The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E playstyles

I ran D&D 5E for years with a behind-the-scenes OSR mentality. There are a lot of good reasons to apply an OSR mindset to a game for players with a modern (or “OC” or “neo-trad” or whatever) playstyle. Even if the players have no idea what OSR means, applying OSR principles to prep and adjudication creates a more immersive, convincing world, with more challenging obstacles and more rewards for creative play.

But systems matter, and not every OSR principle can apply to a modern game just because the DM has internalized the Principia Apocrypha. The idea that “the answer is not on your character sheet” is not going to translate when the system itself is very loudly and consistently telling players that many answers are, indeed, right there on their character sheets. And there’s no easy way to undo the super-heroic power level of PCs in modern play, without hacking 5E into a different game.

When talking about the modern style of play, as opposed to other cultures of play, we often focus on fluid, action-packed combat, where characters have specialized roles and neat action loops. And that is part of it. Certainly that’s a big part of D&D 4E and (to a lesser degree) D&D 5E. It’s part of Pathfinder. And it’s part of the new crop of games that rose in the wake of Hasbro’s self-inflicted OGL debacle.

Giant Pot-Tomb Demon by Andrew Porter

The Real Fantasy Behind Being Superman

So everyone understands that modern play features superheroic PCs who fight more like the Avengers, rather than fighting like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. But what is also interesting (and comparatively less-discussed) is how modern play changes gameplay outside of combat. Superheroes remain a good point of comparison to illustrate the difference.

A key part of the appeal of superheroes is their ability to act unilaterally, as individuals, without negotiating with or deferring to society’s rules. This expression of independence can be simple and direct. A heroic vigilante acts in defiance of law enforcement… but in a way that the audience mostly views as moral and correct. 

But it can also be a less literal form of unilateral activity, of defiance. I will posit that so many superheroes can fly because the idea of freedom from the law of gravity is a form of rebellion against law itself; in other words, flying is not a common fantasy because of something intrinsic to the act of flying itself, but because the act of flying is fundamentally a rejection of the rule of gravity.

Freedom is what really defines the power fantasy that many people explore when they first dip their toes into TTRPGs. A kid playing their first superhero RPG doesn’t want to be Superman so they can lift a bus over their head, so much as they want to be Superman because nobody can tell Superman not to lift a bus over his head.

Next week: Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

A Random Generator Is Worth a Thousand Hours of Prep

One of the games I ran this year involved adventurers hopping unexpectedly from plane to plane. While prepping for the game, it quickly became obvious that this was not something that I could prep in the same way I would prep a megadungeon or a scene-based mystery.

So how do we produce interesting planar content without prepping dozens of worlds in exhaustive detail? How do we make sure characters “get” each plane they visit? Especially when they’re not spending much time on each one?

Planes of existence in a fantasy world are exaggerations of the “natural” world (the prime material). They are defined by their defiance of rules or expectations we have about the regular world. To boil it down to a very simplified binary, it helps to think about the two sides of what makes a plane different from the normal world.

Concepts that epitomize the plane. Something inherent and fundamental to the place that defines it. It should usually be immediately obvious and prevalent throughout the plane.

Concepts that are antithetical to the plane. Something that is against the plane’s nature. It should either be prominent for this reason, or conspicuous in its absence.

It’s important to think about both aspects. It’s all well and good to say the elemental plane of fire is epitomized by fire. It’s hot. Fires raging, smoke, lava, and so forth. But that’s not enough. Think about near-absolute absence of water. What does the air feel like as a consequence of that? What is the weather like? Are native creatures violently allergic to water? Or is it a precious treasure to them? Possibly some of both, living side by side?

Let’s put this in motion with some prompt tables. 

What are the local landmarks? What captures the eyes of the visitor?

Epitome

• A castle, city, or other built structure. It’s composed of the essence of the plane, or its structure and function is defined by the presence and abundance of that essence.
• A mountain, body of water, or other superficially “natural” feature. It behaves in a strange or exotic way that reflects the essence of the plane.
• A vortex, portal, or other magical, extraplanar juncture or aperture. Its presence indicates the permeability of the plane, as well as its adjacency to affiliated planes. 
• The site of disaster or change characteristic of the creative or destructive forces of the plane.
• Valuables that are rare on the prime material plane are abundant here (e.g., valuable gems on the elemental plane of earth). 

Antithesis

• The absence of something we take for granted in the normal world (e.g., no fire on a frozen or entropic world).
• A concentration of a rare resource, whether precious or merely exotic (e.g., an oasis on a desert plane).
• A structure, object, or feature that was native to another plane, but was moved to this plane, intentionally or accidentally. Its original nature has been warped or changed by this plane.
• Something removed or exploited and taken elsewhere, leaving tangible absence in its place.
• Something antithetical to this plane, but reshaped by the epitomizing forces here.

What is going on there? How is the situation ripe for adventure?

Epitome 

• The plane’s essence is difficult to understand or interact with, or otherwise defies material plane logic. 
• An event (natural or social) is occurring that restricts or slows visitors’ ability to travel and explore.
• A power from a sympathetic or aligned plane is trying to influence, ally with, or absorb the plane.
• Political, commercial, or social activity focuses on a commodity or treasure that can only be grown, made, or refined in the unique environment of the plane. 
• A gift or creation of the ruler or power on the plane, unique to this place and never taken off-plane, has been damaged, compromised, stolen, or otherwise altered. 

Antithesis

• The antithesis of the plane, something that would be expected in the prime material, is totally absent. Natural laws may be distorted to account for its absence.
• The antithesis of the plane is imprisoned, contained, rationed, or besieged.
• The antithesis of the plane has been memorialized, shunned, sanctioned, or put on display.
• The plane’s enemies or natural opposites are invading.
• Magic is altered in some fundamental way by the absence of something that would normally power, channel, or enable it. 

Who is nearby? Factions? NPCs? Monsters?

Epitome

• Natives of the plane, whose nature is linked to the essence of the plane. They are not merely planar loyalists; their very understanding of the cosmos is defined by the epitome of their plane.
• True believers, either in the ruler of the plane, or the nature of the plane itself. They either transmigrated here after death, or traveled here by magical means.
• The ruler of the plane. Whether a demigod, demon-king, or something stranger.
• Created creatures made of the essence of the plane by archwizards, gods, or others who use the plane’s essence as raw materials.
• Creatures from allied planes who have come to visit, trade, or evangelize. 
• Guardians, persecutors, or judges of the epitome, who seek to destroy, expel, or dominate the antithesis. 

Antithesis

• Creatures trapped here, either intentionally by denizens of the plane, or those stranded by accident.
• Creatures that are valued or respected because – due to their antithetical nature – they can do things or provide value that native denizens cannot. 
• Invaders from an opposed plane who have come here to destroy or conquer part or all of this plane.
• Explorers seeking to secure the epitome of the plane for use as an antithesis on their own plane.

What hazards, traps, or dangers are here?

Epitome

• The essence of the plane is hostile or otherwise dangerous to travelers. Simple actions like movement, breathing, or eating and drinking may be difficult.
• An out-of-control or escalating expression of the epitome is becoming more extreme over time.
• The landscape or physical properties of the plane are changing in a way that defies material plane laws.
• Traps, barriers, or other intentional dangers have been established to keep planar visitors either from accessing sensitive areas, or out of the plane entirely.

Antithesis

• A forced merger or overlap with an opposed plane creates violent or unpredictable interactions.
• Open conflict between factions or individuals over antithetical elements. Multiple factions may seek to recruit outsiders. Innocent bystanders may be caught in the crossfire.
• Remainders of a long-ago planar conflict between epitome and antithesis persist to the present (e.g., metaphysical minefields).
• Weapons deployed in the plane broadly attack a weakness or vulnerability inherent to the epitome of the plane, endangering anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. 
• Something hazardous was placed here for containment or safekeeping, because the nature of the plane itself or the behavior of its denizens can suppress, control, or monitor the antithetical thing.  
• Something stolen from an antithetical plane, which is disruptive or wrong in this place.

Here is our random generator that incorporates all these bits into just four prompts. We can adjust it some more going forward; maybe we want the epitomes to be several times more likely than the antithesis.

https://perchance.org/whatishappeningonthisplane

Bonus Table: How Did You Get Into This Mess? (d12)

1. A wizard did it. A spell was cast upon you. It went wrong.
2. A wizard did it (the wizard was you). You tried to cast a spell. It went wrong.
3. Portal passenger. You wandered into a portal and now you’re here, wherever here is.
4. For science. An experiment went awry. Whether you were an experimenter or a test subject doesn’t matter now.
5. Trapped! A nefarious entity created an inter-planar trap. Congratulations, you have sprung that trap.
6. Hot pursuit. Something is chasing you across the planes. You don’t know what it is, but it seems to be accelerating and salivating.
7. Left behind. You were hired for some specific job or expertise, but the person who hired you left you behind. 
8. Cursed! Whether it happened to a distant ancestor long ago, or to you personally last week, the terrible curse has sent you hurtling between worlds.
9. Debt. You owe such a vast amount that when a particularly dodgy character offered you an especially suspicious way to get out of town -- really, really far out of town -- you took it.
10. Transmigration. You died. While your soul was on its way to the afterlife, it took a wrong turn, and you are now lost. Depending on where you were destined to go in the afterlife, this may be either relatively good or relatively bad news for you.
11. Prison break. You were trapped in Tartarus, a demiplane, or some similar extraplanar confinement. You're free now but you didn't plan too far beyond your escape.
12. Sole survivor. You were part of a highly larger team that was intentionally traveling the planes. You're not in a good situation now, but you wouldn't trade places with your recently deceased companions.

Barbarian, Soldier, Conqueror, King… and then Barbarian Once Again

The Appendix N books that originally inspired D&D frequently featured protagonists charting a picaresque path through a dangerous world. In many instances, these characters would enter a given location or scenario as a humble outsider, but by the end of a given short story (or chapter, in an episodic novel), they’ve risen to a position of power or influence, usually through their cunning and guile.

By the beginning of the next chapter – often presented in media res – they are on the road again, returned to the itinerant state they began in. Such stories often do not even include an explanation of how the character left that last position of power and influence, but it’s usually easy to imagine. There’s something compelling about a character who is good at exploiting an unstable situation and rising to power, but then either becomes bored with the work of maintaining that power, or simply gambles it away with the same impetuousness that empowered their rise.

Thinking about the way these characters rise, fall, and rise again got me thinking about two otherwise-unrelated characteristics of old-school and traditional RPGs… domain building and level drain.

Pixel art by Hal0Badger

I'm Losing My Edge, but I Was There

It goes like this. When adventurers reach high enough levels to oversee a domain, the game switches to domain play, under whatever system the DM and the players choose. This could work well as a single session, where the action zooms out and the game skips over longer periods of time. It could also be done by email or Discord messages, in between conventional adventuring sessions.

Each PC of sufficiently high level to manage a domain identifies actions they would like to pursue while in power. These should be goals that would be difficult or impossible to achieve through adventuring. Politics, warfare, arcane research, proselytizing, building things; whatever they can imagine. It can be helpful to think in terms of nations, organizations, and populations (factions, in short). Some good universal prompts can include the following:

• Supporting or expanding an existing faction
• Opposing an antagonist faction, by war, politics, trade, or all three
• Creating a new faction, or reviving a fallen faction

Each goal takes an in-game year to resolve. For every year that passes, each character running a domain loses a level. This works just like classic level drain, except it doesn’t represent undeath eating away at a character’s lifeforce. Instead, it is the loss of the adventuring edge as the domain-ruling character is either softened by the luxuries of life at the top, or weighed down by the burdens and obligations of leadership.  

The rewards for pursuing domain goals should be substantial enough that they are tempting even to players who hate level drain. There should be little or no rolling the dice, and the DM should adjudicate deferentially whenever it makes sense; after all, the players are giving up something real here. They should get meaningful results.

Characters can “spend” as many levels as they wish on these domain-level actions. Different characters can “spend” different numbers of levels during domain play, or opt out entirely. When no one wants to spend any more levels, the characters return to adventuring, at whatever lower level they now find themselves at – years later, in a world changed considerably by their time at the top. 

Title screen from the 1991 video game of the same name (?)

OK, Would YOU Actually Play This?

Me? No. I’m always eager to retire a character and move on to the next character. For me, the thrill of rolling up a new 0 XP nobody outweighs the familiar attachment of a highly leveled character. I think this is typical of people who DM more than they PC, and are accustomed to treating characters more like a fun time, while they last, and less like a semi-permanent avatar of oneself.

But I also think I’m in the minority. Many players are far more invested in playing a character they love, and reluctant to just retire. The desire to gain levels is in tension with the desire to stay in the sweet spot of character progression – leveled enough to be unique and somewhat powerful, but not so leveled that domain matriculation pulls them out of the dungeon. This idea would just be a new way to resolve that tension. 

So ask your players – is the idea of gaining power, squandering it, and starting all over again compelling? If so, they may want to try being barbarians, then soldiers, then conquerors, then kings… and then barbarians once again. 

Pixel art by cibella

Ah 5E, Here We Go Again

After a year of running other games, I was asked to run D&D 5E again. While I have one big problem with 5E as a system, and many more particularized complaints with specific mechanical executions, I think 5E is a decent system. I have run hundreds of sessions with it. Thousands of hours. If I hated it, I would have found a way to get off that train. I said that I wasn't sure if I would run it again, but I'm not surprised that I am. My desire to run D&D outweighs my disdain for any particular D&D system. I have voted with my feet.

All that said, I am skeptical of the implicit presumption that 5E is the default choice for fantasy TTRPGs. When I have run other systems, with cleaner, more concise mechanical designs and ludological execution, I’ve been consistently impressed with how quickly players – whether versed in 5E, or entirely new to TTRPGs – grokked the system. I’m skeptical of the common belief that seems to exist in the TTRPG world, that 5E is the natural starting point for fantasy games, and players can then opt in to other games after they have tried out the industry standard. I don’t usually write about the 💿🐴 on this blog, but a kerfuffle over a popular actual play streamer’s defense of using 5E for games that don’t strictly fit its explicit and implicit system is instructive on this question.

I haven’t watched Brennan Lee Mulligan’s games, but I’ve wondered about the “5E as universal system” idea in other media that I have followed. I’ve been an on-again, off-again listener of the Adventure Zone, the TTRPG wing of the McElroy brothers’ podcasting family. They’ve run a variety of campaigns, some lasting dozens of sessions, and have shown a commendable willingness to experiment with different systems.

When they announced a campaign titled The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula, I thought “Ah, interesting! What system will they use? The Dracula Dossier… or something homebrewed, but still set in Night’s Dark Agents? If not, Urban Shadows perhaps? Undying? Maybe even a Vampire the Masquerade game, steering into (but also dissecting) the ‘90s edgelord reputation of that storied game?”

No. They chose D&D 5E, for… some… reason. It’s strange, because their style of play, and the podcasting format itself, really lends itself to PBtA and other story games. And the best Adventure Zone moments really sing with PBtA energy. Listening to their 5E episodes really grates my bacon, as the players, versed in PBtA play culture, wander around spamming 5E skills as if they were playbook moves. Every time someone on the Adventure Zone says “I’d like to make an Arcana check” without first framing their character’s actions in-fiction, a fairy flies into a bug zapper.

So the McElroys keep coming back to 5E. If they’ve explained why in an interview or blog post somewhere, I haven’t seen it, just like I haven’t seen that degree on Travis’ wall. I only know that it is a pain to listen to an engaged, creative, often laugh-out-loud actual play group struggle against the system they chose to play.

Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk

Previously: Mapping the Fantasy Languages – How and Why 

The following approach is very intentionally “vanilla fantasy”, hewing as close as possible to D&D qua D&D. Most games should tweak or change this approach considerably to fit the setting and campaign concept in use. But as a starting point, the generic treatment is more useful than a tailored version.

Common

Common is pretty obviously a solution to a gameplay problem rather than a worldbuilding detail that emerges naturally from the fiction. The party members need to talk to each other and the game designers don’t want every session devolving into frantic pantomime. Can we do better? 

Variations: Dialects. Fantasy games have a bad habit of suggesting that human nations have cultures that vary just as much as they do in the real world… yet these cultures speak the same common language. Use the close and familiar gaps (defined in the last post) to articulate dialect differences. Human languages don’t just have to be limited to people from far-off places. Two towns separated by a handful of miles of difficult geography may have very different languages; it certainly happens in the real world.

An alternative approach: Delver cant. Common is a lingua franca, but as real-world lingua franca was used by groups who needed it for their profession (e.g., traveling merchants) fantasy lingua franca would not be the common language of, uh, commoners, but rather adventurers. This means the party can easily talk to each other, but they can’t necessarily communicate with every Tom, Dick, and Harpy they encounter on their travels. Bonus points if the players want to invent their own slang, unique to just their group.

Get weirder: Memo-virus. Use Noise Sans Signal’s idea of common as a memetic virus (this idea is very Snow Crash).

Dwarvish 

Dwarves and their ancient language are a familiar part of the common fantasy vernacular, and their written script (often flavored as runes) appears a lot in the game. We'll revisit Dwarvish script in some of the following entries in this series, as D&D uses it a lot.

Variations: Mountain homes. There’s no particular reason that dwarves should have any more lingual unanimity than humans. Rather than tying their language to nation states, like most fantasy human languages, perhaps each range of mountains has its own Dwarven tongue. Dwarven adventurers exploring a mountain home that was completely abandoned (like Moria) might need to navigate a close or familiar language gap. 

An alternative approach: Terran dialect. One way to tap deeper into the mythic nature of dwarves, and get them away from the bad Scottish accent cliche, is to tie their language directly to the capital-E earth; make Dwarvish and the elemental earth language Terran related languages, so dwarves are not just those who dwell in the earth, but those who descended from it.

Get weirder: Tremorspeak. Take the above idea one step further. Who says Dwarves have to speak their language in a conventionally verbal manner? Instead they could communicate through complex vibrations and tapping; a tactile language formed deep underground. This opens up all kinds of interesting opportunities for non-verbal communication, subterfuge, and strategy.

Elvish

Vanilla fantasy typically posits Elvish as the other very ancient language among humanoids, besides Dwarvish. 

Variations: A tongue for every terrain. Many real-world languages have different tenses and word choices for different social settings. A person speaking their language to immediate family members may sound completely different from how they sound when at work, or speaking to a stranger,  or participating in a religious ritual. Consider giving elves dialects that vary based on the place where they are. PCs may be surprised to find that the elf who is perfectly grokkable in the streets of the human city speaks a difficult-to-understand dialect when deep in the forest.

An alternative approach: Sylvan cousins. The Elvish language itself is a descendant of the Sylvan tongue. Elvish brings rigor and structure to a language that is famously mercurial when spoken in the fey lands. This complexity is not arbitrary. It holds back the inherent chaos of the mother tongue, allowing elves to maintain the connection to unadulterated magic and the natural world, without succumbing to the satyr’s bacchalia, the abandon of the Wild Hunt, or any other manifestation of Sylvan chaos. “You’re speaking Sylvan'' is an Elvish expression suggesting that someone is saying something irrational.

Get weirder: Musical meaning. Most lore about elves suggests a propensity toward art and music. Why not make it explicit, and make their language musical? Elves literally speak in metered prose or loose, interwoven melodies. This doesn’t mean that elven PCs have to constrain how they speak or come up with song-speeches (although an ambitious PC absolutely should feel welcome). It’s more just a way to drive home an alien or foreign language gap. 

Giant

D&D 5E treats Giant as one of the "standard" languages, even though the lore suggests Giant is older than any other language besides Draconic. We’ll interrogate that contradiction in our treatment.

Variations: Planar fugitives. If giants trace their origin to other planes of existence, then their languages could reflect this. Fire giants can speak Ignan, of course, but we should avoid just slapping elemental affinities on everything; elements are already overused in D&D's cosmology. Perhaps some of the connections are less obvious. If stone giants don’t speak Terran, but instead speak a language of the Dreamlands, isn’t that more interesting? If cloud giants are cagey about their native tongue and refuse to speak it in front of outsiders, doesn’t that create an interesting mystery behind these tricksters?

An alternative approach: Bound by the word. Why do the giants use dwarven script? They are among the oldest creatures, peers to dragons. Shouldn’t they have their own script? Perhaps in mythic times, they had a spoken language, but no writing. The Monster Manual seems to at least suggest this would be a reasonable inference; in one aside, the 5E book notes that fire giants “work through insight and experience rather than writing or arithmetic.” Perhaps in that mythic pre-history, when the giants were more common, they had no need to write. One day, a clever dwarven smith came to the king of the giants and asked to learn the ways of the giant metalworkers. The haughty giant king scoffed, asking what the dwarves could possibly offer in return that would equal the value of this rare knowledge. The dwarf said that his people had a form of “magic” that could compel armies to battle or stop kingdoms in their tracks; "magic" that would make warlords weep and turn modest maidens into military marauders. The “magic” was, of course, writing, and ever since that day, dwarves have known the ways of the giant smiths, and giants have written in dwarven script.

Get weirder: Deafening declarations. A giant’s size can be hard to communicate in a TTRPG. So many other D&D monsters are very large, so the idea of the giant as “really big bearded guy” can lack narrative oomph. It helps for the DM to channel the giant’s size into something besides just a height measurement and commiserate strength score. Imagine a giant who whispers and is still so loud that her voice shatters glass. Imagine giants reveling in the mountains, with the echoes audible hundreds of miles away. It is difficult to parse their language simply because it is so loud. Massive lung capacity can really play up the true size of a giant. Wouldn't it be more evocative if a cloud giant was literally blowing a PC over with a sneeze, rather than the boilerplate X/day wind and weather spells from the PHB?

Next time: Fantasy Language Review: Building, Stealing, Adopting, and Conquering Words

Mapping the Fantasy Languages – How and Why

Language is an interesting part of TTRPGs, but many games treat it as an afterthought. Other media have amply demonstrated that it’s entirely reasonable to put language at the center of a game or story. It’s been done in video games (Chants of Sennarr or Tunic), books (Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, and Snow Crash), and movies (Arrival or Pontypool).

If there’s a TTRPG out there that has done language well, I haven’t seen it (as always, pointers appreciated). Other blogs have done the hard work of unpacking various aspects of TTRPG languages (for example, see here, which also links to other interesting examples).

I have written a few posts that incidentally deal with language, but only in specific, niche cases, like using an unusual tense to flag important information, or thinking about how D&D’s old alignment languages implied interesting things about the game’s setting. But I have not done a holistic TTRPG language post. That starts now. 

Defining Interesting Degrees of Separation

Languages in TTRPGs are generally yes/no, on/off propositions. You either speak Elvish or you don’t. You understand the aliens perfectly, or not all. Many games end up with a “common tongue” or universal translators simply because such black-and-white treatments are not interesting to engage with, and are thus easier to simply gloss over.

Take a look at the Mausritter language rules, as summarized in the Knight at the Opera post linked above. Languages are defined as much by the degree of separation between them as they are by anything intrinsic to each tongue. So if we focus on the gaps between languages in a TTRPG setting, rather than the languages themselves, we can come up with three or four categories, like so:

• An alien gap between two languages means that those who do not speak it don’t just find it unintelligible; they may not even recognize it as language.
• A foreign gap means that the listener knows it’s a language, but they can’t intuit any specific meaning from the words. At best, they might infer broad intent or very, very simple concepts, as much from inflection and body language as the words themselves.
• A close gap means that the languages have some overlap or common interoperability, whether through a shared language family (see below), an abundance of loan words and social exchange, or simple cultural osmosis. Everyday conversations and simple exchanges can be understood, but nuanced or complex ideas get noisy fast.
• A familiar gap means that the languages are nearly related or intermingled, and the difference may boil down to dialect or patois. The large majority of ideas can be clearly communicated. Only concepts and conversations closely related to whatever differentiates the two languages may be difficult to parse.

Why Making Comprehension Harder Is Worth It

It’s fine if games decide they are not about language. When I’ve been a player in Urban Shadows or Delta Green games, everyone is pretty much speaking English, and unless we find some eldritch runes or something, language is not going to come up. That’s fine. But if a game is going to include language, it shouldn’t be handwaved. Language should present challenges and obstacles that make the game more interesting, just like monsters and traps and fronts and stress points do.

How can it matter in a game like D&D?

"Languages known" matters more. In modern D&D, characters receive generous additional languages from their ancestries, classes, and backgrounds. Many of these never come up in the game, because most communication is happening in Common. Emphasizing differences rewards characters for selecting interesting languages.

Spells and abilities that translate matter more. Comprehend Languages and Tongues become much more viable choices for precious spell slots when communication could hinge on their availability. Telepathy powers become much more potent. 

Pantomiming, drawing, and other methods of non-verbal communication matter more. While not every session should devolve into charades, it can be a good prompt for some creative, physical roleplay.

Hirelings, guides, and translators matter more. Absent a fluent speaker in the party or relevant magic, PCs can do what real-world people did in the ancient world; hire someone who does know the language to translate. This can provide a good hook for incorporating support NPCs into a modern game that has largely shed them.

Next Time: Fantasy Language Review: Delver Cant, Tremorspeak, Lyrical Language, and Shouting at the Smallfolk

Make Ancestries Distinct By Giving Them Mastery of Their Domain

What do dwarves like? Brewing beer and mining gold out of the earth? Yeah, so what. Humans like those things too. 

What about elves? Music and magic? Humans. Love. That. Shit. Too.

If you want ancestries to stand out, don’t just make them the best at their thing. Give them exclusive dominion over it.

Dwarves 

Of the surface peoples, only dwarves can mine beneath the earth. They are not just the best at it, or the ones who do it most frequently. They are the only ones who can do it. The earth quite literally rebels against the efforts of surface folk to excavate its riches. Cave-ins, monster attacks, and even earthquakes greet those who try. But dwarves enjoy a mutualistic relationship with the earth, like plovers cleaning crocodile teeth. They can burrow into the ground and sense which riches can be removed without agitating the angry earth. Only dwarves can mine.

Elves

Of the intelligent creatures of the world, only elves can play music. They’re not just the most talented; only they can do it. Other creatures literally can’t carry a tune. Musical notation is gibberish to them. Instruments are like alien artifacts. Music is a force as much as magic is, and like magic, it can be a demanding master. Elves have some gift for it, reaching back into the prehistoric past, when the gods divided up their gifts to the peoples of the world. Only elves can make music.

Humans

Of the civilizations of the world, only humans can build cities. The dwarves have mountain strongholds and the elves have forest sanctuaries, but only humans build cosmopolitan gathering places defined by cultural exchange and mercantile trade. Only humans build cities.

Gnomes

Of the craftspeople of this land, only gnomes can build machines. For other ancestries, inherent process inconsistency means that ideals of engineering rigor and industrial production elude them. But only in the hands of gnomes can machinery work like it does in the real world. Only gnomes can build machines.

Tieflings

Of the peoples native to the prime material world, only tieflings can travel the planes. The otherworldly blood flowing through their veins is the ink on an invisible passport each of these plane-touched strangers carries with them at all times. Portals open only to their touch, and Plane Shift reliably sends them where they want to go. For other creatures, planar travel is an uncontrollable (and usually deadly) misadventure. Only tieflings can travel the planes.

The Player Rebellion

If you tell a group of players that things work in a certain way in the game world, at least one player is going to immediately want to create a character who breaks that rule. They may bristle at restrictions as a matter of principle, or find that ancestry-exclusive cultural or societal domains are too close to real-world stereotypes about nationalities or ethnic groups being "best" at something. So it’s a matter of when, not if, a player will want to break the rules.

And… that’s great! Let them! 

The first human in living memory who can perform music? A great hook for a character. A group of elves and humans and dwarves who embark on a quest to travel the planes, the metaphysical constants be damned? Those are some stakes for an adventure.