Thanateros's page

I can totally see an Evil deity trying to subvert Desna by creating an anti-Desna being which mockingly takes the form of a butterfly.

A Chaotic Good "anti-Desna" isn't really "anti" though. I do however like the idea that Black Butterfly was originally actually a pre-sentient shard of a Lovecraftian deity (Rovagug).

...does Desna have any monopoly on butterflies?

Do you know of any other Pathfinder deity strongly associated with butterflies?

I kinda figured it'd be Ansed...you know, Desna spelled backwards?

The idea of an "inverted" Desna would make more sense if her Alignment was also inverted, but the fact that Black Butterfly is not Evil is one of the reasons I like her. My solution for the connection between Desna and Black Butterfly is that Black Butterfly's Voidal essence had previously existed in a pre-sentient state and that the conjurer (Desna) unintentionally imprinted a portion of her psyche upon the conjured (Black Butterfly). If a deity other than Desna had been the one to conjure "Black Butterfly" into sentience, well, she would not be a butterfly.

I've also recognized this problem. I have a character from Arcadia who follows her. Name I use for her is Calamisa. It's a type of south american butterfly with very appropriate looks.

I have not actually used the name Xephiqali in a game yet. For my goal of recognizability I like the fact that the name Calamisa is already in use within a Pathfinder game. With influence from the Hindi word kala for "black" and the spelling of the Hebrew word Qabalah, I think I will go with qala as the Celestial word for "black"; misa is the remainder, so I will have that be the Celestial word for "butterfly".

Some take her just because she's the only non-evil deity with the void domain.

That is largely why I like her, but my reasons are more thematic than mechanical. I use her as the Good shard of a previously Neutral Rovagug that was separated sometime prior to his imprisonment, unintentionally conjured into sentience and imprinted upon by her conjurer Desna.

...Also, you don't have to worry about an entire internet's worth of society being ready to jump in and correct you from now until the end of time to correct you when you make a mistake in presenting a word you made up a decade before

Not surprisingly I am disappointed to hear Paizo's stance regarding in-game languages, but I can certainly sympathize with your reasons; we gamer geeks can be vicious when we perceive a slight to our beloved hobby.

..Black Butterfly's true name being difficult to spell using letters...

Black Butterfly's True Name being difficult to spell using letters means that worshipers will refer to her using an epithet... Reformulating my request, what I really want are the translations of the English words black and butterfly into the Celestial language. James, would you be willing to put your stamp of approval on something like qala for "black" and misa for "butterfly" in [the dialect of] the Celestial language [as spoken by the aasimar of Tianjing]? (Of course, feel free to propose alternative Celestial vocabulary.)

I... am bemused by those who are passionately crapping on your idea, as if your idea ran over their cat or something

It's not like I am trying to take away the epithet that they seem to cherish; I actually like "The Black Butterfly", as a epithet. Simply adding a translation of "Black Butterfly" into the Celestial language would not diminish their beloved epithet.

So you don't like a name being in English so you want to switch it to a "Golarion" name... and by that you mean something foreign to English readers.

Ideally it would not be merely "something foreign to English readers", but in the absence of ideal resources one has to use the best of the available resources (with "best" being admittedly subjective).

Are you equally bothered by The Lantern King (Eldest), The Green Mother (Eldest), Vermilion Mother (Sahkil Tormentor), The Lost Prince (Eldest)...

Regarding the eldest, a thing I like to do with the Fey is to have this be a place where knowing a being's "true name" gives you some measure of power over them, so the most powerful Fey have taken great lengths to obscure this information and instead are known to all via a series of titles and sobriquets.

The notion of Fey hiding their True Names is intriguing.

Do you have a link handy to any dictionaries in Golarion languages?

Hey Paizo, there'a a possible hint for a product.

Not counting the Elvish language, in the absence of said dictionaries I am usually happy to resort to using Chinese for Tien, Klingon for a tiefling language, or fabricate a word in the absence of available references, etc.

The Whispering Tyrant is in English and The Lost Coast is too. Blah blah The Rusty Dragon, The Star Stone, Hell, The Abyss, The Darklands, Five Kingdom Mountains, Lastwall, The Shackles, The Sodden Lands, The Worldwound, and - you know - Inner Sea itself.

At least the Whispering Tyrant has a published proper name, Tar-Baphon. None of your other examples are deities, or even sentient beings, and I find that none of your examples bother me; so far only a deity lacking a proper name in a Golarion language bothers me. Thank you for helping to define the scope of what bothers me.

If we are going to refer to her by a name which comes from an Earth language, we should probably call her Itzpapalotl, who is an Aztec tzitzimitl star goddess whose name could be translated as "Black Butterfly".

...having them call her "Black butterfly" doesn't break my immersion nearly as much as trying to cram a Nahuatl word into the mouth of someone from a fantasy analogue for East Asia...

The fact that the name Itzpaplotl comes loaded with cultural associations for anyone familiar with Aztec mythology does admittedly make its acceptance as a word in the Celestial language potentially awkward, which is why I had coined an original name (Xephiqali) free from such cultural associations. I like the fact that Thistledown's suggestion of Calamisa was already in use in at least one Pathfinder game though.

I figure it's the same problem as Lucerne Hammers. Obviously the people in the diagesis aren't calling those "Lucerne Hammers" (being that Golarion doesn't have a Switzerland), we're just substituting "Lucerne Hammer" for whatever the person speaking Dwarvish would call it, since we can't actually speak any of these fantasy languages.

I am an order of magnitude more forgiving of a common noun such as Lucerne hammer than I am of an absence of a proper Golarion name for a deity; not having the name of a deity rendered in a Golarion language breaks immersion for me more than any common noun in English could.

I always thought that it was 'black butterfly' because that was how the silent empyreal power was described.

The problem with "black butterfly" is that those are English words, which is a language which does not exist on Golarion. What syllables would you hear coming from the mouths of Tianjing aasimar as they utter her name in their local Celestial language? If we are going to refer to her by a name which comes from an Earth language, we should probably call her Itzpapalotl, who is an Aztec tzitzimitl star goddess whose name could be translated as "Black Butterfly".

My aesthetics would say to deduplicate parpar and to end with an -a, as Parshakóra.

That's a Polish ó, Czech/Slovak/Hungarian ó, Faroese ó, Icelandic ó, Irish ó, Kazakh ó, Sorbian ó, Vietnamese ó or just some accent/stress mark (if yes, which one?).

That question seems playfully trollish, but I will answer it anyway... On Wiktionary.org one of the two transliterated translations of black into Hebrew is shakhór; I simply copied and pasted that.

Going from Wiktionary it's either sh'khorá parpar or parpar sh'khora (not sure if the adjective goes before or after the noun in Hebrew).

Given that you are creating a name in a fictional language which has no published grammar, do not limit yourself to the grammar of a source language which you do not even know; allow your aesthetic preferences to influence your creation of words in a fictional language. My aesthetics would say to deduplicate parpar and to end with an -a, as Parshakóra.

I always thought Celestial would sound like Hebrew. Anyone know the Hebrew words for black and butterfly?

Given that Judeochristianity is the popular mythology among the Anglosphere, I can see why you would default to Hebrew as a source for Celestial words.

A good resource for translations is Wiktionary Translations.

I won't deny she could use something a bit snappier

I am genuinely interested in what snappier name you would come up with.

All of her mortal worshippers just call her "the Black Butterfly" in whatever their local tongue is.

I would love to know the name by which the aasimar of Tianjing call her in their local tongue.

I mean, considering the (popular and textually supported but not confirmed) that Desna is an eldritch horror/outer god who just happens to genuinely like people, it's conceivable that the BB's original name was something like "Iuc'tholth'axz" in Aklo. Something no one is particularly inclined to share, since it sends the wrong idea.

I am very fond of the implications that Black Butterfly is actually another Good-aligned eldritch "horror", so I rather like the notion of her tiefling clerics secretly acknowledging her as something like "Iuctholthaxz"; secrets dwell in silence.

I won't deny she could use something a bit snappier, but I'm not really wild about the proposed name... mostly because it tries to adhere to essentially arbitrary linguistic conventions by pulling from real world languages in its efforts to escape a name written in a real-world language.

Do you know of a resource with which we could translate black and butterfly into the fictional Celestial language?

Why couldn't her name just be Black Butterfly?

The problem with the English words "Black Butterfly" as a proper name is that the English language does not exist on Golarion. What is her name in her native Celestial language? Hence, I proposed that Xephiqali be the Celestial name which translates to English as "Black Butterfly".

I've also recognized this problem. I have a character from Arcadia who follows her. Name I use for her is Calamisa. It's a type of south american butterfly with very appropriate looks.

I do like Calamisa, for your stated reasons, and for the fact that cala- is close to the Hindi word kala meaning "black", though the closest to -misa I can find for "butterfly" is the Zapotec word mitet.

Is it explained anywhere WHY he (Rovagug) wants to destroy everything?

One of my favorite explanations for the motivation of a deity who wants to destroy everything is that he/she/it perceives the multiverse as ugly, and longs to return to the Absolute Tranquility which preceded the creation of the ugly multiverse. Perhaps Rovagug had wanted to purge only a portion [albeit a very large portion] of the multiverse prior to his imprisonment, but his imprisonment is what tainted him with a hatred of the entire multiverse. Perhaps Asmodeus was aware that such would happen.

Purgation of ugliness as a motivation opens the possibility of a sect of heretical clerics/paladins who act in Rovagug's name and who do perceive and value some beauty in the world but primarily fixate on purging the parts that they find ugly; such clerics/paladins could perceive themselves as "Good", though victims of their purges would obviously disagree.

We have the translation of Black Butterfly's proper name into English, but what is missing is her actual proper name in a Golarion language. This thread is a petition to Paizo to give Black Butterfly an official proper name which is not merely an English translation of her actual proper name.

Xephiqali (zeh-fih-KAHL-ee) is my proposal for Black Butterfly's proper name; I derived it from an amalgamation of Mazahua, Hindi, and Azerbaijani words meaning "butterfly" and "black" [with additional spelling influence from Greek], so the name Xephiqali effectively translates as "Black Butterfly". For the Golarion language from which the name Xephiqali comes, Celestial seems like the obvious choice.

If fellow pathfinders agree that Black Butterfly needs an actual proper name in a Golarion language that is not merely the English translation of her actual proper name, here is the place to let your thoughts be known. (As this is a petition, thread necromancy is welcome.)

Thanteros: You realize you responded to a 7-year-old thread, right?

That passage of time did not diminish the relevance of Mairkurion's unanswered [implied] question regarding the OGL status of axani and cansin, so I answered the portion that I know.

Gensai are closed. Don't remember the other two.

The word axani meaning "laws" or "lawful ones" derives from an essay titled Ósanwe-kenta by J.R.R. Tolkien (writing as Pengolodh), so WotC has no exclusive claim to it. Paizo (or anyone else) are just as free to use it as WotC is.