Retconning Bards as part of Rockhome
by Marc SaindonOompah!
(shamelessly retconning Bards as part of Rockhome)
Okay, so Bards have a weird history of first being a AD&D prestige class, than a human-only class, and never made it into BECMI. But it would makes sense that, (post the AD&D2e conversion) Rockhome have a strong Entertainment Guild (recruited mainly from commoners) that trains Bards.
Naturally, I'd avoid the usual Dwarves-as-Scotsmen and thus not give them bagpipes (this point even shows up in Forbes, of all places) as Rockhome and Klantyre aren't on good terms. And reach into the Dwarf's ancient history, and make the Bards a connection to Rockhome's ancient past, the Kogolor. Sure, most of the Kogolor past is lost to the mist of history, but part of it survives in the Entertainment Guild (placeholder name until something better comes up), at least its in heart.
Also I'm great fan of the Kogolor as a concept, and can't really wait for a campaign to evolve until reaches the Hollow World to have some aspect of them intervene.
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another note is while I appreciate the effort of creating a dwarf language lexicon in the gazetteer, maybe it's simpler to just call it 'Old Form', a language that dwarf scholars study and dwarf clerics use in rituals (and Kogolor use as their common tongue), while dwarf Common in Rockhome is basically German, having been influenced through trade with the Northern Reaches.
(pic from: https://hyperboreancomics.wordpress.com/tag/bavarian/)
