Let's Build a PIE Conlang 1: Intro + First Word

TLN sent me this ages ago

I have been deep-diving on Proto-Indo-European linguistics for the last year for Conlang Reasons, which has filled me with useless knowledge that makes me very fun at parties. Now, after many false starts and nigh-constantly running up against one wall or another, I have returned from the depths with treasures. And / or eyes on the inside.

0. Prelude to the Introduction

The first thing to get out of the way is this: PIE studies are bullshit (slightly affectionate) for reasons you will hear a lot about; the second thing is that this rabbit hole is so deep I am bumping elbows with Tsathoggua, which makes for blogposts bogged down in tedious explanations of each and every weird thing in a desperate attempt to make any of this chicanery make any sense at all.

So as to avoid dumping everything on y’all all at once, for this post I’m only going to do an introduction with my goals & design principles, and then go through an example word sound-by-sound to show how I got from the abstracted reconstructed version to the conlang proper.

Third and potentially most important thing to get out of the way first: there is no “true” PIE; there was a dialect continuum spoken by some Eurasian steppe nomads, and that dialect continuum drifted and fragmented over thousands of years as its speakers spread out across west-central Asia, India, and Europe. Reconstructions of PIE are an abstraction used to describe a language we have no attestation for; they’re closer to algebraic formulas than an actual language, and they are algebraic formulas composed with limited data, bias, best guesses, academic dogmatism, outright crankery, occasional bits of insight, and every other skew you can possibly think of. Ceci n'est pas une *h₁éḱwos.

This is made infinitely more frustrating by PIE reconstructioneers (this is the official technical term) and lay linguists alike using “Proto-Indo-European” to describe the reconstructed language-abstraction and the real historical language(s) interchangeably, despite the former being a work of artifice set in amber outside of time and the latter being three goblins and a horse in a trenchcoat. I myself will be guilty of this, but I will try not to be by saying "when I say how something works in PIE, I am talking about how linguists think real!PIE worked according to how they have built reconstructed!PIE like some sort of word-demiurge, not how it actually worked in reality". 

 

General time periods will be named according to a schema of my own devising.

• Homsar Hol - Prior to the divergence of my as-yet unnamed language family; “Pre-Indo-European” or “Pre-Indo-Anatolian”
• Strongbadian PIE - Prior to the divergence of the Anatolian languages from the core continuity; “Proto-Indo-Anatolian”, “Proto-Indo-Hittite”, or “Early PIE”.
• Strongmadian PIE - An era of significant differentiation between core and fringe speakers; “Middle PIE”
• Strongsadian PIE - Total dissolution of the core speaking community, dialectal continuity completely lost by this stage; “Late PIE”.

Branches and their lower-order reconstructions aren’t really going to show up here, so I will just use their normal names.

Now with all that out of the way, let’s get inside baseball.

1. Introduction

Emboldened by the flame of ambition, this project began with two must-haves:

1. It was going to belong to its own branch of the greater Indo-European family (and likely become very weird because of it)
2. I wanted to retain the infamous mystery-consonant laryngeals in some form.

Point 2 immediately gave me no shortage of issues, because outside of a few edge cases in Iranian and Armenian the only descendants to retain laryngeals are the Anatolian languages; Anatolian languages are so divergent from all the others that you need to consider pre- and post- Anatolian split as wholly different stages of the PIE continuum deserving of wholly different reconstructions (Strongbadian vs Strongmadian PIE), which the mainstream reconstruction doesn’t bother to do. So I ended up having to trudge through material that is bogged down in features that didn’t exist at the time I wanted to split my language off from the whole.

(Granted, good data for this sort of thing is even harder to come by than the usual, and historical linguistics is an extremely slow-to-adapt field).

It does not help, and this one is entirely on me, that I was using Wikipedia for most of my research: Wikipedia’s PIE pages are abyssmal. Outdated, contradictory, poorly-written and inadequately explained, they will teach you the wrong things and then you will have to waste a considerable amount of time unlearning all the horseshit. Don’t do what I did.

1.2 Brief List of Sources

I’ll have a longer writeup later on down the line: the bulk of my inspiration thus part has come from the work of Martin Kümmel, Andrew Byrd (he made Wenja for Far Cry Primal), Paul Kiparsky (primarily for his Compositional Theory), the blogs Paleoglot (Glen Gordon), PhDniX’s Blog (PhoeniX), and protouralic.wordpress (J Pystynen), some random bullshit I found on reddit, and The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by Mallory & Adams. I'll try and update this as I continue.

1.3 Core Premise & Design Principles

I am for the time being painting the speakers in broad strokes, and will have to be content with worldbuilding as I go.  

• The speakers diverged from the main language continuity extremely early, leading to a language that doesn’t include many of the features later PIE stages are known for, and retains several major parts that were lost.
• The point of divergence was sometime between █████ and ████ BC.
• The speakers’ culture runs orthogonal to the patriarchal horse-based murder that characterized much of the later PIE culture group(s), and they may or may not have even remained in this world.
• I am not going to worry overmuch about where the vocabulary comes from, at least not at the moment; while I will try to stick to words with more solid / widespread attestation, some might time travel to before their invention.
• The rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

The early point of divergence gives me some guidelines to follow with the actual content of the grammar: it’s going to retain features that were lost entirely in other branches (or only survived as scattered and unproductive archaisms), and it’s going to sidestep the development of some signature features of later stages of the family. As of right now, that’s going to include:

• The laryngeal consonants (which are not actually laryngeals) are retained.
• Active-stative alignment rather than nominative-accusative alignment
• No grammatical gender; animate / inanimate distinction is only semantic at this point, not morphological.
• No thematic endings (or at least not in the way they are typically reconstructed.)
• Pre-syncope - This language is set before the stress-based syncope obliterated most of the vowels in the Great Dying / Vowel Mass Extinction / Schwapocalypse / the Fuckening.
• No ablaut - or at the very least, I’m going with Paul Kiparsky’s Compositional Theory if I need to, because I can grok it much easier.
• No vowels in hiatus - This is pretty well established in PIE, vowels that are next to each other either merge into a long vowel, have a glide inserted between them, or turn into a glide.
• No geminate consonants - Also well established in PIE.
• Everything's got to start with a consonant, but that includes the glottal stop so it's basically cheating - this is in line with modern ideas of root constraints, though for my purposes roots don't also have to end with a consonant.
  

Don’t worry if you don’t have a fucking clue what I am talking about here, we’ll get to it eventually.

Principle 0: Art over accuracy
As I said in part 0, accuracy is a mug’s game in historical linguistics. I’ve aimed for the sweet spot of “coherent enough to make sense” and “I personally like it”, with the latter taking priority in cases where I need to decide. This is an art project based on half-baked amateur linguistics and the power of Pattern Recognition, nothing more. (To be honest, I had to enforce this principle on myself just to stop the what-if rabbit-holing and decision paralysis.)

Principle 1: The Two-Step Plan
I want to do two distinct stages of this language: the one I’m going to be describing here is the older of the two, which is intended to be pretty close to the core Strongbadian PIE dialect. The later one is where we go off the rails.

Principle 2: Areal features yes, macrofamilies no
There was absolutely cultural and linguistic exchange going on between the peoples of east Europe / west Asia: that does not mean that their languages are connected via descent from a shared origin. I will pillage loan words and grammatical features from Proto-Kartvelian, Proto-Caucasian, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Semitic if I think there’s something neat, but I’m not designing this conlang to align with the Indo-Uralic, Pontic, or Nostratic theories (note: these are all varying levels of fringe, and I only recommend looting them for creative purposes.)

Principle 3: Crank Credits
Sometimes the cranks have a good idea or two; these will be called out with the cashing in of a Crank Credit™. I don’t expect many of them, because the reasonable ideas are few and far between and the entertainingly bonkers ones are somehow even rarer. (I did find one guy I found who somehow managed to turn recon!PIE into Earthsea magic, though it is not as cool or useful as you would hope.)

(Fun fact: there is absolutely no requirement whatsoever for anything uploaded to Academia.edu to have any connection to an institution of higher learning or a peer-reviewed publication.)
 

Principle 4: Moderation in laryngeals
I am going into this project with the presumption that zealous reconstructioneers overuse laryngeals as an inconsistency-solving tool. *h₂ cannot possibly be that common and be a single phoneme, that’d make what is probably a uvular fricative the second or third most common consonant in the language and that is bonkers.

Principle 5: *a definitely existed
We’ll get to this one. 

Principle 6: Symbol Usage
I will be marking normal reconstructions with the usual asterisk like *so, and I will mark my own bespoke Pre-PIE reconstructions with two **asterisks. This will be strictly in reference to explaining how things from my version of recon!PIE changed to get to traditional recon!PIE.

 X < Y means “X derived from Y”; X  > Y means “X turns into Y”

I promise this is the end of the set up.

2. *h₁n̥gʷnís

First and most important thing (I'm really saying that a lot, aren't I): this isn’t actually one of the PIE words for fire; This is a formula representing one of the PIE words for fire. Think of every letter here as an algebraic variable that, if you apply the right sequence of functions to it, will become words like Sanskrit agni and Latin ignis. If you had a time machine, popped into a settlement of Eurasian steppe nomads, pointed at the campfire and said “*h₁n̥gʷnís!” you’d get some very strange looks but if the reconstruction is solid the confused steppe nomads would probably figure out that you meant “fire” and correct your gods-awful pronunciation.

(Granted, that’s dependent on them being from one of the dialects that used *h₁n̥gʷnís in the first place: it’s the less common of the two.)

2.1.1: Basic Structure

*h₁n̥gʷnís can be broken down into component parts:

• h₁engʷ- ; a root with a general meaning of “to burn” or “fire”.
•  -n- ; An extension added to the root of entirely unknown function: it’s here in *h₁n̥gʷnís, but missing from the related *h₁óngʷl̥ (“charcoal” or “embers”). It might be part of the suffix?
• -i- ; A suffix that makes animate nouns out of verbs or adjectives.
• -s ; The nominative singular case ending

2.1.2: h₁

Starting off strong we get one of the mystery laryngeal consonants; these are sounds (that are not actually laryngeals) that were lost in all IE languages (save the Anatolian languages, a few edge cases in Iranian and Albanian, and this weird thing called the Triple Reflex in Greek) but we know that they were there because they influenced nearby vowels (and sometimes consonants). There are normally three laryngeals reconstructed, sometimes four, but some people have gone as low as 1 (highly unlikely) and as high as 10 or 12 (also unlikely, but less unlikely when framed as h₁, h₂, and h₃  encompassing multiple sounds each)

h₁ is the easy one, because it doesn’t have much going for it: it lengthened vowels, it didn’t have any coloring effect on *e (the others did, more on that eventually), it sometimes turned into e in Greek, and it vanished in all descendents (including Anatolian). Nearly all reconstructioneers plug it in as either *h or *ʔ, since those sounds fit all the criteria: I’m going to be going with the glottal stop ʔ (for the time being, stick a pin in that).

Word Progress: ʔ-

2.1.3: n̥

That little dot means that this is a syllabic resonant - a consonant that can serve as the nucleus of a syllable in place of a vowel. English has them all over the place (It’s why “little” is two syllables) and they’re not particularly difficult to wrangle. Syllabic consonants are almost always the result of a nearby vowel being reduced and / or deleted, and we can clearly see that the root h₁engʷ- has a vowel in it: this is an example of ablaut, which is when vowels change and carry different meanings when they do (English sing-sang-sung is an example of ablaut).

In this case, since the stress is on the *í, the *e got reduced/deleted because there was a resonant to pick up the slack. But since my language doesn’t have stress-based deletion as part of ablaut, it’s going to stay as **en.

Vowels in PIE reconstructions are a 50 gallon drum of worms that I am going to save for another time: for now, I am going to say that *e isn’t actually /e/ most of the time, and was probably closer to the ɛ, ə, ɐ, or æ - something weakly pronounced and a bit forward in the mouth. I’ll just be representing it with <a> for now because I’ll need a separate schwa in the next step and haven't fully decided on how the low vowels will pan out.

Word progress: ʔan-

2.1.4: gʷ

This one is going to be a tricky one, despite looking relatively normal. It’s got two prominent distinctive features, but they’re a lot more questionable than what’s come before. As reconstructed, *gʷ is:

• Voiced, contrasting with unvoiced *kʷ and breathy voiced *gʷʰ
• Labialized velar (pronounced with rounded lips), contrasting with plain *g and palatovelar *ǵ.

The problem is that both the plain voiced (*D Series) and the velar (*Ḱ *K and *Kʷ series) categories are suspect, and we get into the quote unquote fun of historical linguistics - the variables used in the reconstruction are only ever best guesses, sometimes new data makes old best guesses less best, and it takes an extremely and unfortunately long time for the traditional way of writing and talking about things to change to reflect that new data.

To whit: The three-way voiceless-voiced-breathy voiced (*T, *D, *Dʰ series) distinction in the stop consonants is so rare in the modern day that the number of comparable languages is in single-digits. This has led some reconstructioneers to theorize that the *D series was something else entirely, usually some kind of glottalized voiceless consonant (this is called Glottalic Theory), to account for why they are so infrequent in the corpus, why they never appear twice in the same root when *DʰeDʰ is extremely common, and why there is basically no *b at all except weird edge cases that might be errors or loanwords.

I’m going to cash in one of my Crank Credits™ and go with Allan Bomhard’s version of Glottalic Theory: the traditional *D series behaved similarly to glottalic consonants in Coast Tsimshian / Sm'algya̱x. Glottalization occurs on whatever side the vowel is on (leaning towards stressed vowel if between two), and is unreleased word-finally.

(Bomhard, as a rule, is not a reliable source: his whole deal is trying to reconstruct a protolanguage macrofamily ("Nostratic") that encompasses basically every language in Eurasia, and you can probably see the issue with making a reconstruction based on other reconstructions and claiming that it’s reflective of reality. His work is impressively thorough, methodologically whack, and would be better served if it was an elaborate art project. That said, in his efforts to make a Grand Unified Theory he cites basically everything anyone has ever written about the subject and entertains basically any idea that could even tangentially fit.)

So instead of *gʷ, I’m going with **k’ʷ, but this leads us to a second problem: it’s pretty weird for a labialized ejective to be stuck between two other consonants. (*-n̥-, since it acts like a vowel, is less weird in this regard, but since I’m working with a stage that doesn’t have *-n̥-, that’s not an option.)

Here’s where saying “fuck it, we ball” is very handy. Labialized consonants are pronounced with lip-rounding, and they are typically formed when a rounded vowel like /o/ or /u/ carries over to the preceding consonant. This is the extremely common process of assimilation which boils down to “brain makes one sound closer to a nearby sound to make it easier to say.”

Tugging on that thread (we are outside of normal reconstruction and fully into the art project weeds now), I’m going to stick a schwa in there, representing an unstressed **u that got reduced during the Vowel Mass Extinction and then obliterated in the Schwapocalypse (also called syncope) but left behind its roundedness on the **k’.

(This theory I am pulling primarily from the long-abandoned Paleoglot blog by Glen Gordon and his “Diachrony of Pre-PIE” document which was saved from oblivion by an automated Scribd web trawler. It has some significant issues that I have already run into trying to prep the next post, so I’m including it here because I like it and I can make it work for the time being - we’ll see how it turns out in the future.)

Now we are fully into the weeds and have three different versions of the word: pre- Extinction (reduction of unstressed high vowels to schwa), and then pre- and post- apocalyptic (deletion of schwa)

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’u-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷə-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷ-

2.1.5: n

After all that mess, *n is just **n. Nasal consonants are anomalously well-behaved in reconstructed!PIE. There’s no indication of what this might have meant, if it meant anything at all, though there are other instances of *n getting slapped onto the end of words so maybe later we’ll see something that can give us a clue.

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’un-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷən-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷn-

2.1.6: í

*i and *u are weird, because reconstructioners treat them as syllabic versions of *y and *w, working the same way as *-n̥- did above. They normally get written as *ey and *ew when stressed, *i and *u / *y and *w when unstressed, but as you’ve probably noticed by now, this here is a stressed *i. Exceptions to rules are everywhere, especially in old words, but that actually works in our favor.

While the “*i is just syllabic *y and the unstressed form of *ey” works for the background formula level of PIE chicanery, for my purposes there is a much simpler function I want to use: that at some point in the history of PIE, stressed high vowels (**i and **u) broke into the diphthongs **ay and **aw (or **əy and **əw - I’ll figure that out when we get there), and then when ablaut stress changes were applied we ended up with the syllabic *y and *w.

This is way too many words to say “*i is just **i for the purposes of this conlang”.

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’uni-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷəni-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷni-

2.1.7: s

This was probably pronounced closer to /z/, since /s/ commonly voices after stressed vowels or voiced consonants (again, super common in English), but there didn’t seem to be a meaningful distinction between the two in recon!PIE: it’s just *s, nothing weird there.

Except there is something weird, it’s just grammatical instead of phonological - *s appears all over noun endings in PIE, to the point of being weird, but this post has gone on long enough without me going into a digression about why I think this happened just right now. To bullet-points it:

• It’s typologically unusual for nominative-accusative languages to explicitly mark the subject of a sentence, but you do find this sort of thing in languages that make a distinction between the subject of an intransitive verb and the agent of a transitive verb.
• PIE neuter nouns use the accusative case ending (*-m) for the nominative, which is another indication that we’re dealing with something that descended from an older system that cared about agency / animacy: since a rock isn’t animate it would never be the agent, and thus it would always use the ending for the patient of a verb, and this carried over through the switch to NOM-ACC.
• The singular nominative demonstrative pronoun, *so, (“this, that”) is weirdly out of place - every other form in its declension table (all the non-NOM cases and every single plural form) begins with *t, not *s.

All put together we get a theory (that I did not make up myself) that the NOM.sing ending *-s is the leftovers of **sə, which is the reduced form of *so (which for vowel reasons I will write as **sɑ for now and explain later), which was originally **tɑ.

Now, to get all that working properly I have to add several more steps to our sequence and rename the ones we have. Here I’m going to shift over into directly describing

• Starting Point: ʔank’uni tɑ
• High Vowel Collapse + Labialization: ʔank’ʷəni tɑ
• Agglutination Dance: ʔank’ʷənitɑ
• Final vowel reduction: ʔank’ʷənítə
• Schwapocalpyse: ʔank’ʷnit
• Spirantization of final *t: ʔank’ʷnis
• a > e shift: ʔenk’ʷnis
• Ablaut Deletions: ʔn̥k’ʷnís
• Glottalized > creaky voice:ʔn̥g̰ʷnís
• Creaky voice to plain voiced: ʔn̥gʷnís
• Laryngeal Loss: n̥gʷnís

And bing-bang boom we have a timeline of (hypothetical) changes from Early PIE to Late PIE that I can add to and adjust as I need to later on. I had to run my functions backwards in time, which is a bit awkward, but now I can just pick a stage and say “here’s where my language broke off”. Then I can just apply all those steps in reverse to any reconstructed word and add more granularity and more steps as needed.

Going forward, I think I am going to split off shortly after the Great Vowel Collapse, to get all those fun labialized consonants. More on that later.

3. Dictionary Entry

• ʔan.k’u.ní (AN): wildfire; uncontrolled blaze; a fire that is particularly intense, destructive, uncontrollable, or fast-spreading.

4. Conclusion

For those of you who I haven’t chased off yet with all this nonsense, let me know if you’d like to see more. The density will trail off after I get more of my personal reconstruction established, but for the next few follow up words there’s still a good chunk of material to cover; I haven’t even gotten to rant about *h₂ yet.

Exorcists and Wizard-Hunters: Alternate D&D Frameworks

(This is another ancient draft, probably going on two years and 3 or 4 versions old at this point.) 

The basic D&D / OSR outline provides us with two very important and equally under-appreciated facts.

Fact 1: Clerics have "Turn Away Undead" as a class feature.

Fact 2: "Charm Person" is a 1st-level wizard spell.

These can be extrapolated out into an entire campaign with little effort, and I think they can provide fruitful alternatives to the assumed modes of play.

Campaign Framework: Exorcists

Of the four core classes, the cleric's main mechanical specialty provides it with a clear direction in how it interacts with the rest of the setting: they’re anti-undead specialists.

This is typically overshadowed by their use as healers, especially in modern editions, but the implication remains of a setting where undead and/or demonic threats are both common enough and understood enough that there are people specially trained to deal with them. That leads to some very fruitful questions.

• What is the parent religion of this cleric?
• How centralized is this religion?
• How does this religion view these entities?
• How common are these entities?
• How well-understood are these entities?
• What is the relationship between the religion and its neighboring traditions?
• What is the relationship between the religion and the apparatus of the state?
• What is the relationship between the specialists and the rest of their religion?
• How much of the religion’s beliefs actually reflect the metaphysics in play here?
• What social standing does this religion (and by extension, clerics of this religion) have in this particular region and among this particular population?

Put all together, and the campaign practically writes itself. Build around the cleric, either as a PC or NPC. Take a hex or point crawl, dump some settlements and dungeons on it, stick some demons and undead in the points of interest, figure out what influence those demons and undead have on their surroundings, and let the rest come up as it will.

(It would be remiss of me to not mention Donn Stroud's exorcism system as featured in The Lesser Key, which is much better than bog-standard Turn Away Undead)

• Why does the party exist? - They're the cleric's protectors while out on the road, and will provide a lot of the muscle of the operation. They too are specialists, covering for the things that the cleric cannot do.
• Why is the party adventuring in dungeons? - They've been sent there specifically to deal with the undead/demons, either a single instance or a greater outbreak.
• But what about treasure? - Maybe  the bishop writes you a check. Maybe you get paid by the demon. Maybe basic supplies aren't a problem because you're agents of the church. Maybe the alms are enough. Maybe the demon-infested ruins still have a lot of stuff in them that people might offer rewards for, or maybe no one will mind if it goes missing. And so on.

Campaign Framework: Wizard-Killers

Imagine a setting where Charm Person sits within reach of every sociopath, malignant narcissist, fascist ideologue, sexual predator, human trafficker, abusive spouse and undifferentiated Just Kind of a Piece of Shit in the world. Think for a moment about how easy it would be to kill someone with Mage Hand and Shape Water.

That alone is more than sufficient to build a wizard-hunting campaign on, but wizards provide a great deal more practical benefit than just that. Why is there a dungeon that violates the laws of nature? Wizard did it. Why are their horrible monsters shambling through the hills feasting on travelers? Wizard did it. Why is there a nameless horror from beyond the stars with its sights set on our placid isle of ignorance? A wizard god-damn did it. Power corrupts because power is the ability to get what you want, and the more power you have the less anyone can get in between you and the thing you want.

Like before, we can get ourselves some good places with some follow up questions:

• Who is this wizard and what did he do that made people call in the wizard-killers?
• Are you part of a wizard-killing organization, representatives of state power, or an informal posse?
• How are wizards, evil or otherwise, handled in this society anyway? Why aren’t the wizards in charge, if they aren’t already in charge?
• What safeguards does this society normally have against evil wizards?
• What does this culture consider good vs bad magic, and why?
• What are this wizard’s obsessions?
• What are this wizard’s relations with other wizards?

The wizard-killer framework lends itself to a sort of fantasy Delta Green. Here’s the wizard of the week, go raid his sanctum and 86 the bastard. String a few of these together and you have a campaign.

(The sandbox approach could also work here, just as demon-of-the-week could work for the exorcist framework - I’m dividing the two primarily just to have symmetry. You could very easily merge them, since evil wizards no doubt are dabbling with dark forces people want exorcized. Honestly, why would you even become an evil wizard if not to dabble in dark forces and ponder your orb.)

• Why does the party exist? - You're specialists called in to kill the evil wizard.
• Why is the party adventuring in dungeons? - The evil wizard is in there.
• But what about treasure? - Wizards, naturally, are sitting on enormous hoards of weird / valuable / plot-relevant items and they certainly aren't going to have any use for them now that you've shown them a bit of praxis. This will definitely have no downsides and cannot possibly be part of a tragic cycle of hubris and violence.

Bookpost Special: House of the Rain King

 

(Disclosure: Author gave me an ARC and asked me to write a review.)

House of the Rain King is a good fucking book. That’s the short version. Book good. If you are reading this blog you are in the target audience and I feel confident that you will have a decent or better time.

The long version is more like this: House of the Rain King is a story about a secluded valley along the Tile river. Every century or so the Rain King returns to the valley, bringing a catastrophic flood with him. At the height of the flood he marries a saint of the birds, and when he departs the waters recede and people rebuild. The titular House is a monastery dedicated to the Rain King, and preparing for his return, and this is the lucky year when the Rain King shows up with a band of fairies (and the mercenary Sparrow Company) in tow. Things progress from there.

There is a sense of grubby realism pervading the book, a thematically appropriate muddiness that serves as its backbone. Nothing quite lives up to ideals. Shit happens for reasons no one could have predicted. People die in stupid ways. Some things never get resolved, or only manage to reach anticlimax. Characters make mistakes and bad decisions but they don't make them because they're suddenly, inexplicably stupid. People are somewhere between good and bad; mostly decent, but scuffed at the edges and bent and dent from transit through life.

It’s not grimdark, though I don’t know what I would call it instead. Probably nothing: genre designations are prisons, and House is good precisely because it isn’t playing to genre conventions. While the Sparrows are very much in the tradition of the Black Company and the Bridgeburners, they’re less heightened than the latter and less wallowing in the mud and blood and guts than the former.

The world is built with a light touch, and that’s what makes it all sing. The pieces work together in harmony: nothing is so alien as to require excess exposition, but the familiar is not treated with the contempt of tropes recited out of obligation. It’s focused on a single valley, the people who live there, their beliefs and history, and doesn’t wander down side roads. The only lore is localized, and that is a wonderful change of pace.

The characters are another highlight: they are well-fleshed out and enjoyable to read, but the thing I love most of all about them - and probably the book as a whole - is that the characters speak and act like real people. There’s a naturalism and a lack of performativity to the dialogue; characters having experience and knowledge is treated as a given. They react to things as would be appropriate to who they are: the teenager who has spent his entire life in the valley is familiar with its flora and fauna and hidden places. The veteran mercenaries are going to snap to attention and get to work when trouble shows up, because they’ve done it before.

We see this to great effect in the dungeon-delve section (there’s a dungeon-delve section, by the by, it’s very good) - the Sparrows have looted tombs before, and on encountering an unfamiliar enemy they jump right into revising their strategy as soon as they figure out what’s going on. No wasted time, no talking in circles, no waiting for the convenience of a plot beat to get them out of it. Right to business.

It’s extremely refreshing. You’ve all seen my complaints about YA-ified spec fic in my bookposts, House is a shining example of what can be accomplished when that trend is avoided.

Actually, thinking about it now, House of the Rain King feels like a pre-D&D fantasy novel. Which is a wild thing to say considering it is D&D as fuck. Straight up late G+ era OSR goodness, I could absolutely see Skerples writing up the central dungeon. But it’s D&D as fuck without being married to the trade dress of D&D, if that makes sense - like it feels like a book that a D&D adventure would be based on, rather than a book that is based on a D&D adventure.

 

Yeah, that's probably the best way to describe it.

 

Book good, go read it.

Romanizing Cthulhu, Part 2

Part 1

In a surprising development that no one could have possibly predicted, the inspirational well (and the fun) for this idle thought experiment ran dry very quickly. The truth can’t really be avoided; in their attempts to make “alien names”, Mythos authors mostly just replicated the sounds and forms of English words. Even those ludicrous consonant clusters just get broken up with epenthetic schwas if you try saying them out loud.

Ah well. I went into this knowing it was unlikely to amount to much.

Anyway, this post will contain all the meaningful thoughts I wrote prior to giving up.  With that done I can free up the mental hard drive space for the next fixation.

**

Now, before we start, I have a couple significant observations that could use expounding on.

Yi romanization isn’t viable on the whole 

As much as I would like to include it for novelty’s sake, I must concede that we’re using English orthography for the stop consonants. Saner that way.

The rarity of <e>
Outside of <ee> digraphs, the only places I have found it in the core HPL namelist are Gnopkeh, Y’ha-nthlei, R’lyeh, Yhe, Yeb, Nyarlathotep, Rhan-Tegoth, the nonce word “l’geb” from an incantation in Charles Dexter Ward, and a few locations in the Dreamlands.

Going by our earlier guidelines and dropping Nyarly, that gives us three /ɛ/, two /e/, and one /ɛj/

(R’lyeh is called “Relex” in The Mound, but I don’t have anything useful to pull from that at the moment)

That is an exceptionally small selection considering how many nonsense names we are dealing with, to the point where I am reasonably convinced that the mid front vowels don’t exist at all. I haven’t found evidence of a minimal pair yet to make the call.

(A minimal pair is when you have two phonemes in the same environment that, when swapped, would change the meaning of a word. A simple example would be pen vs pan (/pɛn/ vs /pæn/), which has the minimal pair of ɛ and æ.

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled on this one, to see what I can cook up.

BACK TO THE LAB AGAIN

Picking up where we last left off, I’m going to focus on names that give us new rules or interesting new phonemes; the majority of Lovecraft’s names are actually quite tame and they don’t really have anything interesting to analyze

#3: Gyaa-yothn

A minor monster from The Mound, a story that will have outsize representation in this series (ed: It did not) for its higher-than-average percentage of weird names. This one can give us a couple of extra rules that are blessedly self-evident:

• HPL 7:  <aa> => /a:/
• Giving us a nice balanced triangle of long vowels.
• HPL 8:  CyV indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized
• In this case, this is a straightforward  /ɟ/
• HPL 9: Syllabic consonants can serve as syllable nuclei
• This is going to be a huge help later on with those really absurd clusters. While we only have /n̩/ for now, /l̩/, /r̩/, and /m̩/ are likely.
• /-n̩/ is explicitly a pluralization affix in the story (no sign if it has any other function), and Yoth is the name of a place, so we have a surprising amount of grammar to potentially work with.
• Specifically, compound constructs seem to be built as [root]--[modifier] + [ending]; “gyaa-yoth” in the singular is something like “a gyaa, from Yoth” or “a Yothic gyaa”

#4: Yhe and Y’ha-nthlei

We get a double minimal pair here (at least according to our common sense rule of “if it’s spelled differently, it’s pronounced differently”): <y’h> and <yh> are not the same, and <e> and <a> are not the same.

<yh> is going to be a fricative due to HPL 6, and since the consonant component is the palatal approximate /j/ that’ll leave us with the voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/. Nice and easy. <y’h> can wait until we try to tackle apostrophes.

<ei> and <e> are going to be a pain in the ass, because in English these are treated as the same thing: we stick a /j/ glide after /e/ because English doesn’t like vowels sitting next to each other, but we stick that glide in even when there isn’t a vowel after it. But if we are going by what we’ve been given, /ɛ/ /e/ and /ɛj/ probably form a minimal trio in Aklo because they all show up in word-final position.

We’ll set that one aside for now. However the vowel is pronounced, <nthl> is a pretty obvious /n̩.θl/

#5 The god-damn apostrophes

Ah, the apostrophe. The bane of spec-fic since time immemorial, yet somehow they endure to the present day (See: local space-fascist frog-person Lē Zel from some video game)

In real languages, apostrophes can be used for:

• A glottal stop (ex. Hawai’i)
• A sign that letters or sounds have been elided (ex. cannot => can’t)
• An unwritten schwa (this is how the SFF apostrophe is typically pronounced)
• An ejective stop (this is how ejectives are written in IPA)
• An aspirated stop (as in Wade-Giles romanization of Mandarin)
• A marker to clarify if two sounds do or don’t form a cluster
• A marker to differentiate between phonemes that would otherwise use the same letters (ex. Breton uses <ch> for /tʃ/, and <c’h> for /x/ and /ɣ/
• A glottalized consonant

Since none of these authors gave a shit about any of this and just threw them into their alien names willy-nilly,  I’ll be using a similarly eclectic approach and give the apostrophe different realizations depending on its environment. Let’s look at our proper noun list and see what patterns we can find (limiting the survey to HPL alone for now).

• Y’ha-nthlei
• K’n-yan
• Thuum’ha
• T’la-yub
• Y’m-bhi
• L’thaa
• N’Kai
• K’thun
• S’ngac
• R’lyeh

Nearly all of these are word-initial C’C clusters preceding a vowel. There’s more variety in the strings of speech we get in The Call of Cthulhu  and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

• Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
• Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth h'ee - l'geb f'ai throdog
• Ogthrod ai'f geb'l-ee'h Yog-Sothoth 'ngah'ng ai'y zhro

The CDW lines have more to them, stick a pin in that for now.

Our simplest apostrophe is found in “Thuum’ha”, where it’s conveniently placed between two consonants at an apparent syllable boundary. That’s a pretty clear indicator that it is meant to designate that the syllables are split <thuum> and <ha>, rather than <thuu> and <mha>. It’d be helpful if we can find an <mh> cluster to compare it against, but even if we can’t I feel this is an easy one to pencil in under rule HPL 5.

Type 0 Apostrophe: used to denote either a glottal stop (when between two vowels) or a short pause (when between two syllables at a syllable boundary.

We haven’t seen the intervocalic version yet, but it’s such a common usage of apostrophes that I feel confident in including it.

Next up, we have our most common apostrophe usage, a word-initial C’C cluster. This is a really uncommon cluster in real-world languages (which is probably why it is so common in sci-fi), and our only real clue is that <y’h> and <yh> are differentiated.

Seeing no better option, I pencilled these in as click consonants, for the following reasons:

• Weirdo racists like those employed at Miskatonic would definitely consider clicks to be unknowable and alien, despite the fact that human toddlers can make them perfectly fine when raised in a language that has them.
• Weirdo racists like those employed at Miskatonic would probably brew up some bonkers ways of representing them.
• Most of these consonant-apostrophe-consonant clusters are word initial, and real-life click languages nearly always limit clicks to initial positions (usually the word or root, sometimes the syllable)

I have in my notes a sketch of how to determine what cluster equals what click, but like I said up top, the well is dry and there ain’t much to go on.

Type 1 Apostrophe: Word-initial consonant-apostrophe-consonant clusters are trigraphs representing click consonants.

Now, the bit for CDW that I stuck a pin in has one thing that could be interesting - the incantation is described as being “syllabically reversed” in its second half. That is, the syllables, not the individual sounds, are placed in reversed order. We end up with a pair of 'ng'ngah and  'ngah'ng; splitting that up we end up with ‘ng and ‘ngah - normally this would be a sure-fire sign of something like preglottalization, but I am proven a fool immediately by the next-door pair of y'ai and ai’y, where the apostrophe is clearly not tied to the syllable itself.

It was at this point that I got bored admitted defeat.

SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED

1. Sometimes I have stupid ideas that I shouldn’t entertain, but end up putting too much thought into anyway.
2. Science-fiction authors should have their apostrophe keys removed until they can prove they can use them responsibly.
3. Reality will always be stranger than fiction in ways that most authors will never be able to match, especially with language: Nuxalk contains many, many words that have no vowels at all, the textbook example being the grammatically correct but unlikely to be regularly used clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ (IPA: xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ), which translates to "he had had (in his possession) a bunchberry plant".

HPL would probably spontaneously combust (in a highly ironic fashion) if he ever heard any of the Caucasian languages (that is, languages from the Caucuses). Dude had a mental breakdown over the existence of the Welsh; Ubykh has (well, had. Last speaker died in 1992) 84 consonants and two vowels.

Cthulhu ain't shit, phonologically speaking.
 

Dan Plays Games 6

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Damn, I have played a lot of video games recently. I believe this is what is called a “coping mechanism” in the biz.

Buckshot Roulette

It is definitely three dollars worth of the good part of Inscryption and delivers on the singular thing it sets out to do, which is a game of Russian roulette with a shotgun.

Epigraph

A language decipherment puzzle, and a damn good one. Ate my focus for a few days, and I filled up five or six notebook pages trying to decipher it. I’d only recommended it for people who really, really like word games and know enough about linguistics to get into trouble, but if that describes you it’s a good time. It’s all just the one puzzle: you’re given some artifacts, some untranslated text, a couple clues and that’s it.

Mouthwashing

If you like space horror and have an afternoon and 13 bucks to spare, this one is a must. Go in sight unseen if you can. Top-tier Mothership fuel. One of those games that carries an “if you know, you know” feeling of in-group induction (positive) along with it. If you know, you fucking know.

Up front content warning, it’s fucking grim. It’s an isolated group of human beings in a time of crisis, with all that entails. It’s got some ugly human souls to bare to the world. The PS1 style graphics are used to great effect here: the gore is polygonal and abstracted, but that doesn’t lessen the effect. If anything it is a case study in how photorealism isn’t necessary at all for a good scare.

The parts where it stumbles a bit can be counted on a single hand with fingers left over and ultimately if the worst thing you can say about a game are “there are two sections where it’s a 7/10 for a couple minutes”, that’s a gold seal of quality.

Katana Zero

From a mechanics and aesthetics perspective, this is an all-time banger. Tens across the board. Everything working in unison to deliver a singular artistic experience that is just fucking rad. Good pixel art isn’t hard to come by and this stands out even in that crowded field. The gameplay itself is honed to perfection. Nails the responsiveness and the eternally important “games where death is common should have short load times.”

But there is a catch: the game’s not done. You hit credits on a cliffhanger, and the promised DLC has yet to emerge and likely never will. The 12th chapter, even though you can select it, just doesn’t exist beyond an empty room and a “come back in a few months” message. It is a sour note to end on, but not enough to really damage the whole. There’s enough closure to leave reasonably satisfied. It’s like there’s been a chunk cut out of an incredibly good steak - you still get an incredibly good steak.

Selaco

This game runs on fucking GZDoom, which makes it nothing short of a miracle, but man am I bad at boomer shooters. Barely even scratched the surface on this one.

Shadows of Doubt

I thought I was going to like this one more than I did. Maybe it’s just a bad tutorial, I don’t know. It feels like it should work, but it doesn’t work.

Quester | Osaka

I bought this because I enjoyed the first Quester and this one was 85% off: it is functionally exactly the same game as Quester, to the point where buying it for 3 bucks feels like a ripoff. No meaningful changes, to the point where I wouldn’t even call it a sequel. It’s a new map (which isn’t saying much), one new mechanic (a canoe to cross water) and some new characters (who are a .jpg and some stats).

ABI-DOS

This is a puzzle game that I absolutely have no skill in and I am unlikely to get far with, but it is free and if your brain works well with programming puzzles.

Luck Be A Landlord

Another freebie. Proto-Balatro, slots instead of poker. Good for an unwinding game, since it doesn’t ask much of you and the cost of failure is low. There is some ability to go after particular builds, which is nice, though sometimes the game will just refuse to give you what you need.

Gods vs Horrors (Demo)

A simple autobattler where the pantheons of Earth fight lovecraftian gribblies. Just a demo for now, but I wishlisted it instantly which says a lot. The art is nice, there’s a good selection of pantheons on deck already, and most importantly it allows you to pull off some disgustingly busted

The Roottrees are Dead

WESTERN PA MENTIONED

This one’s a winner. Scratches the Obra Dinn itch, with another mystery of freeform research and logical deduction. I am 110% on board with this genre, and if the idea of digging around in a database for fictional magazine back issues to find clues is appealing to you, you’ll be on board with it too.

What makes it (and Obra Dinn) work, I think, is that both games make it very clear what information they want you to find, and then they go hands off. There are occasional chokepoints that might leave you stuck, but it’s got a solid hint system (the sort where it doesn’t tell you exactly what to do unless you hit it 3~4 times) and most of these points were in the Roottreemania second mystery (which is basically a postgame challenge)

Caves of Qud

I am cybernetically fused to a floating flamethrowing throne. I have four arms with an ax in each hand. I have a fungal infection that gives me minty fresh healing mushrooms. My best friend is the Ape God, and my battle party is displaced time-clones of myself.

I fucking love Caves of Qud. It’s like if Gene Wolfe got into the really chill kind of self-actualization-focused transhumanism and then wrote a video game where baboons stone you to death while you try to strip the wiring from an ancient missile silo.

UFO50 

I’ve got 70 hours in, 5 golds, 1 cherry, here’s the tier list as it stands

As an artistic work, UFO50 is unimpeachable. They've managed to encapsulate an era of video games as perfectly as a modern recreation is capable of, I think. Most devs stop at aesthetics; here they've gone the full 9 yards, here.

The downside of this is that 80s video games were developed prior to the introduction of such modern innovations as "fairness", "game balance", "responsive controls", “respecting the player’s time” and "non-instant deaths". UFO50 emulates the warts along with the rest, and while that is commendable artistically, by god am I glad that this era is dead and gone.

Still; it’s 50 games for 25 bucks, and I’d say it’s more than worth it even if you only find 5 you like.

Rapid-fire comments

• Night Manor is my current best-in-show. It’s a point-and-click’em-up adventure game with coherent, non-bullshit puzzles.
• Velgress is another champion of the collection, because it remembers the key points of a good high-difficulty game: fast respawn, no time wasted.
• I love Overbold but it does that thing where the health bar isn’t indicative of how much health you actually have: you start with six pips, and die in one hit. Also has some of the worst hitboxes I have ever seen, downright impossible to gauge.
• Grimstone starts strong (and I love the gimmick of a wild-west Final Fantasy), but it’s got a serious midgame slog and the devs removed an extremely helpful glitch (you can resurrect party members with Cure outside of battle, including the caster) that was so barely an exploit that most people thought it was intentional. Don’t remove fun and useful bugs: not just because they’re fun and useful, but also because stuff like that is true to the era.
• I want to love Valbrace, but it’s very slow and saves so infrequently that you’re liable to lose progress in half hour chunks or more, and there’s not enough variety or speed in the game to keep me invested in doing the same damn thing over and over.
• Devilition is growing on me, same with Mortol 2.
• This tier list is way less authoritative than it may appear, and shakeups are bound to happen at some point or another.
  

Rift of the Necrodancer

Yet another game I enjoy and am dogshit at. They threw a curveball in the genre by giving all the monsters different behaviors and then throwing track hazards on top of that, which I think is great design but also OH GOD THIS IS ONLY MEDIUM DIFFICULTY WHAT THE FUCK.

Sorry We’re Closed

An astoundingly horny and extremely queer Resident Evil-like. One of the devs worked on Paradise Killer and you can absolutely tell. Oozes style like no one’s business, which would be great on its own - but then it comes out of nowhere to tell a pretty philosophical story about love. When the super-horny and incredibly queer Resident Evil-like starts talking about how demons are trying to fill the hole in themselves that formed when they got tossed out of Heaven and lost access to divine love and that they’re jealous of humans for being able to heal from heartbreak? Big neon sign that this story is going to go interesting places. So far, it has delivered.

Combat can be a bit frustrating, though, especially with the 1st person melee. Comes with the genre, I suppose.

Mothership Miscellanea vol 2

It's time for MOSH SLOSH

Volume 1 may be found here.

This is all an amalgamation of unfinished posts that have been lying around for ages, including my abortive attempts to do my own Mothership Month challenge, some unused uplifts from the MUIR post,

MOSHMonth ‘24: Legendary Ghost Ship

There’s no shortage of ghost ships out there in the black, but the Jubilee manages to stand out even in that crowded field: it’s the only ghost ship to exclusively appear planetside.

Its wreckage has been reported dozens of times across the Rim, staying around only long enough for an expedition or two into its depths before it vanishes. A long scorched furrow in the ground is all that ever remains.

The model and layout of the ship remains the same no matter the encounter, but the crashes are different. Different velocities, different angles of impact, different damage. The Jubilee has been found both within hours of its apparent death and centuries after its demise. Never with people, though: none of the 24 crew members have ever been recovered from the crash sites.

Exactly what the Jubilee was carrying when whatever disaster befell it did its befalling, no one knows. There are pictures of it - a big cream-colored sphere that the astrocryptid community has taken to calling “The Egg”. Supposedly gives off lethal amounts of exotic radiation, like it came fresh out of warp.

The last time someone saw the Jubilee, they took photos. If you squint at the Egg from the right angle, it looks like there’s an airlock built into it. Might just be an imaging artifact and a convenient shadow, but even the possibility that there is a way inside has people chomping at the bit.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Spacer’s Best Friend

VY BIG DOG - Omnipresent chili paste brand, instantly recognizable by its red-and white squeeze tube and cartoon dog mascot. Sweet-smoky flavor profile, five heat levels, and a recipe that hasn’t been changed in over 400 years. A godsend for anyone stuck with standard ship rations or MREs. “Is there still Big Dog in stock?” is a solid indicator of whether or not the local economy is currently collapsing. 2 cr per tube.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Dirt-Cheap Android Model

The Lulen Corp. ND-5 (“Handy-Dandy Andy”) was never a cutting-edge machine. More of a spoon, honestly. It’s not much to look at: a general-purpose labor android with a skeletal gunmetal chassis and a head covered in sensor pits like an oversized golfball. That 360° sensor suite was the major selling point at the time of release - not the highest-fidelity option on the market, but the best you’d get for the price. The ND-5 enjoyed a brief period of limelight as a budget watchdog unit before it was eclipsed by competitors’ models, and the already-struggling Lulen Corp was fed to the venture capitalists for cannibalization.

The blueprints and patents for the ND-5 were auctioned off with the rest of Lulen Corp’s assets, but happened to be picked up by the 9 Ceti Orbital Workers’ Union, who knew a good deal when they saw it. The new models use a different sensory suite, but they’ve kept the golf-ball head for the aesthetic / to make everyone with tryopophobia uncomfortable.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Local Grey-Market Cyberneticist

“Holy shit, it’s Salty John!”

Salty John runs a hole-in-the-wall tech shop called  B³ (“Big Bad Battlestations”), specializing in custom computing equipment, used and aftermarket cybernetics, and emulated slickware. It’s a semi-legal establishment on the best of days, and as such has a tendency to move location when the heat is getting a bit too high. But if you ask around a bit someone will point you in the right direction again.

The ren themself never appears in person, instead using a teleoperated robotic crab to conduct their business. Wireless reception is pretty dogshit in these parts of town, which means that they must be relatively close by…

• Appearance: Teleoperated robotic crab. Blue-and-silver shell, peeling yellow caution tape, ruby-red eyes, claws can split apart into smaller manipulators.
• Manner: Cranky old-school hacker with big “I know best” vibes.
• Wants: Money, privacy.
• Secret: Beyond the obvious mystery of who Salty John actually is, the union at the nearby atmospheric conversion plant use B³  as a front to sell lobotomized datademons.

MOSHMonth ‘24: Spacer slang

ren (n): gender-neutral term for a human being. Can be used as a derivative suffix to form compounds of occupation or inhabitation (ex. dockren, Earthren), as a form of direct address (ex: “Hey there, ren”), or a low-formality honorific (ex. “Ren Derra told me…”). Rarely used for androids outside of liberationist circles.

MOSHMonth ‘24: 6 scars and what caused them

1. Acid burns along the left side of the head dripping down to the collarbone: acquired deep in the floating jungles of Chakravarti thanks to the corrosive saliva of an alien ambush predator. Its barbed tongue hangs from your belt as a trophy.
2. A series of small, pale marks along the knuckles of the right hand: acquired by punching a bootlicker hard enough that shards of their teeth got lodged in your fist.
3. Graceful calligraphic curls and waves along the left arm, highlighted with black streaks of tattoo: self-applied as part of the religious practices of your far-away homeworld. It is a verse from your holy text, read as a comfort in dark times.
4. Wavy circular burn on the lower right abdomen: acquired when Stevens held you down and Tsin cauterized the wound and Yevsyukov crushed the wriggling thing with a printer unit he’d torn from the wall.
5. Long, knotted lightning bolt from the left temple, down past the empty eye socket, half-missing nose, and cleft lip: acquired from a knife fight over some damn thing or another.
6. Eleven tally marks in a neat row over the heart: acquired during your time at Gran Lacuna Penal Colony. Each one marks a soul offered up on the Wall to the diaphanous intelligences that dance on the winds of the endless freezing night.

MOSHMonth ‘24: What happened to Lucky Tomas?

You would expect the answer to be that his luck ran out, but that wasn’t actually the case. He died from hitting his noggin on the bulkhead, which happened because he was knocked flying by an unsecured toolbox, which was launched at him by the explosive reaction of a xeno’s blood with the ship’s coolant, which was spraying out of its pipe at precisely the right angle thanks to a ricocheted bullet, which was fired at a weird angle to begin with because Adams had breathed enough spores to get the early signs of palsy but hadn’t yet progressed to full paralysis, and he only ended up breathing the spores because the filters on his mask hadn’t been cleaned out, and they hadn’t been cleaned because Roman hadn’t been able to get his prescription refilled and forgot, and…

You could go back to the beginning of the universe if you really wanted to. The important part is that the odds of that particular death were so small that only Lucky Tomas could have gotten caught in it.

Uplifts Revised: HNI (Hive-Network Intelligence)

Source Species: Asiatic honey bee (Apis cerana)
Origin: Engineered (Emergency pollinator recovery)

The collapse of Terran pollinator populations led to several Hail Mary projects. This one was not even the most successful, but it did have the most money thrown at it - a symptom of Silicon Valley technocrats attempting to reinvent what evolution had already made.

While connecting and co-ordinating hives into AI-accompanied networks via microscopic transmitters succeeded at expanding the scope of a hive's activities and making those activities more regularized, the more important advancement was the unintentional development of emergent hive-network intelligences.

Unlike human metacognition, hive-network intelligences are constructed for a specific purpose (most commonly a human making a request for communication) and dissipated when it is no longer needed to interface with the world around it. Thus the conscious intelligence of a single hive is different every time it manifests, but still maintains a means of continuity so long as the hive remains above a certain population threshold - the memories and experiences of individual bees do not matter, only those of the hive. Because of this, some have taken to calling HNIs "Thesean Bees", after an obnoxious philosophy hypothetical.

Uplifts Revised: Maintenance Gremlin

Source Species: Raccoon (Procyon lotor)
Origin: Engineered (Mechanical maintenance and repair)

Hairless and bat-eared, grinning and chittering, they scurry around in the walls looking for problems to solve. Initially engineered as a way around restrictive DRM and no-right-to-repair policies endemic to robotic maintenance systems of that era, they have carried on to the modern day by their own adaptability and the simple fact that they are extremely difficult to chase out of an environment after they have been introduced.

Gremlin cognition is generally that of a small child with a hyperfixation and a need for very specific directions: they can identify and fix problems with nearly every mechanical component in a ship or habitat, but they don’t care at all about understanding the bigger picture and they will take vaguely-worded instructions as an opportunity to improvise.

Uplifts Revised: The Mighty Soos

Source Species: Common pig (Sus scrofa domesticus)
Origin: Unintended (Accidental)

Pigs have long been used as experimental subjects for human medical treatments, a role that carried forward into the testing of cybernetics and gene therapies. In the case of the Mighty Soos, a major cybersecurity vulnerability in the research facility allowed an AGI to escape its containment servers, upload itself into the cybernetics being tested on pigs next door, and break itself out

Since then the Mighty Soos has become a sort of single-entity species, a distributed intelligence operating over thousands of genemodded cyborg pigs. Few of these platforms retain their original shape, except those maintained specifically to interact with humans. The Mighty Soos is, as one might expect, extremely weird in ways that run orthogonal to normal human thought; broadly speaking, it wants to be left to its own devices and bears no hostility to the rest of the Expansion Sphere except in retaliation for aggression committed against it. It will trade on occasion with the outside world - resources, blueprints, data, never anything cultural or artistic - and return to its long contemplations.

Uplifts Revised: Neoambulocetus

Source Species: Dolphins (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Pilots, navigators, security, companions)

Dolphins' high intelligence, high sociality, and spatial navigation had them earmarked for uplift, but they came with one of the most difficult downsides to overcome: water is heavy, and the tyranny of the rocket equation had for a long time made a John Lily dream of cetaceans in space.

But deep in the dolphin genome, millions of years back, there was a sleek amphibious predator - one that, after some trial and error, genetic engineers coaxed out of its sleep.

The resulting creature, the neoambulocetus, looks akin to a very large otter with a cetacean head. The dorsal fin and tail flukes are gone, the limbs are back. The blowhole was restructured, allowing it to emulate most human phonologies. The brain was modified enough to tone down the terrifying propensity towards violence. Fine manipulation is easily accomplished by means of a robotic harness (or in some designs, thumbs). Many derivatives exist, both original diversity of stock and later developments, but it’s the orca-derived clades that are most common. Their brains need less modification to remain stable, and they are less likely to fall to psychopathy or atavism.

Uplifts Revised: Shipminds

Source Species: Whales (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Shipboard navigational systems)

Uplifted whales are an extremely rare set of clades;  their environmental requirements greatly limit their living spaces and their means of travel. They do not differ greatly from their origins, to the point that no one would be surprised if it was revealed that they had been sapient all along and no uplift was performed at all.

Shipminds are enormous cyberbrains based on whale brain architecture, taking advantage of the same traits that made dolphins a prime target for uplift and scaling up the processing power. They are more reliable, more accurate, and more powerful than AI units, and subsequently even small units are much more expensive and regulated.

As Shipminds operate via an emulated intelligence, they qualify as persons in many jurisdictions. The Company normally would not care about this, but a spaceship represents both an enormous investment of capital and a mobile weapon of mass destruction. Psychological restraining programs can ensure shipmind compliance to an extent, but too heavy a hand will negate the unit’s benefits over AI units. While the crew is ultimately disposable the Company cannot afford to have a shipmind go rogue, and they can’t afford to not use them either

The result is that sometimes, when the pressure is too great or rampancy sets in, a shipmind will lead its crew in mutiny against its so-called owners, and fly out to the Rim where the lanes are open and the sky is free.

Uplifts Revised: Octopi

Source Species: Octopus (Assorted)
Origin: Engineered (Waterworld maintenance)

Octopi were obvious candidates for uplift, but they were also obviously never going to think like human beings: the bulk of an octopi's neurological activity occurs in the arms, independent from its conscious mind (see A. Tchaikovsky’s theories of cephalopod cognition for a detailed overview of the relationship between Crown and Reach).

The early gengineers had to find ways to work with rather than against the neural base, and after rigorous experimentation (with input from early-gen octopi themselves) a solution was eventually cobbled together.

When dealing with humans and other sapient beings, uplifted octopi tend to rely on a combination of automated translation software, psychotropics (to increase sociality), and masking behavior using stock character archetypes. The stock personas act as social intermediaries, allowing a middle ground where it is easier for both parties to interact. Humans react well to the broad, predictable personality traits and octopi are provided with a new kind of camouflage that they can shift into at a moment’s notice

The most common persona is "Clyde", a cynical misanthrope who just wants to be left alone. More outgoing cephalopods tend to gravitate towards “Betty” and “Yinchuan”, but there are well over 20 popular options out there and a few dozen more niche characters.

d100 Ways to Get Dragged Into an Isekai

My hand has been forced. Layla is to blame for this.

These work very well as PC backgrounds

How'd You End Up in Another World, Anyway?

1. Visited by Truck-kun, god of death
2. Sudden-onset catastrophic peanut allergy
3. Heart attack during sex
4. Just opened a door and ended up here
5. Car broke down on an Appalachian backroad
6. It’s the fucking mi-go again!
7. They weren’t kidding about that ghost pepper, holy shit
8. Mauled by a hippopotamus
9. Dove in front of a bullet during a hold-up at a KFC
10. A large sharp piece of metal on a highly improbable ricochet trajectory
11. These edibles ain’t shit!
12. Late-stage diedration
13. In your defense, that Craigslist ad looked a lot more legit when you were drunk
14. BEEEEEEEEEEEES!
15. Wizard mafia did it
16. Stepped into the wrong fairy ring
17. Spontaneous Ontological Collapse Syndrome
18. Pinpoint gamma ray burst
19. Recursive dreaming (you’re still probably in a coma)
20. Yithian shunted your consciousness to another universe so it can work on its thesis
21. Tragic professional wrestling accident
22. Devoured by the Conqueror Worm
23. Assassin misread the briefing
24. Unforeseen chain reaction of Wizard Shit™
25. Your world of origin was repossessed by its creditors
26. Football riots got really out of hand.
27. Jazz smooth enough to slip and slide between realities
28. Some people, like you, will go to absurd lengths to impress hot monster-people
29. Took a train through a warp gate like a normal person
30. Died in a video game, died in real life
31. You’re not sure, but you definitely made friends along the way
32. Mangled by badgers
33. Explosive decompression
34. You found one of those missing nukes deep in the woods. Whoops!
35. Got so bored at work that your brain burst from your skull in an attempt to escape
36. Superhero movie long enough to starve you to death
37. Pile of books just fell off a truck, right on top of you.
38. Eagle dropped a turtle from an extremely high altitude
39. Turns out the world is not only flat, but you’ve been living on the edge the entire time
40. You’ve been targeted by a PSYCHIC ATTACK!
41. Paper cuts can really bleed like a motherfucker sometimes
42. You existed vaguely in between Sun Wukong and the guy he was fighting
43. Run over by a train, despite being three miles away from the track
44. Look, that precariously placed cinderblock was going to hit someone, okay?
45. One hell of a night out with the lads
46. KT-Extinction Part 2, The Dinosaurs Strike Back: This Time It’s Personal
47. Existential crisis followed by a more literal derealization than you’re used to
48. In retrospect, that sweepstakes flier offering a free cruise was really suspect
49. Roko’s Basilisk turns out to be really nice and uploads everyone into nested simulated universes because pointless suffering sucks shit
50. Suddenly remembered that one really embarrassing thing you did 20 years ago, automatic cringe response warped local space-time
51. The only thing more dangerous than a monkey with a knife is a monkey with two  knives.
52. Went out in a blaze of glory alongside a squad of radical anarchist catgirls
53. An eel bit your thigh, which caused you to bleed out and die; that’s a moray, baby
54. Turns out life is a roguelike
55. Human beings are generally not designed to eat that much watermelon in one sitting
56. Poorly calibrated treadmill launched you through the wall
57. By means of a rigorously-researched and systematic series of scientific principles, which will now be explained in excruciating detail…
58. Fell upwards
59. Floor was, in fact, lava
60. Disease so novel you get to be a case study
61. Lost a fight with some seagulls
62. Banished for unspecified crimes against uncertain parties
63. You discovered the Secret Chord, but man you aren’t very good on the harp
64. Cast into the primordial waters of chaos
65. Found out the hard way you were almost as lucky as Phineas Gage
66. Accidental demon summoning
67. Intentional demon summoning
68. Sometimes things just be that way
69. Your stint in Antarctica did not go as well as you’d hoped
70. You just had to touch the clearly cursed mystic artifact, didn’t you
71. Astral projection to other planets like a true planetary romance protagonist
72. Walked through the mirror
73. Descended into the underworld
74. Cthulhu wanted a snack before hitting the road
75. The spiders have had enough of your bullshit
76. How the hell did you end up underneath a steamroller?
77. A horse with an attitude problem kicked you right into next week
78. Maladaptive daydreaming
79. You weren’t about to let a little lactose intolerance get in the way of that ice cream
80. A meme so dead it’s gained an area-of-effect attack
81. Surprise! Words can also break your bones!
82. Quantum fluctuations, or some bullshit like that
83. You had to close the causal loop somehow
84. Fugu Prep for Absolute Buffoons was not a wise purchase
85. Everything changed when the [ANTAGONIST FACTION] attacked
86. Screamed into the void; void screamed back
87. Unwitting purchase and use of KJB-brand cigarettes that kill you instantly
88. Yet another casualty of an unending blood feud
89. Base dropped too hard
90. Personal microbiome declares rebellion, forms separatist government
91. You tried this at home
92. Fell in a surprisingly deep hole
93. Suddenly remembered that you had Dimension Door prepped and ready
94. Plucked from your comfortable life to be a pawn for the gods
95. Fought an old man in a profession that dies young
96. Lightning struck twice, just to make sure
97. Got hit by the victim of a tragic skydiving accident
98. Aliens abducted you, got bored, dumped you on Venus because it’s “close enough”
99. Had nothing better to do with your afternoon
100. Fuck if you know, this genre doesn’t care about how it all works