Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update.
Good news to report to y'all this morning. Thanks to a very concerted effort on my part over the course of the last two weeks, I can report that - after eight solid months of work - Tarakh'ga, Chapter 2.1 of the Elegy campaign is finally 100% complete and ready for proofreading. I spent much of the week of the 23rd doing the translation work, completing a total of 48 text blocks. As the translation work progressed, I took some time each day to add any new generated and re-purposed terms to the translation table, which in several cases made certain words available for use later on in the Chapter. May 25th in particular was a busy day, with twelve blocks translated just that day alone. I did have a freak-out moment that same day, though, when I thought I had two terms missing from the K-E Lexicon, but it turns out I'd merely misspelled them when I went to search for them in the table (an understandable mistake, given how many freakin' times the letter "k" and the letter "h" appears in most Kilrathi words). I also briefly thought that I'd been using certain pronouns incorrectly (again on the 25th), specifically the Singular Objective / Non-Possessive forms as subjects of a sentence, and that it was going to require an effort to go back through the translation work and correct the offending terms with the formal voice pronouns. I realized by the end of that day that things were as they should be, so I probably dodged an annoying bullet there. On Friday the 27th, I crossed the halfway point of the remaining translation work.
After taking Monday off for Memorial Day, I spent much of this past week doing the same thing in the same way. This past Wednesday was the most productive single day of the entire past two weeks, with twenty-two text blocks completed and another fourteen blocks partially translated, representing the remaining text in the Chapter. I went ahead and added a couple of idiom dictionaries to my set of translation tools that same day. It's a tricky thing to find idioms and colloquialisms before I translate them; I'm sure more than a few up to this point have been given literal translations, though I'm hopeful the new tools will help curtail their usage in the future. And I might keep a few: such phrases add flavor to any language and Kilrathi shouldn't be an exception. After finishing the generation of terms on Thursday and adding the remaining such terms to the lexicon, I plugged them into the remaining bits of text as needed, completing the work. Over these past two weeks and the 95 total text blocks translated, a total of 80 new terms were added to the lexicon with 180 terms re-purposed, corresponding to 595 reverse terms. I can't really guarantee that the re-purposed count doesn't include some duplications; I'd be surprised if it didn't. I also didn't really need to generate that many terms; I may have mentioned to y'all recently that I'd added a thesaurus to my list of linguistic tools (at least, I recall mentioning that to y'all but I can't find anywhere where I actually did it). Many of the reverse terms grew out of having the availability of synonyms to the words I was translating, so while I may not have needed those terms now, I will have them available to me in the future. I did decide to go ahead and count the number of entries on the lexicon tables to see how the Kilrathi language compares in terms of total vocabulary to other constructed language at this point; it has been a while since I've done such a count. As of Thursday morning, there are a total of 1,603 Kilrathi words corresponding to 3,646 English words. For comparison, there are roughly 900 root terms in Esperanto (though those can be combined with enough affixes and qualifiers to generate a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words) and roughly 3,000 in Klingon (I don't know if there's a 1:1 correlation between English and Klingon terms or not, so I don't know exactly how it compares). It certainly seems like my ultimate goal of constructing a viable conversational/literary Kilrathi language, if not fulfilled at this point, is pretty near close.
Some work did take place on the next Chapter of Elegy, Dekh aq T'kon H'hra, over these past two weeks, mainly in terms of dialogue for both the prologue and epilogue of that mission. I have a rather humorous conversation planned between Nagkilin and the leader of the pirate base that Bloodeye and his crew go to in order to get a crew, and there is the scene in the prologue where we get to meet Ku'a K'le's lair-mate (Mo) for the first time. Let's just say that she's not thrilled with the notion of her spouse being in with a bunch of a) commoners and b) nascent pirates. I did make some progress on the T'kon Meth encounter this past Friday, changing things up where instead of the encounter happening on both branches of the mission it only happens on the "correct" path, and which may make getting through the Valgard system much easier for the players if they happen to get it right. I still need to re-structure the encounter; instead of having the choice of which path to take at the end of that encounter, it now happens at the beginning. With work on 2.1 finished, I'll be able to turn my full attention to 2.2 this coming week, and I'm hopeful that I might be able to knock this particular encounter out.
That's largely my Plan for this week - to begin turning my attention to 2.2 in earnest. I have largely worked out the details of the T'kon Meth encounter and I need to get that encounter re-structured, and that effort has indirectly helped me with the events of the Valgard encounter. I still need to work on the details of the Kabla Meth encounter at this point; I hope to be able to get to that in the near future. Much of the draft dialogue of the prologue and epilogue has been written at this point, and I might be able to get to the point where useful work on constructing the narrative of both sections can begin. Finally, there's still the outstanding work that needs to be done on the Demon's Eye base; I've only been sitting on that for a few months now, and it'd probably be really easy for me to finish up if I'd just take the time to sit down and do it. I suppose that it could wait until work on Chapter 2.3 begins in earnest, but that could be months from now and if I take care of it now, that's one less thing I'd have to deal with in the future.
Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z next Monday, June 13th. Y'all have a pleasant week.
