Ildur

The official FFXIV: ARR page has this to say about arcanists: So it would seem Arcanists are pretty much like thaumaturges, relying on their 'internal aether' to cast spells. Except that thaumaturges use 'deep instrospection' to tap the aether inside them and channel it outwards to a staff/wand housing a magical gem; while Arcanists channel it towards symbols in their books. I guess we'll find out more about how they work once the next phase starts and we can play through their guild's storyline.

You can, but they aren't animated and the expressions don't last very long. It would be nice if they were a toggle like in Champions Online: you could have a forever smirking character, or a forever frowning one. Or you could dance between expressions when roleplaying. In practice, though, nobody used it. I think it was because the expressions were very exagerated and ugly. A system that looked natural and pretty might have more success.

Indeed, that was a nice lore dump. Now go ahead and do one about magitek. You know you want it!

I never played 1.0, so the details of its plot aren't something I am sure of. Some players did mention that Darnus' Legion (or at least the army that clashed against the Eorzean Alliance in Cartenau) was somehow being manipulated to disobey the Emperor. There's also a cutscene (the same cutscene I mentioned before, actually), where one of the NPCs implies that the Emperor had given the unconquered regions as "lost" and that the Legate's orders made no sense. This NPC was quickly killed by one of the Legate's best friends, naturally. In any case, I'm sure someone with a bigger Knowledge: FFXIV1.0 Lore skill will come around at some point and clarify.

Artorias! How's that abyss walking hobby of yours? Back on topic: There's this on the Final Fantasy WIKI. I -think-the Empire has pretty much all of the playable races in its ranks, except for lalafells, maybe, because they don't dwell on the north (and that's where the bulk of the Empire's forces are. There's a cutscene where I'm quite sure one of the engineers was a Roegadyn, and one of the Legate's on 1.0 was implied to be an elezen. The Empire has also conquered Ala Mhigo, one of the city-states, and are conscripting/recruiting new soldiers from there. Seeing how all the known Eorzean city-states are basically cultural boiler plates, its safe to assume Ala Mhigo would have all races represented too and that the Empire is only racist against beastmen. Also, the Empire has rigorous training and brainwashing for their low-key troops. So making him part of the military will make the whole defecting trickier to explain. Not impossible, mind. The wiki seems to imply this only happens in conquered nations, so if your character comes from the Empire's main continent, perhaps he was not subjected to those practices. Alternatively, you could make him a civilian that aided the military in some way. On a side note: As far as I know, the Empire wasn't deliberately trying to release Bahamut. They were trying to nuke the Primals and, for whatever reason (probably tricks by someone, I guess), they thought that bringing down the lesser moon would do the trick. Of course, it kind of didn't. Quick edit: Oh, and if you are wondering about their naming conventions, there's no thread for it like there is for the playable races. But, by seeing how the Legates and some other garlean NPCs are named, using germanic and roman names is probably a good idea.

I'm not particularly fond on extremely detailed backgrounds on my characters. I tend to forget details, things that I wrote down as important or defining end up not being so, quircks change or are never used...you get the idea. I prefer to start with a simple concept and play the character once or twice and let it grow organically. I remember the details better in those cases. I also have a big problem called 'I don't read' (yes, I know it's a flaw), so I'm not particularly fond of other people having very long and detailed backgrounds unless I'm invested in a plot with them, or their character managed to call my attention during an actual scene. But then I'd probably only read the basic information and try to get all the other details by interacting in-character. With that said, I do write backgrounds for my characters. They are pretty barebones, to the point (sometimes, anyway) and aren't good literature (you can see for yourself on the wiki page of my main character). They are more like internal notes than anything else: if I forget anything, opening the page and looking it up should be easy since it's a short profile. It doesn't work with special mannerisms and quircks, though. I had a character in TERA whose biography said she always had to have something in her hands. It never came up in actual roleplay and, by the time I remembered or read it in the background, it was a bit too late because I had spent various hours where she had absolutely nothing between her hands. So my advice is to make a basic draft. Then roleplay a bit in a casual scene (like a tavern, or a random walk-up in the street) to see how the character develops organically from there (and to see how you play him or her), and then go back and try to marry your draft with your roleplay, filling out details that seem necessary to define the character as a person.

Even if someone 'did it before', you still have to adapt it to your current game/engine/programming language, and perhaps you'll run into technical difficulties that will render it impossible to do. There's a lot of factors that could be the issue. Resource allocation is the most likely.Modern videogames eat a lot of computer resources to work, mostly on visuals. All those high-res textures take a lot of space and quite a lot of memory to load and show, not to mention all the shadow and light calculations, and a lot of other systems that need to be processed. I'm guessing doing a phenome system like the one FreelanceWizard mentions would, perhaps, not be that taxing to the system on its own. But you also have to consider that you can have many people in the screen talking at the same time, and for each text line you have to run the process and show the result. In ARR, however, I think they wouldn't have much of a problem besides designing the whole system to work properly. They'd need a lot of animations to fit the words and the pauses, though, so it's hard to say. And while it looks like it should be a simple task...well, it isn't. That's the thing with programming: maybe that window with the 3D preview of your charcater that you can open and close in a second actually took a week of programming. Not because it's hard, perhaps, but because programmers run into problems, bugs and glitches all the time. Maybe the render window was rendering the wrong armor, or the wrong colors, or the wrong race, and they couldn't find the error until after a week. Now imagine something as complex as a phenome system. It would take them a lot of time and a programmer that is stuck in such a complex system is a programmer that isn't programming other, probably more important gameplay things. EDIT: Ninja'ed like, two times. I'm so slow and old and get out of my lawn!

Details like this make me go "SQUEEEE!" with joy.

Preservation of parts of the original language makes some sense, but we don't have enough information to do so. Anything we come up with might get trampled by lore, forcing us to retcon it at a later date. We'd have to come up with our own 'dialect', to name it in some way, but since there's hardly any good source of Miqo'te language anywhere, we'd be just making stuff up with no actual grounding in official lore. So if the real Miqo'te language ever comes up, we'd be in a lot of trouble to justify the inevitable huge differences between it and our dialect. That's why I recommend against its use: we can't base it from actual lore. It would be purely speculative instead of interpretative or infered by the original text. The original name of the tribe is the Hipparion Tribe. I don't see any reason to make another word for it. It would be meaningless and serve no practical purpose. Like changing the name 'tribe' to 'oonkla'. I would agree to use the original language if we had it. But since we don't, I don't see any compelling reason to use it. Hipparion is already kind of an obscure name, so why use an even stranger word to designate the tribe? In fact, we can explain why the original name was lost: lack of use. The Eorzean language was more versatile and practical to use and, after many generations, it displaced the original language completely. On an unrelated note: we have a wiki page! Wiiiii!

It is implied in some of the developer posts in those Lore forums that all racial languages have faded into obscurity or disuse (except for Roegadyn, who still use their language but -only- for naming their children). What I'm thinking is that all races have lived together in Eorzea for so long that the languages fell into disuse or merged together into the modern language. This would have taken many centuries, mind, but Eorzea has a lot of eras in the calendar. It's not hard to assume that our nomadic tribe adopted the modern language so long ago as to make the old Miqo'te one meaningless.

All the names start with K because that's the letter that designates the main tribe. You can see how Miqo'te names work in-lore in this very helpful thread..

Considering that Eorzea is 'exactly' the size it is despicted in the game shuts down a lot of potential roleplay. We can assume Eorzea is actually much, much bigger, but the game has to 'scale it down' for gameplay purposes: nobody would like spending three real life days travelling from one city to the other by foot. So there's plenty of 'free' space for small meaningless towns and random unruled wilderness. Now, if by 'growing up' you mean literally, growing up from a little boy to an adult, I'd say that person wouldn't have any kind of spoken language at all and, what's more, he would a lot of problems fitting back into society. He would be very animalistic. I guess you could compare him to Tarzan. However, if you meant that he used to have human contact before but that at some point he was left to 'live secluded for a long, long time', then it's plausible if he was in a very, very obscure location or if he chose to avoid human contact. In that case, him having no concept of 'yours' or 'mine' can make sense or it can make no sense depending on the place. If there were predators or other people (whom he avoided) that tried to steal his food and were very territorial, then he'd have a VERY distinct and primitive concept of 'mine': he'd be very violent when other people put their hands on his things. Ironically, he would probably see stealing as another means of survival, so even if he has a very strict concept of 'mine', he would have, perhaps, little respect for what is 'yours'. Or maybe he would respect it a lot, identifying himself with other human beings and not daring touch anything that 'belongs' to others.

Kyatai: yes, the main and only Eorzean deposit is in Thanalan. At least, it seems it's the only one that has been discovered as of time of speaking. I think Ishgard is locked up in their own little holy war with dragons, currently, and the garleans had a very nasty battle against them (the dragons, I mean. There's a cutscene in the game and all). I'd say it's likely the Empire isn't focusing on Ishgard because they aren't particularly helping the rest of Eorzea and maybe because the dragons are actually a bigger problem. Besides, I'm sure once Ishgard wins/stabilizes their war effort against the dragons, the Empire will lunge in and take advantage of their weakened state.

I think we should see Eorzea as Ancient Greece: Some of the greek city-states had their own version of the greek language, but they all were so similar that it was basically the same, with some small differences that wouldn't be worth representing in roleplay. Except for pirate speak, I guess, because pirates! The Lalafell Naming Conventons mentions an anomaly in some of the male names, caused by a sound that is no longer represented in the modern language. So that means lalas, Miqo'te and Roegadyn has their own languages at some point in the past.

I think this is going rather well, so I'll let you guys keep talking about that. What I did see was people worried about certain classes not fitting the tribe's backstory, so I'll ramble a bit about that. Lancers and archers are probably mostly self-explanatory: when hunting, you want to keep your distance from the target. So it makes sense that the majority of the tribe would focus on those disciplines (the hunting parties, anyway). But other classes can fit well too. The simplest way is to say certain characters left the tribe to study in the Guilds, with the purpose of coming back later and teaching the others. However, I think most classes can be explained without the need to have left the tribe. Remember than in ARR's universe, pretty much all classes have flashy magical skills, so some disciplines that wouldn't work in the real world would work in Eorzea because of...well, magic. That sounds like a poor argument, though, so let's try it without magic (in some cases, anyway). For instance: - It's probable that hunters would be subject to some hand-to-hand combat training, in case their weapons break or are unavailable, so a puglicist could be a character who maybe wasn't so good with spears but who really liked punching people (and beasts, maybe) in the face. - Conjurers can be explained as the healers of the tribe. However, along with Thaumaturges, they also have a very nice way to fit into hunting parties: slow spells. Both classes have access to spells that (as far as gameplay goes) slow down the targets. That would be really handy for hunting. - Axes are better than spears to smash through a beasts caparace, and even better to cut them to pieces for easier transportation. That'd be a nice way to make Marauders fit: for dangerous or big beasts, the lancers could keep pressure against it to confuse it, while the Marauder found a vantage point from where to leap and axe it in the face. Or, if we want to keep the gameplay roles consistent with RP, maybe the Marauders where the ones who distracted the beasts while everybody else poke them to death with pointy sticks. - Gladiators are a bit tricky, as swords aren't really made for hunting. The shields would come handy when a sandworm leapt out of its hole and tried to munch on the hunting party. So let's marry gameplay and roleplay and say some of the hunters carried shields so sandworms/whatever they hunted wouldn't murder their partners so easily. - Arcanists are a bit trickier to explain because they seem to use arcane mathematics. But, luckily, I think Naunet's character is supposed to have dwelt in that, so other arcanists could have learnt from her. Or to go back to my first way to explain all classes: some left to learn at the Guilds before coming back (or not). With all that said, lancers and archers are probably the most common choice of weapons because, again, when hunting you want to keep your target far away but in reach. Spears would also be good to poke at the sandworms nests, I'd say. But all classes can be in the tribe.

I can't answer 1, but I can answer 2. Or...a part of it. During the story-line mission that opens up Airship travel, it is stated that Airship travel is tightly controlled and kept to a minimum because of fear that the Garlean shoot them down. This, to me, implies that the Garleans are able to send airships without being shot down or being detected by the Grand Companies. Consider that they do not have the same access to magitek the Empire has (though that might change), and airships are actually quite hard to detect (or even see) without modern radars. So the Eorzean military groups could 'probably' catch it when it's landing, but by the time they get a patrol or squad there, the garleans might already be gone or be on their way by foot. Airships seem to work on 'spaceship' or maybe 'helicopter' physics in ARR's world, judging by one of the cinematic trailers and the in-game cinematic you are shown when using the Airship passes. About Ceruleum: the wiki says it's obtained by refining elemental crystals, so it's likely that there's quite a lot of places where you can get them. On the other hand, it then mentions it's only found in Thanalan. That would explain (in part) why the Empire is trying to invade Eorzea: their magitek is powered by huge ammount of it, so they will need it to mantain their power. I'd assume it means Ceruleum can be found in 'raw' form only in Thanalan, but that you can obtain it by processing normal elemental crystals, too.

There's no limit to the ammount of nunhs according to the Miqo'te Naming Convention thread. There's a nunh every 10-50 females, so you can have quite a lot of nunhs in a single 'sub-tribe', as long as birth rates for males are enough (and, in an lore-friendly sense, as long as it's implied there're more females than males).

Makes me wonder what sense the lalafell have improved over time, if any. I guess those long ears they have would mean their hearing is a bit better than those of the Hyur.

Equipment is much more easy to handwave, even if the game has hard restrictions like being clan specific or being only obtained from a specific raid or boss: you just got it somehow. Maybe it was a gift, or you won it in a bet, or their previous owner is now dead (not necessarily by your hand), or it's a copy of the 'real' deal in the case of rare equipment that is supposed to be unique.

Nobody can stop you from having a character name that doesn't suit your race's lore as long as you have a reason behind it. Actually, even if you had no reason at all nobody could stop you. I'm not sure I understand why you want a Sun Seeker how is 'attuned' to the moon. But I guess what you mean is that you like the Sun Keepers' aesthetical appareance but you prefer Moon Keepers' name, correct? If that's the case, you can handwave it by making this character a Sun Keeper adopted by a Moon Keeper family. It's probably best to make them city-dwellers, too, since the city-states is where the cultures meet and merge, so naming conventions can be bent more reasonably. A tribal setting could work too, though. Personally, I'd just go full Sun Keeper and adapt the name. Being a Sun Keeper with an attunement to the moon sounds incredibly odd and will send the wrong message to other roleplayers. But, as stated, being raised in a nocturnal family can explain it quite well, I think.

As K'airos Thalen's player, I approve of this connections: RP will spring naturally from them! Someone mentioned the tribe's leadership. I'm not sure how Seeker tribes work hierarchicaly, but I'd assume the nunhs, being the strongest/most capable members of the tribe, probably form a council of sorts, with the elders working as councelors. But, whatever the leadership will be, I suggest we keep them as offscreen NPCs and just decide their 'orders' or overall goals OOCly. Bringing the tribe back together after the Calamity seems to be a good starting point, and it gives those who want to play characters with the tribal ties intact a reason to seek the other members and interact with them. Also, Wolf, I don't see any problem with that little detail on your backstory.

It's hard to say if there's any such institution in Eorzea. From what I gathered when playing, I think the safest way to approach education is to imply the guild's take care of that. Upbringing is most likely handled by the family itself until a certain age, at which point I'd expect the child to either become an apprentice on one of the guilds or to start learning their parent's trade if they can't afford the apprenticeship for whatever reason. Guilds don't seem to ask for money to the player-characters (maybe they have a special 'adventurer scholarship'?), but the teachers would still have to be convinced that the potential apprentice has...well, potential. Alternatively, we can assume there are off-screen schools and academies, but then one would expect them to come up during the game: all the scholarly NPCs I have seen always come from one of the guilds.

Things for which Ulanan might be known: -Her family spent a long time trying to get into Ul'dah's highest social levels. Specially by hobnobing their daughters and sons with the politically or financially influential and marrying them. Ulanan was the youngest. -She was married to a respectable and easy-going merchant with connections to the Syndicate, until his death. -Her husband was found dead, stabbed in the neck with a hook and hung from his room's ceiling. The investigation claimed he had been killed by one of his concubines. Gossip between the socialites blamed Ulanan for not being a 'good wife'. -If you have connections to the Brass Blades or the Immortal Flames, you might know her father 'financed' the investigation. -After her husband's death she had a mental breakdown and dissapeared from Ul'dah's social scene. In fact, she dissapeared from the city completely. -You might have seen her at the small towns scattered around Thanalan, buying supplies and speaking in alliterations quite often. Sometimes, she can be seen wandering in Gridania and La Noscea. -Sometimes, she yells randomly. Ussually when she's already engaged in conversation. -She always carries a jar of olives with her.

I'll assume you want to be a Damage Dealer. Marauder, from what little I saw up to level 14, wasn't very complex and required no movement at all. I tried Archer for a bit, but I found it an extremely dull and uninteresting class. I didn't have to move much, however, and I'm not sure if kitting is required for them. Quite a shame, because I like archers in most games. I also played a Thaumaturge, but I couldn't decide if it was a kitting class (the story-line missions seem to suggest that it is) or a face-tanking class: sometimes I just killed things more efficiently if I spammed Fire on them. Other times, the mobs hitted hard and I was better off running away. I also had to get Cure as soon as possible, because it's a damn handy spell, specially for those pesky solo quests. During instances, though, I barely moved as a Thaumaturge. You just fling fireballs at the enemy until you run out of mana, at which point you use Transfuse (or whatever the skill is called) and reapply the electric dot and use ice based attacks until your MP regens. It's a very fast regeneration and it's actually kind of fun and well designed. A burst damage dealer, I guess you could call it.

Quite useful! And I must say that I like how Squeenix actually animates Miqo'te tails and ears differently during emotes. It's a very nice detail.