not scared of cooking (start of Nautical Shenanigans)
6. Episode 027: The crumpling noise you can hear was Book 2 (start of Nameless Ancients)
7. Episode 049: Mint Ice Cream (start of Trouble in Cheliax)
8. Episode 067: Or we'll come and eat you and your children (start of Road to Rachikan)