The Common Language

What The Common Man Knows

Onisol is the trade-talk, merchants all seem to know it. I suppose they need it to talk to foreigners with their silly babbles. I don't see why the whole world doesn't just speak our tongue,  it would be so much easier.

What Wealthy Merchants And Nobility Know

Onisol is a remarkably simple language when compared to others. A fluent speaker can teach it to someone completely virgin with only a few weeks of dedicated study. Everyone who needs to talk to foreigners learns it by default; sailors, traders who visit foreign ports, mid-to-high ranking nobility, and so on.

Florian Herold

Occasionally you hear stories of novices who dream on some restless night of falling out of their beds and up into the sky, landing on some distant star. There they find a tower of slick black stone. Inside they go through many constricting passages with walls detailed by intricate golden filigree. They lead deep underground and finally come to a chamber greater than the greatest cathedral hall and twice as opulent. At the center, on a plinth, they find, well that's where they can't recall, nobody can. Then they wake up in a cold sweat and suddenly they're speaking Onisol fluently like their father had been whispering it to them through the wall of the womb.

Map of Termina

I quite like maps, I'm not much of an artist though. So here's a map of my default, standard issue, campaign setting known as Termina, that I made in hexographer. One of these days I'll likely make something less rudimentary and slightly more functional with names and icons and everything else in an actual image editor but for now this is the what I've got.

Fig. 1 The Continent of Termina. Scale is 24 miles per hex

There are currently no places marked and I think that technically this is a map from before the massive deforestation that comes with tool using, tree chopping intelligent mortal life anyway. There are however places on the actual real and present day Termina, the one that exists in my head and not this feeble representation. Places like the Rot, the Rainbow Forest, and the Broken Tusk Mesa. Most of these places are a few paragraphs scattered in text documents on hard drives, the rest are less concretely free floating in my head.

The eagle-eyed of you may recognise the contours of this land from a certain place on Earth. It is in fact based on a map of Antarctica 'cept no ice. The original inspiration and map I drew over came from here or one of the other alternate Earths on that site, though Termina is not in the tropics. Those vestigial white lines on the edges at 1/3rd and 2/3rds the y-axis mark latitudes of 30 and 60 degrees north, putting her firmly in the temperate regions.