Hello.
I send you with this E-Mail as attachments the original German Text of the
Story. Additioonally, I'll send you my Translation.
I consider it as somewhat rough, but on the other hand it still is the only
available translation of the whole story. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
The text itself arose as a kind of "forum-role-playing" : We decided to write
down an advemture with tendency to more or less "true" role-playing, and with
that, every contributor told a part of the story.
"That was many years ago" (Genesis), and in the German part of the Old Forum.
Checking the offline pages I still have, the topic began in January 2000. The
Larian Forum was erected 1999.
The Topic had the simple name "Rollenspiel", which means "Role-Play" (rather
than "Role-Playing" ) in English. I renamed it for the translation into
"Rescuing the Princess" (which indeed was the intention of the characters of
the role-playing game
) .
Somewhere in / on the Fan-Page of Anthea there is a sort of compiled version of
the original, german topic.
Well, now I decided to put the original text as an RTF file into the package;
the whole HTML files - with all data like background pictures and buttons)
would be around 1 MB. I don't have such a good connection (dial-up-connection)
for sending such big e-mails , so I want to try to keep the whole package
small.
The texts are in RTF and in HTML format. I think this should be okay.
And now a few notes on the role-playing itself :
As you might know - or not - Larian Studios once worked on a game called
"Unless - The Treachery". This was partly bought up by a german developing
company called Attic. They renamed it into LMK : The Lady, the Mage and the
Knight; the german title was a bit different : Legenden der Magier-Kriege
(still LMK) [Legends of the Mage-Wars].
In a quarrel, Larian and Attic split, and in order to simply survive, Larian
had to develop something - it became "Project C" (rumor says that "C" stood for
"Cash" - which later turned to become "Divinity - The Sword of Lies". Some
employees of Attic were at Larian then, too.
Why do I say all this ? Well, it's because LMK was intended to be compatible
with the famous German RPG System "Das Schwarze Auge" (DSA). Well it's famous
here in Germany, but the rest of the world desn't know it - with two exceptions
:
1. The more or less predecessor of LMK was the "Realms of Arcania" series,
which was translated into English by Sir-Tech. These were three games, known
here in Germany as the "Nordland-Trilogie" [Northland-Trology] :
Schicksalsklinge [Blade of Destiny], Sternenschweif [Startrail] and Schatten
über Riva [Shadows over Riva].
2. Only a few months ago, the original developer of the RPG System, Fantasy
Productions (FanPro) released this underlying RPG System as "The Dark Eye" into
the English market.
The original RPG Topic - which later became the "Lost Kingdom" epic - *also*
used originally elements from this RPG System : Character names, classes,
peoples, even Gods.
In the text which appears in the game, however, the editor - Bronthion - had to
erase there references, because he feared it wouldn't be allowed because it had
no license for using these elements.
I tried this, too.
A seldom noticed reference to DSA is how the Elves speak in their native tongue
in Divinity : It's like how the Elves speak in DSA ! ;-) (Kind of Easter Egg,
too ;-) )
As a summary : There exist three versions of the "Lost Kingdom" epic (role-
playing text) :
- The original german-language topic with all references included
- My translation, with all references taken away
- Bronthion's german-language version, also with all references taken away, and
with the pages shuffled a bit, it seems to me. ;-)
From the original, there are two versions : The original pages I saved onto my
harddisk, and the pure text taken out of these pages into one RTF document.
The translation itself was very hard for me, a) because it was totally new to
me to translate such a text (with *lots* of rarely-used words like "chain-mail"
! ) and b) due to time constraints. I had to do it in a definitive amount of
time, meanwhile colliding with another important project I had to do during my
training as a programmer.
Since then, my translation skills have become stronger, but still need a *lot*
of work. ;-) I recently translated a FanFiction story in the Star Wars Universe
from German into English. ;-)
Well, that's it ! Have Fun ! ;-)
Alrik.
