3.a Melissa’s statblocks

Lesser Forest Troll

You are what you eat. Trolls absorb certain properties of whatever they eat. They also regenerate if they’ve recently eaten their staple diets. Forest trolls mostly eat wood and flesh making them relatively weak. They’ve got decent natural armour, but they’re vulnerable to fire and blight damage.

Level 3

Str: +4 Dex:+2 Con:+4 int: -1 wis: -2 cha:+0

HP: 60 AC:16 Speed: 30

Attacks

Club 2d6+2 bludgeoning

.Resistances: bludgeoning

Vulnerabilities: fire, blight

3.b Professor Stanton’s notes on linguistics

Written after discussion with Gorn while his translation spell was in effect. As such names are translated literally.

The lingua franca among most societies seem to be what’s known as the Trade Tongue or Common Tongue. In academic circles the language is formally known as Low Imperial. There are many different dialects of Low Imperial; but according to Gorn there is a standardised version used by merchants and travellers that is understood in large portions of the globe. Even in places where a dialect of Low Imperial is not the mother tongue, standardised Low Imperial is still commonly taught to the point where it is near universal in large portions of civilisation.

If this is true, and there is no reason to disbelieve the dwarf; it suggests a standardisation of language that should be impossible without some sort of central mechanism to ensure that language remains taught. Of course there are more modest analogues in Earth’s history. Koine Greek during the Hellenistic period, European languages in post-colonial societies, and many others.

But in most pre industrial examples these languages were used primarily among scholars and the elite. According to the dwarf the vast majority of human children grow up learning to speak some form of Low Imperial. And due to the widespread nature of humanity; Low Imperial is spoken by nations of gnomes, orcs, centaurs, gnollls, minotaurs, and many other people’s in addition to what languages those peoples speak.

I should note it is less common among dwarves. But even then; clans with regular contact with human nations tend to all be fluent in it. In some cases standardised Low Imperial is used to mediate between clans who use two unintelligible branches of Dwarvish. I think most of Earth’s linguists would consider dialects that alien to be separate languages. But Gorn seems to consider all languages spoken by dwarves to be Dwarvish.

It did occur to me that Low Imperial might just be a number of different languages spoken by humans. But Gorn assured me that while this might be the case for the Low Imperial dialects; standardised Low Imperial is a language with a vocabulary and grammar which has remained unchanged for thousands of years.

There is also a language called High Imperial which was spoken by an Empire which existed several thousand years before the development of Low Imperial. The translation rite used by Gorn calls it the Second Empire. The language is still in use by scholars and diplomats despite Low Imperial’s popularity everywhere else in society.

Lastly there is a language called True Imperial that was spoken by the gods during the First Empire and is now spoken only by priests and spellcasters during their rituals.

My linguist colleagues, if they ever had the opportunity to read this, would be relieved to note that High Imperial is a much more complex language than Low Imperial. High Imperial involved multiple genders, conjugations, tenses and tones that make learning it fairly difficult. Low Imperial has almost none of that. The conjugations have been stripped out entirely. Most objects are of neuter gender. Tone makes no difference.

The only thing remotely similar between Low Imperial and High Imperial is the vocabulary. And according to Gorn the same relationship exists between High Imperial and True Imperial. Which apparently makes learning the language of the gods a nightmarish endeavour.