Thari

[jibbajibba]

Got to agree with Gabriel. the language in use in a particular situation is always understandable unless it not being understandable advances the plot.
So unless 2 players decide that they will always talk in Cree when using trump, or I don't want that player to understand Oberon's conversation with the pirate prince then it's all understandable.
A true use of language in a game would be clumsy and unmanageable. Why do you think Gygax invented Common in the first place :-)

[gabriel_ss4u]

Yeah, I always thought of it as the lesser beings striving to understand the greater beings... not the other way around.
Accent & dialect enrich story detail.
Inability to understand conversations is a real hurdle in game play.

[Otha]

I usually take language as a given everywhere.

Earth is unique in that Corwin isn't speaking Thari there.

Perhaps that's an aspect of it that Eric (or Flora or whoever found it in the first place) added in order to make it that much more hostile to Amberites arriving for the first time?

[Rel Fexive]

It could be that everyone consciously or unconsciously picks Shadows where the people speak a language they understand.  So 'choosing' to have a world with an 'unknown' language is a sort of tactical choice.

That being said, for simplicity I would let Pattern (and possibly Logrus) give initiates greater/quicker facility with learning languages rather than out-and-out universal translation.

[gabriel_ss4u]

It could be that everyone consciously or unconsciously picks Shadows where the people speak a language they understand.  So 'choosing' to have a world with an 'unknown' language is a sort of tactical choice.

That being said, for simplicity I would let Pattern (and possibly Logrus) give initiates greater/quicker facility with learning languages rather than out-and-out universal translation.

& Otha both have good points and I agree, this is basically how I run my campaign on language.

I really like Otha's progression on Eric's details of Corwin's banishment.
It would be real interesting reading Eric's side of things.