Set and Setting - I - Languages

Set and Setting is a series of posts intended as aid in fleshing out a world by way of setting-specific rule design and reinterpretation.

Introduction

New blog year, new series.

Where the previous rubric focused on rule expansions and reinterpretations for universal acts such as climbing,  that I would endeavour to keep constant across settings and tables, this series too is to deal with rules homebrewing but as applied to lending a setting a distinct character, honouring the concept of “fluff is crunch”.

Despite intending to dip my toes into more lore driven forays later on, I’m settling for now on the utilitarian approach to setting building. This will imply modular mechanics for aspects of a setting that need not remain constant across time or space, primed on the belief that, when wishing to invoke otherness, exoticism and a sense of place for the benefit of the players at the table, knowingly employing one of the primary bridges – that of the game’s structure – to tackle this problematic can be greatly effective. Thus rather than just saying that something is different, one is best served by having it *play* differently.

Angling for subtlety, a little can go a long way. As before, all of these rules are merely tentative and, of course, completely untested. The threshold of simplicity, for the sake of me not trampling all over these like a slobbering husky in the heat of the running, remains: “rollable at a moment’s notice, behind the palm of the referee's hand if need be ”. 

Ideoglossia

Language use gets a real bad rep as it is seen (correctly, I must add) as an inhibitor rather than enabler of action and interaction, a stonewalling that the real world throws up at us and that is never fun, to the point that it has been pretty much abolished by escapism in whatever format, with exceptions as the shibboleth special episode of the Old Testament only serving to highlight the rule.

In Dnd, the afterthought of language use as written in the rules manifests itself with mindnumbing predictability, as once a party counts a given language’s speaker in its ranks, effective communication with a huge demographic cross-section of an entire fantasy setting is all but assured: if you’ve got someone who can speak elvish, you can talk to all the elves you ever happen to come across, from tallest mountain to deepest wood.

For a basic rulebook I can understand that the above is sufficient, but it just seems disingenuous for me to put forward even the most tentative sketch of a setting and tell players with a straight face: “don’t worry, everyone here understands everyone else just fine”. If you can contemplate that sentence and not wince at the positively granitic dumbing down implied by it then I’m afraid we can’t be friends.

Localism above

The essence of an old school running hinges among other things on the assumption that cultural microclimates exist, rather than the unified and overbearing cosmopolitanism of settings implied by later editions of the game, where “common” serves as the dovetailed excuse for trivializing any and all manner of cultural barriers, namely linguistic ones. This means tribes, kiths and clans sooner than it means kingdoms, fiefdoms and empires. 

(As a side-note, it won’t be the last time you find me linking Manola’s blog, if only because he must’ve built himself a treehouse for all the nails he’s hit square on the head.)

Since before the advent of the city, the human tendency to divide and set itself apart linguistically (and culturally in general) stemmed from both geographical accident but also the immanent desire to point to the competing tribe that dwelled across the river and clearly broadcast, through all possible signifiers – ritual, tradition, law, personal fashion – that “we are not like those other people over there”.

Framed by the above and tempered then with the addition of even just a sampling of different fantasy races to this bubbling crucible, language begets this hazier quality, embracing a quasi-mystical and certainly anti-scientific paradigm: the Gods’ divine will is pretty much what determines if one can understand a given creature or not; for despite a character knowing the rudiments that enable him to understand one barbarian tribe, such does not mean he’ll be in any way guaranteed to understand the next one, three miles south as the crow flies.

Underworld below

Then we get beneath the earth. Mind the dinossaurs.

Truth be told, I find excessive talkie interactions to devalue the act of the descent, forming a familiarity that quickly evaporates wonder and leads to gonzo or philosophical questioning of the motives of every single hapless creature found dwelling under the ground, all of it conspiring to offer up the most hated interaction by me as both player and referee: the in-depth hostage questioning.

As personal refereeing style goes, my default assumption is ever for creatures in the underworld to be either unwilling or incapable of cogent communication, barring exceptional setpiece social encounters (i.e. characters with something interesting to say), preferably with a weird slant.

So the understanding comes to be that finding a creature you can have a conversation with in the underworld ought to be a prized exception, almost treasure.

“Common, motherfucker. Doth thou speak it?”

Aim’s to naturally select for slapstick avoidance as this isn’t about building a sitcom generator, rather about offering some small measure of setting immersion while keeping the play flowing: It is presumed that all of the semicivilized (read playable) races and cultures can understand each other to a workable degree when not under pressure. If milling about town, always assume that either one of the characters with the matching language knowledge understands the local speech or that a translator can be fetched handily.

In the wilderness of the borderlands however, over a tense mid-road encounter with a band of roving foreign mercenaries or faced with the discovery of ancient script lining a foreboding entryway while the sand runs out is where a party cannot count on the luxury of assured communication.

The Rules

Let's forget for a moment my railing against oversimplification in language use with one breath as with the next I dive with gusto into making some insulting simplifications and draw wild correlations between intelligence and average literacy levels (as applied to the exceptionality of the PC condition).

- Reading, writing, orality and even gestual signs are all contained in the knowledge of a language family.

- Having a language listed on the sheet is merely the gateway to rolling and finding out if a character can actually grab at least a toe-hold on communication with a creature that shares a speech drawing from that language tree.

Languages known as determined by Intelligence total:

Intelligence attribute	Language Knowledge
3	Speech impediment
4-5	Unable to read or write
6-7	Has not learned to read or write
8-9	Has not learned to write
10-11	Literate in one’s own mother tongue
12-13	One additional common language known
14-15	Two additional common languages known
16-17	Three additional languages known, one possibly exotic
18+	Four additional languages known, two possibly exotic

- When encountering NPCs in a tense or stressful situation or in any interaction with monstrous characters, determine the number of language families common to both parlaying groups and make a single roll:

Shared linguistic families	Die roll	Degree of communication
Common	d20	4+: No verbal exchange possible and even gesticulation is misunderstood; Reaction roll adversely affected. 3: Basic understanding, present tense only, strongly aided by practical gestures. 2: Functional understanding, including future and past tenses allowing for conditionalisms. 1: Complete understanding, allowing for formal, subtle and artful speech; knowledge on how to read and write the language, if applicable.
one	d12
two	d10
three	d8
four	d6
five	d4
six or more	lowest of 2d4
Roll result:

Specific language knowledge dispenses with rolling and same goes for having a reliable interpreter. The domains of man are each accorded a distinct language while the diluted pseudolanguage known as ‘common’ is actually rare. It does have a use keeping disparate parties afloat within the tenuous glow offered by distant beacons of civilization as a mercantile lingua franca, a civilizational legacy of a long-forgotten past.

This opens the postern for injecting all manner of languages as set-dressing without increasing the complexity overhead, from isolated tribal dialects to splinter sect religious cant. Of course, the dials can be tuned to adjust the implied level of isolationism presented in the setting so that the  number of languages shared may increase the chances from a d12 straight to a d8 or understanding can happen on a higher base number.