San Diego Comic Con

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’ll be out of town from July 15th and heading to San Diego for the Comic Con. The convention should be awesome, and I get to connect with some of my roots down there as well. Meanwhile, if I slack on posts in the next few weeks, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten. They may be spaced out a bit more, but I’ll be busy preparing for the trip. Of course, I’ll be reporting on the awesomeness that is the convention. Pictures should be plentiful and I’ll try to report on the highlights I come across.

If I have the translations and the world space stuff figured out by then, I’ll have posts scheduled for them, as well as a short series I have planned about some lore theories and other things. Don’t tune out just yet. Working on World Spaces for Skyrim is very difficult just for the fact that they take a lot of work around all the broken bits in the Creation Kit.

I have to say, while getting an toolkit for modding a game is pretty neat by itself, it loses something when every game in the same series has a toolkit that is hopelessly broken in some way and the company never fixes them.

 

That Fire Emblem Translation

I was cleaning out some files and I came across my notes on the Fire Emblem translation I made to prove they weren’t talking about Tharja’s hair as someone claimed on one of the Nintendo forums.

サーリャはバインバインだね
sarya wa bain bain da ne
Equiv to something like: Sarya goes boing boing doesn’t she?

ノノ、何よ穾然。。。?
nono, nani yo totsuzen…?
Nono, what, so suddenly…?

だから、 サーリャはバインバインだね。
dakara, sarya wa bain bain da ne.
So/therefore, sarya goes boing boing, right?

バ、バイン。。。? 何のこと? 呪文。。。ではなさそうね。
ba, bain…? nani no koto? jumon… dewa nasasou ne
Something like:
B-boing? What thing? What kind of nonsense is that?

まったく意味だわからないわ
mattaku imi dawa karanai wa

サーリャはね、 お胸もお尻もバインバインってこと!
sarya wa ne, omune mooshiri mo bain bainttekoto!
Sarya’s big butt and boobs go boing boing!

—-> Nono is talking about Sarya’s breasts and butt. Using respectful o-mune and o-shiri, probably in reference to their size.

。。。っ!?
…basically an surprised exclamation.

 

So, there you have it.

Alchemy Overdose Mod

So, one of my first characters in the Tamriel world was an Alchemist. It was a custom class, one that focused on the Alchemy skill with a side helping of magicka and some minor skills in One-Handed.

To me, the Skyrim perk tree for Alchemy seemed weak. So I started up a little mod that tweaked the heck out of the Alchemy skills to increase the potency of created potions. Most mods out there that tweak magicka didn’t really seem to touch the Alchemy skill.

I won’t lie and pretend I had balance in mind as so many perk tweaking mods do (and then proceed to make life a living hell if you actually rely on those skills coughstealthrebalancedcough), especially for high levels in the skill. It just seems to me that if you’re a Master Alchemist (or Master Anything really) you should be able to make legendary items. Since it’s a perk tree, alchemy will be pretty much the same if you don’t invest in the perks, but the idea behind it is to make the potions more useful than 2 seconds of freaking invisibility, for example, especially when starting out with Alchemy perks, and by the end, being able to do amazing things with the ingredients. I got really tired of having a billion useless potions in my inventory that weren’t worth selling.

To that end, I restructured some of the default perks, combining the perks dealing with beneficial potions into one set of perks, and creating a new perk with the leftover.

Instead of making the healing potions super strong and the other beneficial potions somewhat strong, it makes everything a little bit stronger in general, but the overall boost to healing potions is slightly less than what it is in default. I thought it was a good sacrifice to make. Poisons get an extra boost as well.

The leftover perk went into a boost for skill-based potions, so your smithing potion should work just a little bit better.

I also added some high level perks to increase ingredient gathering, my thinking is that an experienced alchemist would know how to use more parts of the plant, and unless my memory is totally failing me, that had been one of the added effects of gaining Alchemy skill in Oblivion.

From Oblivion, I really missed the ability to create two potions at once, so I added that back into Skyrim, too, placing it at the higher end of the skill tree.

A truly exceptional Master Alchemist should be able to do these things, I’m reasoning out. You hear the stories of what Alchemists and Enchanters can do in lore, but you never get to do them yourself. Likewise, I feel if your enchanting skill is at 100 and you’ve got all the perks you should be able to reconstruct the Staff of Chaos.

The mod itself is in an alpha stage, as I am not quite sure if I tweaked the skill potions properly, but testing it out should prove interesting.

Dwemeris Translation: And I Thought Japanese Was Hard

Starting from where I left off, we now head into the sticky situation of the second sentence.

If you need to refer back to the previous post, click here.


Dwemer: Amz thuamer ahrkanch kemelmzulchond aka Mora,

Falmer: ilpen av sou meldi nagaiale as guntumnia spantelepelaelia arani morae

Translation: ILPEN of yours driven NAGAIALE by GUNTUMNIA SPANTELEPELAELIA kings of the wood,

 

There is no translation as of yet for “ilpen” and likely we won’t discover what “Amz” means, although, if we think about it a bit, it may mean “many” if we take into account the rest of the translation. As I have no other ideas at this time,

Supposition: “amz” = “ilpen” = “many”

“Mer” of course, means people in most Elven languages and all chances are that it means the same in Dwemeri, though may have evolved to extend to a broader sense, or a more general sense.

“thuamer arkngd” and “thuamer ahrkanch” both appear where “your” and “driven” appears. I’m fairly sure at this point that “thuamer” and “thua” means “you” and “your” and the second words with “ark” and “ahrk” are both compound words and the “ark/ahrk” prefix refers to “driven” with either modifiers or merged with another word to form a compound. “arkngd” may mean “driven forcefully/exiled” and “ahrkanch” may mean “driven by death” or “death driven” if we take a look at the root of the next word, but I think that in this case, “ahrkanch” and “arkngd” are different forms, possibly of the tenses, of the same word, and both loosely translates into “exiled/driven.”

If we look at the previous sentence, where “meldi calne” appears, it’s a bit similar to “meldi nagaiale” in that “meldi” appears before both words and appears to modify them. Both words have an “e” at the end and may be a possessive, or past tense modifier.

“Naga” in Ayleid means “death” so “nagaiale” I suspect has a root meaning of “death” with a modifier attached. “Nagaia” is a word in Ayleid that means deathly, but the chances that it means the exact same in Falmer is a little vague. Assuming that “Naga” is the Aldmeri root word,-ia may be a plural of it, or a past tense. “Nagaia” itself could be the Falmer word for “death.” “Nagaiale” could also be a proper name in the possessive. I. E., Nagaial.  “IA” is often used as a past tense of a verb in Ayleid. Without more knowledge of the grammar of Falmeri, it’s difficult to say.

Since “Naga” and “Nagaia” both mean “death/deathly” it’s a good guess that it’s to do with death of some form, but as the grammar and language is not the exactly the same it’s good to keep an open mind to the other possibilities. Anyway, trying to look for the possible word in Dwemeri is proving a little more difficult. If Dwemer is based on the tendency to have more compound words than its cousins, which love compound words in the first place, the “anch” part of “ahrkanch” may refer to “death.” Heck, “nagaiale” may be part of the larger “kemelmzulchond” word, but without determining the meaning of “SPANTELEPELAELIA” this section may be impossible to pick apart.

Wow, this is confusing. ANYWAY. Let’s assume that “Nagaia” is “Deaths” and that “nagaiale” is “deaths” in past tense.

“Mora” and “Morae” is fairly obvious, being from the same root in Aldmer, and refer to “wood.”

SPANTELEPELAELIA is obviously a compound word. “Haelia” which means “terrible” in Ayleid, shares a similarity with end of the word “AELIA.” At the very least, these two words seem like some sort of descriptor of “Wood Kings.”

“Arani morae” does translate into “Kings of Wood” but I’m wondering who or what they are referring to.

Taking the history into account, when the Nords attempted to extinguish the Falmer, it could be referring to the scattered groups of disenfranchised elves who fled after the defeat of the Snow Prince- or, more likely, it may be an allusion to the Nords, though thinking back to snow-bound Saarthal, despite the implication that Skyrim and Atmora had at one point been warmer than it is now, doesn’t completely make sense. Who could be “kings of the wood,” if not the Nords though? The Dwemer certainly are not, but what if it referred to the Ayleids themselves? It may make a bit of sense if the Falmer sought shelter with the Ayleids first and were denied.

“Aka Mora” in Dwemeri has a high chance of meaning “Wood Kings” as well, but interestingly in the greater Elhnofex languages “aka” could also refer to the same root as “Aka”tosh. The root “aka” is said to mean Dragon, but the possibility exists that it also means “king” as Akatosh is considered the King of the Gods and the other form of Akatosh is Auri-El, the God-king of the Aldmer and their descendents.

Dwemer is definitely a more compact language compared to its cousins, if kemelmulzchond = guntumnia spantelepelaelia. I’m thinking that “spantelepelaelia” is actually two words, however, broken up to “spantele” and”pelaelia.” Which would seem to make sense, as “spania” is a word albeit an unknown one in Aylied, and “pelaelia” may be a Falmer variant of Ayleid’s “pellani” which means “outsiders.” And that sort of makes sense, if it reads-

…wait a second.

Wasn’t it about the same time that Nordic humans were migrating from Atmora? That would definitely explain it and fit. “Foreign Kings of the Wood.” Atmora had grown cold, the Atmorans were emigrating to Tamriel to become the Nords, where they built Saarthal, and the Falmer sacked Saarthal because of the Eye of Magnus, which sparked a war that lead to the eventual downfall of the Falmer leaders at Solstheim. The Falmer and the Dwemer had been living in Skyrim and Morrowind (though not so much the Falmer in Morrowind) for ages before the Atmorans-who-became-Nords came. Their view would be that the Atmorans were outsiders, foreign to the continent. Pelaelia may even mean “invading.”

Supposition: “spantele” = form of “spania”

Supposition: “pelaelia” = “pellani” = “foreign/outsiders”

Supposition: “aka” = “arani” = “kings”

This still leaves us with a large part of the Dwemer untranslated simply because the Falmer can’t be all translated, either. This is extremely frustrating especially since these words do not appear in other places.

My Mod Ideas

I felt like just writing down some mod ideas I have for Skyrim. Mostly just small ones, ones I may or may not get around to. I sort of believe that anything one attempts to achieve, one should have a good plan, after all. I’ve had a lot of experience struggling with ill planned attempts at… well, pretty much everything. I’m definitely the sort of person to charge ahead and give it a whack sometimes just to see what happens. I think I wrote some nonsense like that a month ago….

  1. A Mountain Climbing Mod. Skyrim’s full of mountains. More so than Oblivion. I’m surprised they didn’t implement some sort of feature like this already.
  2. A small farm mod, a place you can grow ingredients or food. (Something I actually am working on.)
  3. An Altmer follower. I think there isn’t any in the base game, and the only Altmer you can marry is Taarie….
  4. A quest mod about the Thalmor. They’re the bad guys in Skyrim, but I prefer having broader choices than Bethesda likes to give us. I think of a mod I used to play for Oblivion, that allowed you to join the Mythic Dawn for real…
  5. A prequel and sequel set of mods for Oblivion and Skyrim.
  6. A tropical island escape. There’s already a few out there, but I kind of want to do my own thing with one. Skyrim’s so cold despite being next to the ocean…
  7. Going to Akavir. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that, but it’d be amazing!
  8. Overhauling the alchemy system to make it better.

Whether or not I can find the time to do all of those is another thing, but I like dreaming. It’s the first step in creating.