Bay 12 Games Forum

Final Fantasy IV: Machine Translated Edition

Ancient Aliens had an Assassin's Creed crossover?

My last Pathfinder game here slowly died due to a combination of lack of updates, lack of responses, and a gradual decline in interest. That's fine, sometimes things just don't work out, I'll try something else, someday I'll run something that progresses beyond the second fight or so. That's not what I'm vaguely sad about.

What I'm vaguely sad about is that I cannot seem to pick a theme for my next world building project. One day, I want to do a Thirty Years' War-style setting. The next morning I'll wake up and try to make a late Sengoku/possibly Edo Japan-themed setting. I'll have lunch and get cracking on a Ming China-inspired setting. I'll head to sleep after browsing Wikipedia articles about the Ottoman Empire to help make a setting based on that. It's been these four ideas that keep on juggling around in my head, albeit with smaller ideas (the ones I can remember off the top of my head being Safavid Iran, late 1500s Malaysia and Indonesia with bits of Polynesia, and early modern Ethiopia) tossed in here and there for a couple hours or so.

I'm loathe to try to combine these concepts in any significant way, because I'm terrible at mixing dissonant things, and the reason I keep switching between ideas is because I like the style or feel of each individual source of inspiration. It's a relatively specific time period (roughly 1580 to 1650) I'm interested in, partly because I'm more familiar with it and partly because I don't see that kind of thing written into fantasy settings too often. If nothing else, I take consolation in the fact that the roughly similar magic level and vagueness about the presence and power level of deities means that I can write them all into being part of the same setting, so in a distant way anything I come up with enriches the setting a little bit regardless of what I pick in the end.

I just wish I could stick to an idea, really. My last game died in part because my interest in the early Middle Ages waned; the one before that, because my interest in the Victorian era waned (although, bluntly, I half-assed that setting. Those were the days when I used random world generators... eep.) And I don't want to write a book, because I want an interpersonal experience, where other people interact with the world as I build it, not long after I've finished it.

That gave me an idea.

So, this is a bit unorthodox for the thread, but I want to ask for a recommendation. I've seen most people agree that Kingdom of Heaven is a mediocre or bad movie. But I've heard nothing but good things about the director's cut of the movie--have any of you seen it? Would you recommend the director's cut?

Just out of curiosity:
- What culture is the Emperor of Hispania? I almost never see them without a dynasty name superimposed.
- For that matter, what culture is the King of Sweden? The update broke the Scandinavian cultural title names, and I always used to see Poles and Lithuanians conquer the Vikings in the early starts.
- The dark stuff near Ruthenia--is that a Ruthenian revolt, or someone else?
- What's up with the Orthodox provinces in Western Europe?
- Any idea how Hispania has a couple provinces in Khorasan and how Finland owns land in Tibet?

Today, I realized just how useless Japanese Google Translate is. Its first response to practically anything is the English word written in katakana--translating "dragon", for example, told me that the Japanese word is "doragon"--and as a side effect, it appears to misread almost anything written in katakana as an English approximation. A great way to show this is how Japanese Wikipedia articles get nonsensical translation results, like the page for rat being titled "caterpillars" on the page and "rattus rats" on the tab; the title for caterpillar, meanwhile, becomes "cemetery" and "chemistry".

It's not even consistent in how it translates the katakana. King Lear becomes "Leah", "Liah", and "Leia" throughout the page for no apparent reason.

A feast for crows