Q&A p.1 Languages question: I would provide a couple of examples to help make sure people are doing this right. A val from the Coryani Empire or Altheria would be a good choice, as would a character from the Hinterlands.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

Fair enough

My concern would be lack of choice for some characters. Your average (pas. Lo 2)human from the Hinterlands gets no actual choices as they are forced into picking national languages. The Hinterlands is the only current region that has this kind of issue, but I do think it needs to be considered.

It comes with the territory, living in a place... with such a huge mix of dialects.. you would learn those before others.

and Linguistics is not all that hard to pick up

why this limitation? i feel that it is in some way taking away the ability to freely choose what your PC knows. if i'm going to be able to choose what languages my passive logic gives me i don't want to be pigeonholed into having to take languages that I as a player would think that my PC would have no desire to know
i understand requiring a nations/race "primary" language, but if your yhing hir from the hinterlands and want to learn Milandisian (which oddly enough milandier has yhing hir as a national language), if im understanding the changes you would have to first learn 4- 5 other languages most of which may or may not be useful, then take milandisian, forcing a pc to have to take the linguistic skill. same could be said for any nation that has more then one "national" language. (as a real life example if i live in canada where some areas have both english and french as national language, and i speak primarily english i don't think i would be required to learn french before i learned spanish or german.) there are also some languages that just may not make sense or desired by a particular pc to know. the first stroy arc withstanding, there could be pcs who are milandisian that have no desire to learn yhing hir and vise versa, or humans from league of princess that would rather know high coryani rather then unden. i

if i remember correctly the universal trade language is Low Coryani yet only 4 of the legal starting nations have it as a base language. as such i think it would be more beneficial to say that all nations/races start off knowing the universal trade language.

Just looked over the errata..

I missed the addition of Milandisian to the Hinterlands....

I'll add it later tonight

I have to also disagree with this rule as written for RP reasons, but can back it up with an in-game example. Forcing the character to learn all of the languages spoken in their nation before being able to branch out doesn't make any realistic sense and is unnecessarily restrictive. If my character were to be from Milandir and live on the border to Almeric...why on Onara would he have been exposed to Yhing hir enough to learn it?

Example:
Exile/ Expatriate
Original nation: Hinterlands
Adopted nation: Unsealed Lands (could be allowed soon)
Now forced to learn all of the Hinterlands languages before you could learn the second Unsealed Lands' language.

Hi there

I look at it this way. Your starting languages are those you learned growing up by being exposed to. Not what you have actively gone out to learn. Taking the example Canada. You may be exposed to English and French as part of your childhood etc, so those are the ones you could take as a starting language. But if you wanted to know German, its not a language spoken in Canada so you would actively need to go out and learn it (investing in your linguistics skill).

As such I think the ruling makes sense as written.

But I would probably add Low Coryan as a default language option for the majority of nations (Maybe not Khitan when it becomes available or Abessios or Unsealed Lands)

Expiate / Exile background does give the player a national language of their adopted homeland, so does it also need to grant access to its starting languages?

I think the effective result of this change in ruling will be to have extremely few PCs from home nations with lots of national languages. Most (playable by PCs) nations have 1 or 2 national languages. The Hinterlands is the exception with 4 national languages.

So except for PCs whose concept is tied to the Hinterlands (e.g., Yhing Hir Shaman), we'll see extremely few (zero?) PCs from the Hinterlands.

I guess I'm curious why the original rule (you must take at least one language from your home nation) was insufficient... I think the above real world example was perfect - just because parts of Canadia (the 'i' was intentional) speak Canadian French, a citizen of Canadia isn't required to learn English and French before they can learn German.