rosetta and gen info

-Basic terminology, particularly when it comes to adventuring stuff, culture, and common sense knowledge.

Adventurers share a good bit in common with Explorers, culture wise.  They form clans (Which are generally much larger than an Exploring Party), own their own property, and take on tasks that the military forces of the major city states of this continent can't handle.  There's a governing body over the Explorers themselves as well, called the Adventurer's Guild

Here are a few terms you picked up while scouting around:
* Leve - this basically means 'quest', or 'job.'  It's a task that is advertised on a stone card and Adventurers pick them up at either the Adeventuring Guild
* Materia - This stuff doesn't look especially special to you, but Adventurers use it to augment their armor and weapons.  It's also used by craftsmen for similar purposes.  Far as you can tell, it's made from them recycling gear they've used a long while - seems this causes some of the properties of the previous armor to carry over to the one they fix it into.
* Mana - This seems to be exchangeable with this Aethir thing you keep hearing about, and as you can probably guess it's used to express how taxing a spell is for a mage.
* The Twelve - You don't really know all the names of these guys but far as you can tell the only religion practiced by people is based around these twelve deities, each of them tied to a different zodiac stone and month.  They apparently have their own shrines all over the region and world, but the churches you've seen are pretty general and based around all of them.  It's not immediately clear to you what sort of fables are baked around these beings and -why- they are worshipped, but it seems like a bad idea to question it.
* Magitek - You haven't seen much of it in the city, but apparantly these crystals are pretty powerful power sources.  People say there's processing plants north of Uldah that convert them into a liquid called Cerulium, and it's used to power all sorts of high tech devices.  The majority of this tech seems to be proprietary to a country people call the Garlean Empire - which has tried conquering this region a few times already (the last of which just concluded a few months ago), so people don't have a high opinion of folks from there or their tech.  This said, it does seem they have trains, airships, and limited navy vessels powered off this stuff.
* The Calamity - It's hard to get a good sense what this was because it's something so big that you'd look like an idiot for not knowing about it.  And people seem pretty torn up about it.  What you do gather is it wasn't terribly long ago, maybe just a few years, and it did a lot to fuck up the world.
* Linkshells - These little bracelets of pearls are used for all sorts of organizations - they basically give you telepathic communication with others holding pearls from the same batch, over a very wide distance.
* Carbuncle - you aren't really sure WHAT they are but you see them often enough, these little magical cat things with inexperienced mages.

The big common sense things you pick up are :

-DON'T FUCK WITH MOOGLES.  Moogles, those cute little bastards, are not only way more powerful and intelligent than they look and act, but are practically demi-gods.  Not even wild monsters attack them.  It's pretty much ingrained into every living thing on the world here that you do NOT fuck with them.  This said they are quite jolly little guys and do a lot of helpful things like run the local mail services.  Apparantly at one point they lived in Heaven with the Twelve, but got cast out for being lazy bastards and forced to work and assist the mortals.  So in a way they are like angels.  Moggles, their mortal counterpart, owe their origins to Moogles who went as far as to integrate with the other races.  Fucking with Moggles is acceptable.  Just not Moogles.

- Crystals mean big money.  They are used for almost everything - Aetherite Crystals for teleportation magic, elemental ones for craftsmenship, and a secondhand currency.  Typically they are mined up or harvested from the ground by botanists - and seem to naturally 'grow', unlike other mineral deposits.

- There's a lot of ruins in these lands, which is where Adventurers often end up at one point or another.  Through the ages several nations have risen and fallen, and for several centuries Eorzea lay dormant - settlements only sprung up here in the last 100 years or so.

- There's a lot of emphasis on labels - Adventurers identify themselves by their profession, and a title such as 'Ninja' carries a lot of assumptions on your training and your aptitude for certain tasks, and where you trained.  Seems a lot of these professions have their own guilds as well.  Also, the armor you guys have?  It's apparently pretty iconic.  It's the sort of gear people get when they reach the highest levels of their respected Guilds, and their teachers have nothing left to instruct them on.  It's not the best equipment, but it says a lot about your experience.

-What's up with the colosseum and other adventurers? How well do we match up to Eorzean adventurers, and how can we improve? Maybe how stuff like magic works here?

The more you watch the more you realize you guys are slightly over estimating these guys.  Yes, they are tough, but most of them aren't -much- tougher than you are, like comparing yourselves to a Gym Leader.  Fighting alongside your Pokemon, you would very easily be on par with them.  Fighting alongside monsters isn't really common here (it's done, however, so wouldn't be out of place), so people put way more emphasis on their personal combat skills.

Far as how magic works, you gather that there's three schools - Conjuration, Thamurtaulogy, and Arcanism.  The differences between them sort of go over your head, but from the looks of it Conjuration is more based on nature, thaumatology is very offensive with fire and ice, and arcanism is just weird.

-What basic stuff is there to know about the Pokémon battling scene in Eorzea? How competitions are organized, how much influence Grant has in this world as a result of it, how Pokémon battling is generally seen by adventurers.

- It sort of looks like Grant just copied what Wizards of the Coast does for the Pokemon Trading Card Game on your side of the world (Shut up this totally exists), same tournament and ranking structure and everything.  Rankings are on public boards in major cities, and people seem to play mostly in pubs (or at least the adults do, kids you see playing everywhere).  It's pretty damn popular and treated mostly as a casual thing - like playing Poker or something.  There's a pretty healthy mix of normal folks and Adventurers who are super into it - it works very much like standard Trainer Battles do.  You got a team of three-to-six (based on the rules for the match) and can swap them in and out as needed.    The prize pools tend to be more cards, low on gil - this said some of the rarer cards can fetch quite a pretty penny.  Specially Unowns.  Unowns are extremely coveted for their scarcity.


Beastmen -

Gen's gut reaction on this topic was that it was sorta racist, and reading more on it this has a good bit of truth to it - Beastmen are defined as races who don't recognize The Twelve as their Gods.  And in many cases this is the only thing that makes a race not Beastmen - cause there's several races you've seen that'd fit the bill for that on appearances (Like Rhonsos, Hypello, Bangaa.)  It seems in ages past the Church tried to cast a shroud over these races by claiming they were created by a dark lord for the sole purpose of destroying the other races.  This was proven to be false in time, but the moniker 'Beastmen' stuck.  Some races, over the ages, lost this label as they began to integrate with the more 'civil' races.  This includes, for example, Goblins.

One thing about the current label that differs from its origin, however, is the Beastmen races not only worship different Gods, they routinely summon them to the physical realm via shamanistic rituals, and wage war on those who worship The Twelve.  While the true wrongdoer here is a bit grey and subjective to each side, the important thing from Gen's perspective is there is an obvious tension here - and the people who worship The Twelve fear the following races:

- Orcs + Amal'jaa - these two races have rather similar origins, cultures, and most importantly worship the same Primal, Ifrit.  They have large muscular frames, and are traditionally proud warrior societies.  They oft take lesser races (in their eyes) as slaves for manual labor.

- Ixali and Yagudo - Both of these races have avian features, and have considerably more finesse than their other counterparts.  They even employ fighting styles associated with Asian traditions - Ninja, Samurais, and Martial Artists.  They worship a particularly troublesome Primal named Garuda - the oldest of the Primals.

- Quadavs and Kobolds - These two aren't terribly similar in appearance.  Turtlemen, and ratmen.  The big thing they share is they both are large on mining, and their settlements are predominantly underground.  Both worship the Primal known as Titan.  Titan is particularly noteworthy because he single handedly destroyed an entire Empire on his own several centuries ago.

- Sahagin and Lamias - Fishbacks, they call them.  These aquatic beastmen are actually the same race - just that males and females are distinctly different in their appearance.  They are known for practicing a form of necromancery they refer to as 'Drowning.'  They drag their victims to the bottoms of the sea, and via the power of their Primal Lord, Leviathan, reanimate their minds and bodies as slaves.

- Gigas - The Gigas are a race of giants that in ages past were actually enslaved by the 'Enlightened Races.'  This ended when their Goddess - Shiva - answered their prayers and liberated the shit out of them.  Gigas are monstrous in size, and seem to follow a culture not far off from Vikings of old, raiding boats and all.  They raid, pillage, and kill in the name of their icy Goddess

- Sylphs - These guys are WEIRD.  Little plant people with a very strong inclination for magic and alchemy.  They employ a number of methods of chemical warfare, and are capable of flight.  Their God is Ramuh, the Thunder Lord.  What's weirdest about these folks is, out of the beastmen, they seem the least inclined to violence by nature, and half their race actually does recognize The Twelve as their Gods.

- Dragonkin - Dragons are probably the most feared beastmen race in this world.  They live long as hell, are extremely powerful, breed extremely quickly, and are extremely cunning.  Unlike the other races, that actually have civilizations of their own, and make tools much as other races do, Dragons, for the most part, live like Pokemon in the wilds.  This said, given their intelligence and clear agenda as a race, they are a huge bane for the people of this world, to the point they have developed fighting styles specifically to kill Dragons (The Dragoons).  It's said elder dragons can even take on the form of humans, and walk amongst others as spies.  It's pretty clear the more you read why The Nameless did not want to linger here.  Their lord is called Bahamut.

Three races labeled after this are a bit less prominant in concern

Anticans - A race of huge, intelligent ants who scholars believe might have a Primal of their own, but the race is entirely mute and communicates via pheromones, so none can say.  They conduct themselves much like Dragonkin do, living like a colony of Durants that as smart as your average Psychic Type Pokemon.

Tonberries - The origins of Tonberries, according to your research, is that they were citizens of a nation called Nym that was 'cursed with a sickness' by Leviathan awakening many centuries ago.  Though to you it sounds more like a disease spread amongst them and mutated them into the figure they resemble today.  They were a people who has very close ties to the Fae, and their Scholars served as military commanders and field medics in one.  It's a practice that's still popular today, and one of the last things people remember for sure about their culture.  Tonberries, as a race, recognize a being they call The Tonberry Queen as their Primal, and have a complex justice system based off controlling one's inner beast - and these green little devils literally have one.  They are a minor concern for the world because they almost NEVER leave the ruins of their shattered city of Nym.  So long as you don't go there, you have little reason to fear them.  (This said some of the most famous assassins in the history of Eorzea were Tonberries who DID leave their homeland).

Moogles - Yes, Moogles have a Primal.  Or at least researchers think they might.  It's a being they recognize as their king - Good King Moggle Mog the 12th.  There's little written here on the subject beyond that.