Talk:Khôltar

I've begun the requested revision and copy-edit, which I'll do in multiple sessions. Moviesign, you have a great, evocative style. :)

But some turns of phrase might be a bit overly wordy. In the sentence "There, climbers on the lowest rung of Khôltar society shoveled the muck into hopper wagons and carted it out of the city a half-day's rumble to the southwest (the most likely direction of downwind) and dumped it." I begin reading thinking it might be about people who climb into the catch basins, then find it's a metaphor for the poor. It's clever, definitely but I tend toward the keep-it-simple approach. I write and edit with English-as-a-second-language readers in mind, so I tend to avoid idioms and clever phrases that might be confusing to them.

I've understood we were using the footnote notes for out-of-universe discussion, as they appear in the Appendix with references and such. Footnotes like "Elminster speculated the origin of this word was from the name of an early builder of this style named something like Klath, and "laaeder", an old local word for "made by"." and "Luthdren usually had servers and plenty of table and chairs for feasting, while blurdren typically handed food over the counter or through a window to people in a hurry to be somewhere else." are very much in-universe, so I don't think it would sit well with OOU notes. Readers might miss them or ignore them. Perhaps they could be made as parenthetical remarks in the main text, within brackets or em dashes, or even as quote boxes? — BadCatMan (talk) 01:45, December 11, 2017 (UTC)


 * On the other hand... "the gnomes and halflings were beneath their notice." Har har har. :) — BadCatMan (talk) 11:24, December 11, 2017 (UTC)


 * But I like clever phrases! :( But you're right, EASL folks might scratch their heads (<- LOOK, did it again!) at some of my colorful metaphors. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to use "greasy spoon" to describe a blurdren, but refrained. I will attempt to rewrite that sentence to be more universally understandable.
 * I would never mix OOU and in-universe notes in the same "Notes" section, but for consistency I will re-integrate those two notes into the body of the article. Thanks for working on this! &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 18:06, December 11, 2017 (UTC)


 * The phrase "climbers on the lowest rung of Khôltar society" might work better in another context, say somewhere the poor have already been introduced, then they can be safely described as "climbers...". "Greasy spoon" could work, but as an adjective rather than a noun. I've left some like "glad-hand" that might be odd, but dictionaries exist and I don't want to completely erase your vocabulary. :) Ed Greenwood invents enough words like that on his own anyway.


 * What, no categories?


 * Excellent work, by the way. — BadCatMan (talk) 01:49, December 12, 2017 (UTC)