Show me your heart

[AS´ti]

Well hello there.

Amsterdam-based Klingon enthusiast signing in. I never had the patience to learn Klingon, however I find the culture very inspiring, have read the IKS Gorkon books with great vigor and even sport a Klingon tattoo on my side. I expect to have friendly banter here and aim to pick up some Klingon words while I'm here.

Feel free to ask anything you want and I'll decide to answer as I please

[El Payaso Malo]

Hello.

By "pick up some Klingon words" do you mean the more or less "official" Klingon language used now, or the Klingonasse used by John Ford, or does it matter?

And what is your tattoo? The Imperial Seal? 

[qoSagh]

My heart is for all to see in my writings here and elsewhere.

Good choice in reading material. Welcome to the fray. Do not be afraid to jump in and discuss or debate any and all things Klingon. Rehashing old topics is sometimes the most fun, and is almost the exclusive purview of new members.

And thank you for not asking me what I want.

[AS´ti]

Hi El Payaso Malo, it is indeed the Klingon insignia that I have as a tattoo. Languagewise I browse through the KLI sources sometimes but due to really bad memory and general impatientness not a lot has stuck

qoSagh, thank you for the hearty welcome, it is most appreciated. Are there perhaps any other books that are similar to the Gorkon ones that you can recommend?

[El Payaso Malo]

You won't get far without the Klingon Dictionary. After I read it, I had a decent grasp of basic grammar in fifteen minutes. It didn't take long before I understood most complex sentence structures. All I need to work on now is vocabulary, really. Do you have a copy?
 

Also, I haven't read that series, but I hear very good things. You could check out this short story: http://teresh.tdonnelly.org/tlhorpuq.html
It is excellent. The author posts on this site occasionally, so if you like it, you can throw much deserved praise at him.

[qoSagh]

Well the ultimate would be John Ford's The Final Reflection. I would follow that up with Pawns & Symbols by Majliss Larson.

Those are the old school ones. As for new school, like the Gorkon books, I would go for the two trilogies Errand of Vengeance & Errand of Fury, both by Kevin Ryan. They deal with the espionage leading up to the Organian Interference and also the same program that Arne Darvin was a part of.

I also check the lists of the various novels and look for any plot in which the Klingons are a major player. While they are not all great works of literature and they often conflict with each other depending on the authors personal agenda, as a body of work, they all contribute to making us better at playing Klingon.

[Black Hornet]

Well the ultimate would be John Ford's The Final Reflection. I would follow that up with Pawns & Symbols by Majliss Larson.

Those are the old school ones. As for new school, like the Gorkon books, I would go for the two trilogies Errand of Vengeance & Errand of Fury, both by Kevin Ryan. They deal with the espionage leading up to the Organian Interference and also the same program that Arne Darvin was a part of.

I also check the lists of the various novels and look for any plot in which the Klingons are a major player. While they are not all great works of literature and they often conflict with each other depending on the authors personal agenda, as a body of work, they all contribute to making us better at playing Klingon.

An interesting point, authors bent. One has to wonder how much this will play into Klingon cultural development in the next 50 years.

[edit- Removed reply from quote block.  No harm done, but you might want to click the modify button to see how the code is supposed to work for future reference -Klythe]

[qoSagh]

The authors POV is already shaping what we have to work with. There have been a number of examples. I remember reading a story about a TNG episode that I have always thought to be one of the weakest, that was supposedly rescued from the trash so the producers could refute a prejudice claim by a rejected author. If that story was true, I can see why the script was originally turned down.

I was once playing in a SIM where there were two players intent of adding personal political agendas into Trek. One I was able to combat with use of canon sources, as they were trying to push an agenda using a great deal of non-canon stuff about a little known alien race. Funny thing is that that race later played a pretty major part in Enterprise and definitely did not behave the way this player attributed them. The other player just used to throw stuff into almost all of his scenes that spoke of two characters and their interactions, but there was nothing technically wrong to address.

In terms of Klingon role playing, I have always seen most of the contradictions as really examples of different cultures within the Empire. Think of the Empire as a really big country, spanning multiple planets. Even in the U.S.A. where we only occupy a piece of a continent we have cultural variations, imagine how many there would be across all those worlds of the empire. In Kevin Ryan's two trilogies he deals with Klingons who do not follow the teachings of Kahless, which I find to be a very interesting concept. In the recent comic series Blood Will Tell, the artists clearly had Japan on their minds. The Klingon architecture and clothing were like walking through a tea garden.