The third in our series of posts on making fantasy languages more interesting. Go here for the post covering common, elvish, dwarven, and giant, and here for gnomish, goblin, halfing, and orc.
Abyssal
Variations: Fallen from grace. Abyssal continues the “dwarvish script" pattern from the previous posts, wherein chaotic creatures adopt a lawful language for written words. For abyssal, it is infernal that provides the script. But why not go one step further? If demons are fallen celestials, in the biblical tradition, they could simply use a corrupted form of celestial as their written language. Surely subverting the very words of the angels would appeal to demons as they are conventionally portrayed in D&D, right?
An alternative approach: Terrifying telepathy. Almost all the demons in the 2014 Monster Manual have telepathy. A creature with access to telepathy would only rarely need to speak aloud, so why not lean into telepathy as their core communication method? When a demon uses telepathy to communicate with a mortal, it is not “speaking” with its own voice, per se. Instead it is using the doubts and weaknesses within that person’s mind as a medium for communication. To speak to a demon is to see the weakest and most vulnerable parts of one’s own psyche gather as a chorus and speak the demon’s words. Truly a language that is both chaotic and evil.
Get weirder: Alien minds. If demons are truly alien beings, communicating with them should reflect that. Understanding their words is not a mere act of translation, but something closer to tropes in horror movies. A recording played backwards. A possessed person spitting blood and painting profane runes on a sanitorium wall. Sickly farm animals bleating and crying out in unison to say “I am Legion.”
Celestial
Variations: The original ur-language. Some D&D angels, as described in the 2014 manual, speak “all” languages. Maybe this just means immortality provides enough spare time for the multiverse’s wildest Duolingo streaks. But I prefer to think that they speak all languages because they spoke the Language from which all those tongues descended. This is the Babel story; angels still speak the language that humankind lost.
An alternative approach: Chaotic cosmopolitans. The above works well for the angels of law. What about their chaotic cousins? Perhaps we can simply invert our idea for demons from above. Chaotic celestials reject the rigors of “one true language” and consider a telepathy driven by strong feelings, intense emotions, and, well, vibes as the purest way to communicate.
Get weirder: Compelling communications. Good celestials don’t necessarily intend to coerce mortals, but overzealous creatures with immortal minds who act on the instruction of hyper-certain gods aren’t great at subtlety. Celestial verbs when stated in the infinitive form have a weird tendency to come across as commands, even if they weren’t intended that way. Talking to an angel involves some tough saving throws to avoid simply Doing What They Say.
Draconic
“You are a very young wizard,” the dragon said, “I did not know men came so young into their power.” He spoke, as did Ged, in the Old Speech, for that is the tongue of dragons still. Although the use of the Old Speech binds a man to truth, this is not so with dragons. It is their own language, and they can lie in it, twisting the true words to false ends, catching the unwary hearer in a maze of mirrorwords each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere. So Ged had been warned often, and when the dragon spoke he listened with an untrustful ear, all his doubts ready. But the words seemed plain and clear: “Is it to ask my help that you have come here, little wizard?”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, "A Wizard of Earthsea"
Variations: Heavy breathers. Dragons do not use their terrifying breath for violence only, and draconic is not a purely verbal language. The lung capacity and unique throat musculature naturally also influences their language. Draconic is as much about subtle coughs, wheezes, inhalations, and snorts as it is about words. Non-dragon speakers of draconic must approximate these forms through a series of adapted techniques, and imperious dragons look down at such “debased” forms of the language.
An alternative approach: Perfect memory. Draconic is such a difficult language to learn for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is a language spoken by creatures with perfect memory. A dragon has a photographic memory for anything it cares about. It knows every inch of its domain and every detail of each coin in its hoard. Draconic reflects this exactitude with exactitude in magnitude. Draconic does not have words for concepts like “a lot” or “very far” or “pretty soon.” A dragon specifies everything exactly, because it knows exactly, and remembers exactly.
Get weirder: Binding words. Dragons are strange creatures. They are near-immortal, closer to gods than men, and perhaps greater than the gods, because the gods had to become gods, while the dragons were always dragons. Talking to a dragon is uniquely dangerous. Their words bind those they deign to speak with to consistent action. You can lie to a dragon, but once you do, you cannot speak the truth to them. The inverse is also true. With the passage of time, it is possible to take a new tack with the same dragon, but the older the dragon is, the more time must pass before this is possible. For ancient dragons, this may be longer than most mortal lifespans.
Deep Speech
I don’t know what to do with deep speech. I think it’s a mistake.
I’ve been running through these languages in the order they appear in the book, and I haven't planned ahead for how I will tackle each one. So I hadn’t thought much about how deep speech fits into the game before I got here. Moreso than any other language covered in this series thus far, deep speech presents a problem.
How and why is there a shared language for disparate creatures defined primarily by their incomprehensibility and unknowability? Creating a shared deep speech language present problems similar to those that we get when deciding how many hit dice Cthulhu has. Once you have quantified and categorized and “made known” the unknown, you've undercut the very essence of what makes the creature different from the more worldly monsters.
A quick review of the 2014 Monster Manual indicates how superficial deep speech is. Here are all the creatures that speak or understand it, along with their other languages:
- Mindflayer (deep speech, telepathy, undercommon)
- Aboleth (deep speech, telepathy)
- Intellect devourer (understands deep speech, but doesn’t speak it)
- Beholder (Deep speech, undercommon; the zombie beholder, like other zombies, understands deep speech, but doesn’t speak it)
- Cloaker (deep speech, undercommon)
- Chuul (deep speech)
Aboleths and mindflayers are mental masters who presumably use telepathy as their default form of communication. The chuul and the intellect devourer are servants of those creatures, respectively. Telepathy should be sufficient to give them their orders.
The beholder and the cloaker are underdark denizens who speak deep speech on top of undercommon. The beholder's polyglot nature in particular is strange, since the book describes them as xenophobic supremacists. Note that the spectator, a beholder cousin, gets telepathy as well, while the proper beholder and death tyrant do not, despite their superior mental stats. I guess this detail was included because the spectator is a summoned guardian rather than a free-range monster, but it still raises more questions than it answers.
If creatures like beholders need a language besides undercommon (which is presumably not their native language), why not just give them a language unique to their species? Slaads, for example, are aberrations, and quite alien in their behavior, but have their own eponymous language, on top of telepathy. Grell similarly only speak their own language, even though they are expressly described as “alien.” I think it is kind of entertaining that grell have their own language, even though they are mostly solitary ambush predators. Perhaps someone thought it would be weird if a brain-themed monster couldn’t talk? What do they talk about? Do they exchange tentacle-cleaning tips?
The niche language that is even funnier to me is that hook horrors speak a language called… hook horror. Like, do hook horrors literally refer to themselves as "hook horrors" when talking in this language? I always assumed "hook horror" was a euphemism applied by survivors of encounters with these beasts. It seems like the designers could have knocked a point or two off of their intelligence score and lumped them in with all the non-lingual beasties, since nothing in their brief description differentiates them from animal-like monsters anyway.
OK, that’s a fun aside, but none of it really relates to deep speech. So I’m breaking format. I don’t have three interesting ideas for deep speech, because in contrast to the other languages we’ve covered so far, I don’t think there’s much to it that makes it compelling.
Next time: We finish up with the last four standard languages: infernal, primordial, sylvan, and undercommon.
No comments:
Post a Comment