Paul, a question. The Driver isn't the only immensely mobile playbook. Do you have similar issues with the Chopper?

Thanks for going into such depth about your process and concerns. People only really notice when it goes wrong, but preserving meaning over languages is such a fragile art. I've had flops with otherwise great games because the emotive content and ritual aspect of a game doesn't translate easily over languages, beyond even just the mere fact of having to translate at the table at all. One of the reasons why I play most of my games with native English speakers online or such.

It's actually easier with games that don't rely on the shorthand of emotive language and connotations as much, and are more like technical manuals. Like, translating D&D's "strength" isn't really an issue, that can go several "good enough" ways. "Hard", though? Translating that into Lithuanian literally gives me a word that has more connotations of AW's "cool" than anything else. But then what do you do with all the moves that work off the physical metaphor of the word, like "Ice cold" and such.

It's difficult!

So again, a lot of respect for the work that you are doing.

AW is a very lively text, full of idioms and patterns of speech that don't hop over to other languages all that easily. Respect for stepping to the task!

What was the hardest thing to do, in your translation process?

This is a great setup! Relevant to my real life, even, in a metaphorical way. Was dealing with some workplace bullying in a very macho environment while being a human twig, and pushing through that to some level of respect without getting physically wrecked myself, but also somehow avoiding pumping up my adrenaline and violent fantasies to a level where I'd actually shred the other guy's face with a claw hammer. I'll spare you the details, but we ended up simply shaking on it. Somehow!

It's one of the most difficult, but also interesting and satisfying things I things I ever had to do. There's definitely a game in that theme.

I don't know if scarcity of room is the best way to go about it. If it was, the Maestro D and the Hoarder wouldn't be having this problem, yeah?

What you may instead be looking for instead is tighter purely causal links. For example, why doesn't it matter for the hardhold, and thus Maestro D and the Hoarder, that the Touchstone's mission failed?

Or, it does matter, but... There might be another issue that I come across every so often in my AW games, and that's the fact that different characters have different rhytms. As the most obvious example - Gunluggers live from fight to fight, and the fact that they have been in a fight usually means they get in another fight sooner, whereas Savvyheads live from project to its completion. Savvyheads go slow and steady, Gunluggers accelerate. Eventually, what happens is that either one of them dominates the spotlight, or you have two geographically and even temporally distinct stories.

What you need at that point is a resync tool, which take chunks of time and deal with them in a kind of abstract way, ending with a situation where all the player characters are back together and the situation is such that their efforts affect one another's. There are a few resync tools already built in, like Wealth or Moonlighting, as well the Love Letter format (the latter seems, honestly, exactly like good honest GM prep most of the time). Dark Ages has a whole list of them, too. Maybe borrow a page from there?

As promised over in the blog, here's some comments on the Baltic section of name lists. I'll do this piecemeal over a few days, most likely.

Assumptions: to make Baltic names, you pull names from lithuanian or latvian sources, as no other linguistically baltic people currently exist. There were other peoples, of course, but they're now either assimilated into either Lithuania and Latvia and exist as regional dialects, or were eradicated altogether and so we only have (not very good) reconstructions of their languages. If you pulled any names from these reconstructions instead of either lithuanians or latvians, good for you! You know more than I do and should just carry on doing what you're doing.

Anyway. Here's the names that make me raise eyebrows sky high:
Kertu, Daniil, Henri, Karl, Maksim, Rasmus, Rickards, Romet, Sander.

All of them save for Rickards are odd because of one reason: word endings. Lithuanians and latvians use word endings to denote gender, grammatical case and singular plural. "Englishing" a name usually means that most of that is ignored and you just use nominative for everything, which is an established practice by now that everyone is quite fine with. However, you *do* need to get the nominative endings right.

The most common feminine nominative endings in lithuanian (and, far as I know, in latvian as well) are "-a" or "-e." (In lithuanian, the actual nominative word ending is "-?", which is important-ish because using an "-e" turns changes the case from nominative to vocative, which is mildly frustrating when reading. Not that important, though.)

Which is why "Kertu" feels ridiculous. You could turn it into the form of an actual name by changing it to Kerta or Kerte, but even then it would not be a name I have actually heard of.

Similarly, the most frequent masculine nominative ending in lithuanian is "-as", more rarer ones are "'-is", or "-ius." Far as I can tell, latvians either stick an "-s", or an "-is", or an "-ijs" at the end. The simple way to look at it is that if a masculine name doesn't have an 's' at the end, it's probably not Baltic.

Henri and Karl thus seem french and german, respectivelly. You could change 'Henri' to 'Henrikas' or 'Erikas', whereas variations of "Karl" are not much used at all.

Daniil and Maksim are slavic. The Baltic states have a long history of being occupied by the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union, with attempts at assimilation through education controls, partial extermination and massive population relocations. You want to avoid conflating names from these two language groups like you'd want to avoid calling the Dallai Lama chinese. There is a baltic version of Daniil - either "Danielius" or "Daniels." There is no baltic version of Maksim.

Rasmus is the name of a band. Rasmas, I believe, is a latvian name, though I do not know for sure.

Romet and Sander I haven't even got a clue about. Where did you get these two names?


And I think that's it for today. Later this week, I'll try to find and list some cool archaic names (the current ones feel fairly modern, and don't read like their English list counterpart at all). Maybe a bit of implied linguistic background for some of the names, though I'm not sure how useful that would be.

If other people want to use this thread for similar name-checking for the languages they know about, feel free.

The majority of my AW sessions were held online, over IRC. Depending on the kind of channel you're on, this has the advantage of having built-in dicebots, so you can have rolls basically as a regular part of conversation.

<Damson> I stick my gun into his face and very politely ask him for the keys to the trunk.
<MC> Haha! Great, so that's going aggro. Roll it!
<Damson> 2d6+2
<=Roll=> <Results for Damson [2d6+2]: 10>
<MC> Alright, since you have him at gunpoint, he rustles in his pockets and hands you over the keys. Looks like he has a few choice words for you, but he swallows them with a gulp.
<Damson> I bet he does. Now, lets see if I'm right about this trunk...

It's a very natural, and since the basic roll mechanic is consistent and dirt-simple, you spend no time with rule clarifications.

So long as you have easy access to an automated dicebot of sorts (would be surprised if Skype didn't have some sort of widget equivalent), I can pretty much guarantee the game will go as smoothly as a face to face one.