Hello, eveyone. This is my first posting, so please be gentle! 
In the vein of Skywalker’s post asking what “coeptir” meant (I was wondering similar), I’m planning to use this thread for any other unusual terms I come across (my print copy of BE arrived tonight; and I intend to run it as soon as the renovations of my house are done - possibly in a month).
To start with, can anyone tell me what a “ravilar” is, please? I tried Google, but couldn’t get any English-language pages.
Hi Rob,
I’m not surprised you couldn’t find any mention of it. I think it’s a term unique to the Iron Empires. We see a Ravilar in the first Iron Empires Graphic novel, Faith Conquers.
Ravilars are sort of a space opera version of bards. They are historians, entertainers, propagandists and spies for their noble lords.
The best advice I can give you when dealing with unfamiliar terms in the lifepaths is to look at the Requirements, the skills and the traits to get an idea of what it means.
In this case, the Ravilar has requirements like Companion, Student, Foundation Student or Courtier. Looking at those lifepaths, we get a sense that they all have to do with social things, music and knowledge.
The Ravilar’s required skill is History. That means a knowledge of history is the core of the Ravilar lifepath. No Ravilar is without it. The rest are Composition, Propaganda and Obscure History. So writing, propaganda, and bits of history that other people aren’t likely to remember are the secondary competencies.
Finally, we see that the Ravilar’s required trait is Ear for Voices. Looking up the trait, we see that it means the character always remembers voices and is also able to pick out conversations over distance and noise.
Taken all together, we can see that the Ravilar is basically a noble version of the Anvil’s Propagandist, the Merchant League’s Commentariat, and the Commune’s Media.
… well, okay, I should have said “could only find a handful”. I dismissed that one because, from Google’s extract, it looked like more in-continuity use ofthe word instead of a definition.
What can I say, but “Ooops!”?