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Old 06-30-2011, 11:33 AM   #41
Archangel Beth
In Nomine Line Editor
 
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Frozen Wastelands of NH
Default Re: And ye shall know the Truth ...

Quote:
Originally Posted by DBloch2012 View Post
It's at the very beginning of the book, in The Overture.
Ah, there it is. Read the next sentence, though -- it's recursive. The extent that God "made" the Symphony (vs. being the Symphony, vs. the ethereal heresy) is, if not fully Canon Doubt and Uncertainty, canonically... fuzzy. God's big. It's a hard thing to get a handle on, and gets described in many different ways.

Especially before I got the reins of Line Editing and started trying to get all the multitude of authors to mesh, rather than having about a dozen different viewpoints, including tidbits that go back all the way to the French INS/MV. (Fun Trivia! The SJ Games In Nomine went through at least 3 drafts and the final product was a major revision in and of itself!)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Acolyte View Post
I don't understand how any reading of the Seraphic resonance would allow the above. The ability to detect lies (and very, very rarely Truths) does not in any way obviate the Song of Tongues.
MunchkinSeraph could probably try to claim that Check Digit 3 should give useful information -- "And Herr NPC is telling us, in German, that he doesn't speak the language because he doesn't want strangers to find out his wife is a demon, right? right?"
( http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/i...eck_Digits.pdf )

Whether that would be too much data and make Language-meister Mercurian unhappy because the Seraph is playing whack-a-resonance and getting useful stuff... is up to the GM in question. Overall, I'd encourage a GM to err on the side of "if language issues are going to be plot-relevant, figure out how you want to handle that." A GM who is running a world-touring group where language-barriers are just going to bog things down may want to hand out extra points for languages or translation artifacts, as might a GM who knows that the character(s) will never go back to X country again. (I went with the latter when a character decided to hop over to Japan for a scene.) A GM who has a "talk to everyone" player character may want to make extra-sure that Seraphim don't step on that PC's toes. A GM who wants language barriers to be barriers ("you've been kidnapped by the Spanish-speaking gang; anyone put points into Spanish? then tough, you can't eavesdrop while they talk about their plans") should be thinking about that sort of thing as well.

Many angels, in In Nomine, can get a huge amount of information from their resonance; it can be very taxing to a GM to come up with a bunch of stuff, often on the fly. While it's fair to propose that a resonance might be able to pick up data from words the character doesn't understand, it's kinder to the GM to assume that language is a barrier as the default, for Seraphim. Now, Elohim and their resonance? Emotions are emotions. Carry on, bald little space aliens.
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