There have been a bunch of posts lately that have me thinking about languages in games, specifically the fact that they kind are honestly kind of the worst most of the time.

There’s Justin, who proposes a pidgin rule where the PC makes a check, and the margin of success gives them a pool of points from which they can establish a word in common with the other speaker. You track these words, and are limited to those words in their attempts to communicate. You get a bonus if you know a closely related language, and you get to roll again for successive successful conversations.

Then, HIPONFA built on this, suggesting a few world-building conceits, the most interesting being that common as either a pidgin (useless for anything but visiting the market), or as a Koine (a smushing of similar languages into a single language due to political pressure).

Finally (and I don’t know how I’ll ever use this), there’s The Worlds Writing Systems, which is a database of all of these amazing glyphs from more languages than I can count, many no longer used. If you can’t find inspiration for a fantasy script here, you need to seek a muse.

Anyway, all of these got me thinking, it would be very cool for a campaign to be based around a trade intersection. Honestly, I do that a lot, particularly for fantasy locations, because a village on a trade route makes a lot of sense for somewhere adventurers might stumble upon. So what if your party weren’t pirates coming to Pirate City, but instead, the crew come to establish it? And ships from three nations, perhaps Orcish, Elvish and Dwarvish nations, all started arriving there, and you had to build a common language? And of course, Pirate City is built on the remains of an ancient civilisation, but if you want to go dungeon crawling, all those antiques and rare magicks can’t be sold unless you speak in common. And so, your party, who speak only Elvish, have to piece together a dworcfish pidgin in order to sell their wares, and gain access only to the best that those nations have to offer aren’t available until you all can butter each other up fluently?

Or, to mix two of these together, what if, whenever you bump into someone in your campaign you can’t communicate, you get a collaborative worldbuilding opportunity? Oh, I don’t speak Goblin? Well, back where we live, there’s a goblin enclave, and I used to go there to buy Goblin Horchata for my grandmother, so I have a few words of goblin? Now, we can use Justin’s language check in a justifiable way, and we get to build the world a little bit more, if you’re a table who enjoys doing that sort of thing.

Anyway, languages are cool. More language minigames, I think, would be better.

Idle Cartulary