Languages of Pao Q2 Worldbuilding
. Does the worldbuilding work? Pao, Breakness, Batmarsh, and Mercantil all have very different cultures. Do the various cultures presented seem interesting? Silly? Shallow? Rich? Many-sided?
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All the cultures were one-note and two-dimensional. I found it to be incredibly shallow.
Yes, I also found them to be shallow, but in my case I thought that shallowness was quite credible, given this was really quite a short book. Did they really have such different cultures? I'm not so sure. But the characters from each culture certainly had different agendas - and that's not quite the same thing.
I don't think that in this story, Vance was interested in realistic world-building - rather, he wanted to set up a collection of artificial constructs to pit against each other, represented by the languages. Indeed, this artifice (IMHO) took over the entire book and left it rather lacking in other dimensions. I'll probably ramble on about this in another more suitable discussion.
I quite liked the cultures - it felt like just enough depth for a mini-campaign, and (although there's another thread on gaming use) I felt like a it demonstrated how you can have a cliched group of factions (merchant culture, warlike culture, science culture, boring culture) and make them sing as long as you give them distinctive non-symmetrical agenda and have some pretty vignettes to describe them and make them cool. WIth the exception of the Pao - I had no love for them at all, and ultimately this made the stakes in the book quite hard to care about. I'd have quite happily subaqueated them all.
You'd have needed an awful lot of aqua...