Gur, gur beltàdlet kert ná… Ròmanár gur pevgetslá koro modá ibiŝan darak pevnánûglá. Spanolár badmâ pevorklá kâ aknà iskan badrokâ itatâ. Itlá Dîŝlan idráurn pevorestlá poro admo bárizûurn darakâ. Garad, gur beltàdlet kert ná.
Gur, gur belt-ayed-let kairt nah. Roman-ar gur pev-gets-lah, koh-roh moh-dah ibishan darak pev-nan-oo-glah. Span-olar badmor pevor-klah, kor ack-nay iskan bad-rockor itah-tor. It-lah Doysh-lan idrah-urn pevor-est-lah, poh-roh ad-moh bah-riz-or-urn dara-kor. Garad, gur belt-ayad-let kairt nah.
WAR, WAR WILL-CHANGE-ITSELF NO !! ROMAN-PEOPLE WAR DID-PERFORM TO PLURAL SLAVE MONEY DID-SEIZE. SPANISH-PEOPLE EMPIRE DID-BUILD BY THEIR DESIRE TREASURE-CONCERNING LAND-CONCERNING. HITLER GERMANY BROKEN DID-REPAIR CAUSE COUNTRY VERY-POWERFUL MONEY-CONCERNING. DEPSITE-THIS, WAR WILL-CHANGE-ITSELF NO !!
Traditional Zurvár belief systems don’t have the concept of an all powerful deity. The closest equivalents would be either pak vâmâkan (‘the creator’ – the ancestor being said to have created the Zurvár race) or pak rèzaq (‘the wave’ – the spiritual plane to which certain components of the Zurvár soul are said to return to await reincarnation).
When discussing deities from non-Zurvár cultures the term báèsûad – ‘being of great power’ – is generally used. The term has no implication as to whether said powers are used for good or ill however, and would be used equally to describe (for instance) the Christian God and the Christian Devil.
When referring to a specific deity, a Zurvár rendering of the deity’s name is usually improvised. Examples from Earth’s religions include,
Báèsûad Kot, Báèsûad Cesùs, Báèsûad Gris, Báèsûad Cùhová – The Christian God
Báèsûad Alá, Báèsûad Alûá, Báèsûad Máhumd – Allah
Báèsûad Ašem, Báèsûad Yáwe, Báèsûad Abráem – The Judaic God
The Zurvár creation myth is based around five elements, and these permeate most factors of their culture, including their traditional calendar. In order they’re lòtò (boats), minak (stars), katálá (fish), rindû (birds) and táká (knots).
The traditional calendar (as opposed to the revised calendar used on Zurvár Arèáná) uses a week (mán) of five days named after these elements (dásûln lòtò, dásûln minak, etc). A month (kadatán) consists of five weeks (25 days), each of which is also named after the five elements, and five months (125 days) – again named after the five elements – makes up a full year (rin).
A date is traditionally written with the full title of the day, week and month, followed by whatever system of year identification the House in question uses. The fourth day of the third week of the fifth month for instance would be dásûln rindû dámán katálá dákadatán táká. Even before the adoption of the revised calendar however it was more common to simply use numbers – for instance sûln tò-rû-zadat “day four three five”.
The combination of the day and month element of a person’s birth is said to predict their character, similarly to that of horoscopes here on Earth.
The calendar used on Zurvár Arèáná has a split derived from the Gregorian BCE/CE system, but in a slightly complicated way.
The Zurvár calendar is based on the calendar used by the Metaphysicians’ Guild, which itself is based on the Gregorian calendar. The epoch however is fixed to the start of the Gregorian century in which Zurvár Arèáná was settled – the 20th – so the zero year of the Zurvár calendar is 1900 CE.
As such the current year on Zurvár Arèáná is ST0123, which breaks down as…
ST – Indicates that the Zurvár Arèáná epoch is being used
01 – It’s the second century of said epoch
23 – It’s the 23rd year of that century
Years prior to 1900 CE are indicated with a negative century indicator. 1788 CE for instance would be -ST0288.
The century indicator is written with a minimum of two characters, but can be expanded as necessary for dates in the distant past and distant future.
The Zurvár are humans originating from a nearby parallel Earth (although not even they can pin down their actual world of origin). They’re close enough to ‘standard’ humans to interbreed but have a number of evolutionary adaptations suited to their marine focused culture.
Most Zurvár have webbing between their toes and fingers. On the toes this extends almost to the tips, on fingers it rarely extends beyond the first knuckle.
Zurvár skin is more resistant to sunburn and is extremely resistant to UV induced cancers. It varies in tone between III and IV on the Fitzpatrick scale, but even the lightest shades almost never burn.
Zurvár kidneys process dissolved salts far more efficiently, to the extent that a Zurvár can drink nothing but sea water for around a week before suffering any ill effects (as such, human visitors to Zurvár Arèáná should keep in mind that municipal water supplies may require additional filtration before being safe to consume).
The Zurvár spleen is significantly larger than that of ‘standard’ humans, providing a larger reserve of oxygenated blood. This allows the average Zurvár to easily hold their breath for several minutes without discomfort, and remain submerged and active for anywhere up to 15 minutes. With practice Zurvár free divers routinely reach depths of 200 metres while remaining submerged for up to 40 minutes.
Around 30% of Zurvár have epicanthic folds. Debate continues over whether this is some kind of adaptation to marine environments or simply the result of genetic drift across the historically nomadic Zurvár population.
The following bit of sub-par Giant Days fanfiction has been wedged in my brain for several years. I have had vague plans of drawing it, but I suspect it’s not really worth the effort, so I will instead present it here as a script (along with copious apologies to John Allison).
SCENE: Daisy’s room, Catterick Hall, first year. Daisy is studying while music plays from a portable CD player.
Enter Esther and Susan through door (dramatically of course)
Susan: Daisy Wooton, what is this noise?
Esther: Did Enya find a mellotron?
Daisy (picking up and displaying The Mollusk CD case): It’s not Enya, it’s Ween. Ed Gemmel lent it to me.
Esther (while Susan takes and examines CD case): You shouldn’t listen to people weeing Daisy, it’s not healthy for developing young minds!
Susan (looking through CD insert): It appears to concern a grown man talking to a young boy about his ‘mollusc’…
For my own reference I shall now attempt to list every unfinished 40k model and/or project I have lying around. Hopefully this will motivate me to get some of them finished, or at least stop me from starting any more.
(Ha!)
Tanks and APCs 1x Kitbashed Church Tank 1x Scratchbuilt A7V Tank 1x Kragmeer Ice Chimera 1x Malcador Defender 4x Chimeras 1x Leman Russ 1x Baneblade 1x Buran Class Chimera 2x Scylla Light Tanks Imperial Guard Bastiladon with 3 Crew
Aircraft Avenger Strike Fighter Valkyrie
Infantry Kitbashed Valhallan Colonel Giant Ogryn with Ratling sniper in a crows nest 9x Penal Troopers and 1x Overseer Kill Team Veteran Guardsmen Box 23x Kitbashed Conscripts Commissar Cadian Standard Bearer Valhallan Standard Bearer 3x Psykers 1x Primaris Psyker 8x Ratling Snipers 3x Assorted Inquisitors Vindicare Assassin (Metal) Calidus Assassin (Metal) Culexus Assassin (Metal) Eversor Assassin (Metal) Venenum Assassin (Kitbashed) 11x Kitbashed Veterans 3x Tankers (Metal) 2x Astropaths 1x Tech Priest 5x Weapon Servitors 2x Cawdor Gangers (Metal) 1x Crusader 2x Valhallan Officers 2x Ministorum Priests 62 Assorted Metal Valhallans 3x Medics 2x Ogryn Cyborgs 2x Imperial Soldiers (Metal) 2x Death Cult Assassins 1x Metal Sister Dialogus 😮 3x Acolytes 1x Daemonhost 2x Fleet Officers 2x Artillery Officers 1x Knight Pilot 10x Orlocks Various Cadians Valhallan Artillery Crew (inc. Ammunition Bear) 1x Space Marine (Just the One!) Various Kitbashed Squats Several Forge World Death Korps of Krieg 10x Naval Breachers
Artillery and Special Weapons Imperial Thud Gun Valhallan Heavy Mortar Team 2x Basilisk 1x Deathstrike/Manticore 1x Hellhound 2x Valhallan Bolter Teams 3x Valhallan Autocannon Teams 2x Valhallan Lascannon Teams 3x Valhallan Missile Launcher Teams 2x Valhallan Mortar Teams Various Unspecified Valhallan Weapon Teams
Kitbashed Inquisitor and Retinue Ordo Malleus Inquisitor Andreus Eldrict Astra Militarum Medic Dr Jeep Death Cult Assassin Lucretia Adeptus Mechanicus Pilot 2-5-0-0-0 Weapon Servitor Doktor Avalanche Crusader Brother Torquemada Bound Psyker “Alice” (AKA The Vision Thing) Cyber-Mastiff Napalm Cherubim Servitor Icke Navigator Marianne Cedd Savant Aegypt Hwaite Inquisitorial Shuttle Soror Misericordum
Special Characters Knight Commander Pask Saint Sabbat (Kitbashed) Inquisitor Eisenhorn Sly Marbo (Official) Sly Marbo (Kitbashed) Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clouseau (Kitbashed) Commissar Severina Raine Sister Superior Amalia Novena 5x Gaunt’s Ghosts (Plastic) 6x Gaunt’s Ghosts (Metal) Vermin Supreme Junith Erutia (on foot) Space Marine Pilot 2x Last Chancers (Metal)
Others 16x Metal Seraphim 1x Imperial Knight 4x Sentinels Bear Cavalry (BEAR CAVALRY!) Kitbashed Walker/Stomper 1x Man of Iron 5x Servo Skulls 1x Giant Servo Skull 1x GheistSkull 1x C.A.T Unit Kitbashed Squat Trike Entire Space Hulk set Metal Chaos Dwarf
Not long ago someone posted the following image (which I have shamelessly stolen) to one the Tengwar subreddits, asking for a translation.
I nicked it. When you let your guard down for that split second. And I’d do it again.
(For those not in the know the Tengwar is the writing system devised by J.R.R.Tolkien for his Elvish languages. It’s very pretty but horribly impractical – the Elves were probably plagued with dyslexia.)
Two facts were quickly established. That the squiggly bits above the eye are the logo of the Tolkien themed, Austrian, atmospheric-black-metal band Summoning, and the writing is complete gibberish, a repetition of something like ait-h dom a chon. Case closed.
Except something about the whole thing nagged me. The photo is obviously of a manufactured item, probably a promotional item for the band, and likely made of metal. It seemed unlikely that the band – either as professional musicians or Tolkien fans – would go to all the trouble of making such a thing and then just stick a bunch of random letters on it. Surely it’s meant to mean something?
Fool! Purple Wyrm writes as he pleases!
The first possibility was that it’s written in the Mode of Baloneyland. “Mode of Baloneyland” is a very funny pun, but you need to understand a few things about the Tengwar before you can understand it. Now, I could skip over this in the name of not boring the hell out of you, but this is my blog, and I write as I please!
Tolkien was a linguist (specifically a philologist), and he made his Elves linguists as well. As such the writing system he invented for them was not simply an alphabet, it was system that could be used to write any language. Each individual consonant (tengwa) is built out of components indicating the basic sound it represents, but it can be reassigned to another value depending on the needs of the language being written. The exact assignment of letters to sounds is called a mode, with examples in Tolkien’s works including the General Mode, the Classic or Quenya Mode, and the Mode of Beleriand.
This flexibility means that the Tengwar does not easily map to a computer keyboard. For a start you need to know what mode you’re writing in – the tengwa súle for instance represents “s” in Quenya Mode and “th” in General Mode. What key should that be mapped to? Also there’s two ways to represent vowels. In General and Quenya mode they’re indicated with marks (tehta) above the tengwa, but in the Mode of Beleriand they have their own dedicated tengwa – so should the ‘E’ key put a dot above a letter or print out the character yanta? It’s a nightmare!
As such, tengwar fonts don’t try to set up a correlation between the letters on the keys and the tengwar they print. They simply make all the tengwar available and rely on the person typing to know what they’re doing. Inevitably many people don’t know what they’re doing and try to write in “Elvish” by typing in a phrase in English and then switching it a tengwar font. Among tengwar enthusiasts the resulting gibberish is referred to as “The Mode of Baloneyland”. Get it? Like the Mode of Beleriand, but absolute baloney. See? I told you it was funny!
(Please laugh)
Now, if the text was written in the Mode of Baloneyland there would be no way to decipher it without knowing the mapping of the specific font it was written in. I decided to ignore this dead end and assume that whoever wrote it had some idea of what they were doing, but were just really bad at using the tengwar. So, I hopped over to Summoning’s Wikipedia page to look for any clues. I quickly discovered that in 2018 they released an album named “With Doom we Come”. Hmmm, not unsimilar to ait-h dom a chon…
A closer look at the image shows that the Redditor who translated the inscription as ait-h dom a chon missed a few things. Firstly the questionable quality of the metal casting makes it a bit tricky to tell for sure, but the final númen (‘n’) could actually be malta (‘m’), rendering it ait-h dom a chom. Secondly there are marks above the space before chom and the divider between repeated spaces – ait-h dom a’chom‘. These are clearly orphaned ‘e’s – when a tehta cannot be written above a letter it’s supposed to have a carrier (like a lowercase “i” without the dot) placed beneath it. This makes the phrase ait-h dom ae chome.
We’re making progress! The “t-h” on the end of the first word is clearly a result of the writer not realising that there’s a single tengwa for the “th” combination, but what’s with the ‘a’s? A consultation of a tengwar chart gives us the answer. While the character resembles osse – used to represent ‘a’ in the Mode of Beleriand – it’s actually not a valid tengwa at all! It’s the character vala (‘w’) printed backwards! So we’ve now decoded our way to with dom we chome.
Consulting a chart also solves the problem with “ch”. Whoever wrote out the phrase forgot to add a line to the tengwa calma (‘ch’), which would have transformed it to quesse (‘k’). Fix this and we have with dom we kome.
There’s still the issue that the first ‘o’ should have been doubled, but we’ve successfully demonstrated that the inscription is a really incompetent attempt at writing With Doom We Come.
For purposes of comparison here are the inscription as written, and how it would be written properly in both the orthographic (based on spelling) and phonetic (based on sounds) English Modes – all generated via Tecendil which is the only Tengwar transcriber you should use!
Incompetent Mode – “?it-h dom ?e chome”Orthographic mode – “Wið doom we come”Phomenic Mode – “Wið duum wii kum”
So in conclusion, perhaps get someone to check over your tengwar before sending merchandise for production, Summoning!
Severn Horror – my homemade expansion for Arkham Horror 2nd Edition based on the works of Ramsey Campbell – is done.
After three solid days of documenting, revising, documenting, revising and documenting again I am too mentally shattered to write anything witty or interesting, so I’ll just blurt the finished product onto the net and worry about promoting it later.
I happened to take a wander through Northbridge today and as is my wont took a bunch of photographs of things that looked interesting or cool. Among these was the old factory now in use as a Wilson Car Park (That’s “parking lot” to you North Americans) on James Street, just adjacent to the freeway.
Note the Google Street View car. I may show up on an update! Also, those dark bits are inside the lens array so I can’t clean them out 🙁
While looking for good angles and lighting and such my attention was drawn by the curvy bit poking up behind the facade. It looked like the factory was constructed around an older building. Curious and with plenty on time on my hands I decided to go in and have a look.
Inside I indeed found the remains of a previous structure with rather fancy – albeit badly abused – columns and some nice surviving detail on the internal part of the pediment.
I took a bunch of photos, poked around the place a bit, and went on my way.
Half an hour or so later, down the Horseshoe Bridge end of Roe Street, I stumbled over a newly erected historical marker talking about the street’s seedy past as Perth’s red light district (a past I already knew about thanks to my dad’s stories of earning pocket money by holding places in brothel queues for visiting American sailors in the late ’40s)…
Did you spot it? Let’s try a close up…
It’s the very structure entombed in the car park! How’s that for a crazy coincidence?!
It turns out that it was a service station that acted as a secret back door to the notorious “Josie Villa”. Which I guess means that visitors to Northbridge are parking their cars on the site of early 20th century Perth’s best known knocking shop!
My walk also spotted an old horseshoe that I presume has been dug up as part of the extensive roadworks talking place all along Roe. I considered nabbing it, but I’ve already got enough junk lying around here.
