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

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

Gnomish

Continuing the “oops, all dwarvish script” theme, we reach Gnomish as the next “standard” language.

Variations: A dwarf by any other name… Gnomes, like giants, use dwarvish script for writing, but we don’t have to jump through any linguistic hoops to explain why. They’re just dwarves. The idea of a “gnomish” language is just a misnomer (a misgnomer?) among humans and other tallfolk. Gnomish is just another dialect of dwarvish.

An alternative approach: Mechanical minds. If anything distinguishes gnomes from dwarves, it is the idea that they are mechanical tinkerers, either in the (relatively) restrained presentation we get in D&D 5E, or in the full-send steampunk version present in World of Warcraft and other media. If we want to separate them from dwarves, give them a language that is as much math as words, inextricably intermingled with artifice and machine-craft.

Get weirder: Conlag culture. Gnomes are known for their restless reinvention, right? To the other civilizations, it probably seems like their love of tinkering goes too far, and they invent things just for the sake of invention. Take that to its logical conclusion, and portray each Gnomish dialect as a language created by a particular culture of gnomes as an expression of their own creativity and inventiveness.

Goblin

Variations: Warrenspeak. Goblins typically live in twisting, cramped tunnels, surrounded by giant rats and dire wolves. Goblins don’t treat these animals as pets or working animals so much as equal members of their warren. In this treatment, the goblin language is filled with howls, chittering, barks, and other animal noises, and goblins are halfway fluent in those animal languages. 

An alternative approach: Unseemly unseelies. The dwarvish script issue puts goblins as downstream of dwarvish culture, and a lot of fantasy fiction pits them as natural enemies. But a fairy-tale treatment of goblins (from folklore up through the Labyrinth movie) views them more as trickster spirits, members of the dark fey court. Switch their script to Elvish and you’re off to the races.

Get weirder: Every word, precious and stolen. In both folklore and D&D, goblins are characterized as  thieves. Why not apply it to language as well? Their entire tongue is made of words that a trickster-deity, in the olden days, stole from other languages. This is not a form of strict mimicry, like kenku; these goblin words literally no longer exist in their parent languages. Other creatures scoff at this idea as mere myth, but the etymological evidence is surprisingly robust… 

Halfling

Apropos of nothing, did you know that when Magic: The Gathering released its Lord of the Rings set, they categorized the hobbits as halflings? MTG had already done halflings as part of a previous D&D set, and they decided to just group hobbits into the same category, rather than creating a separate creature type for something so similar. I love that 50 years after the Tolkien estate cease-and-desisted Gygax into rebranding his smallfolk, we come full circle, and Bilbo gets halfling-pilled. Anyway, about that halfling language…

Variations: Honorary humans. Halfing is the only language besides common that uses the common script. Isn’t that strange? Seeing as how common is so… common, we would expect more languages to use it. Halflings are just “slacker humans” anyway – per the 2014 PHB, “Humans are a lot like us.” So a simple solution is just to have them speak particular dialects of common, just like humans. They could have invented their own language, but that would have been an awful bother, and their human neighbors have a perfectly nice language they’re willing to share!

An alternative approach: Polite polyglots. Expand on the above idea. Perhaps halflings, as much gracious guests as they are helpful hosts, speak whatever language is predominant in the area where they settle. Many speak common, because humans are the most, uh, common neighbors they might have. But not all communities do. A community of halflings speaking a weird language like grell or giant elk would present quite a linguistic puzzle if none of the accompany monsters were found nearby.

Get weirder: The folk under the floorboards. Why do they speak common? Why are they so comfortable in human civilization? Perhaps halflings just sort of appear in civilized places, like house spirits, mending shoes and sweeping rooms. In a tolerant place with good food on offer, they gradually just instantiate into physical beings, showing up one day acting like they’ve always been here… because they have.

Orc

Why just “orc” for the language name? Why is 5E so inconsistent with the “ish” suffix? Anyway, Tolkien again casts a long shadow here, as orcs, like goblins, use dwarvish script.

Variations: Putting the pig back in pig latin. We have an easy solution available if we choose to solve the Evil Humanoid Problem by treating orcs as a subversions of other ancestries (like undead or aberrations) rather than treating them like a culture or ethnicity that should be understood in a similar way to real-world people. With this approach, their use of dwarvish script makes sense. These porcine minions might be variously descended from corrupted surface dwellers of all kinds, but dwarvish is the script they use because it is the most common written language available in the dungeons, caves, and other subterranean spaces they now occupy.  

An alternative approach: Just following orders. If orcs were created for war, uruk-hai style, language would be part of that. Orcish would be like a stripped-down version of its creator’s language, something like a series of call signs, exhortations, and barks from a military shooter.

Get weirder: Chaos manifested. If the previous idea strays too close to hobgoblins in D&D’s crowded collection of intelligent enemy bipeds, we can steer orcs in the other direction. Orcs are not frightening because they can fight, or want to fight, but because they must fight. They raid civilization not so much because they need resources, but because the very idea of civilization is a fundamental offense to them. Their language reflects this. It sounds like gibberish to the untrained ear, but those who learn to speak it see it as an anti-logic, like a record played backwards to reveal satanic messages. Their language is a mockery and a rejection of every word of common, elvish, and dwarvish ever uttered.

Next time: Fantasy Language Review: Demons, Devas, Dragons, Derp Speech

Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

Last week: The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E Playstyles

To summarize last week's post, PCs in 5E and other modern games are free from social and political norms, institutions, and rules. And that freedom is more essential to the appeal of modern play than any particular combat loop or class power.

Examples are easy to find. Take Critical Role, one of the most prominent examples of modern-style play in the 5E age. Both the first and second seasons of Critical Role feature parties who violated laws, disregarded customs, and generally acted like real shitbirds. The characters were, to varying degrees, misfits and scoundrels. But they never faced the consequences that misfits and scoundrels would face in an OSR game. If they died, their deaths were dramatic and tragic, not mundane and tragicomic. And when they succeeded, their success was epic. Success wasn’t just a haul of gold to spend carousing in town. Both of those campaigns ended with world-spanning quests to save the world. OSR PCs who flaunted social and factional constraints the way Critical Role PCs would not save the world; they would die, quickly and unceremoniously.

Running 5E with an OSR mindset, I was constantly reminded of how many “get out of jail free” cards 5E characters had. That could be literal jail; at all but the lowest levels, most 5E PCs have a range of skills that trivialize mundane incarceration. But it also applies figuratively. Factions simply cannot hope to constrain PC action in a modern game in the same way they would in an OSR game.

Dragon by Millennium Hand

And this distinction is not unique to modern vs. OSR play. A huge part of PBtA-style games, and other story games, is tools baked into the core of the game that explicitly create leverage and seed consequences for disregarding social rules and laws, or for recklessly standing in opposition to powerful factions. Faction play is still useful in 5E; if nothing else, factions have numbers and time on their side, so they can act against PCs even in modern-style play, because those PCs simply cannot be everywhere all the time. But it takes a lot more work to make it happen.

Listening to 3d6 DtL’s Arden Vul podcast, I was repeatedly struck by how the idea that “the world reacts to your actions” created situations that the players could at best hope to endure, not overcome. When a dragon shows up and makes demands of the party, it is not a dramatic cutscene. It is not a preview of a boss battle a dozen sessions down the road, in which the PCs will almost certainly prevail. The dragon is orders of magnitude more powerful than the PCs, and if they don’t understand and appreciate that, they will die, suddenly, ignominiously, and deservedly.

To turn the question around, I have also found that modern-style players can adapt quite quickly to OSR play. When I run Knave for players who have no background or investment in the OSR, they very quickly grok the danger their characters are in, and intuit the risks of acting in defiance of the world they find themselves in. They start asking more questions, thinking further ahead, and generally taking the world and its factions seriously. Give a player a character with 2 HP and a rusty knife, and they don’t need you to explain styles of play to them; they figure it out very quickly all on their own.

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