Chamomile wrote:Creating language for your world is like creating music for your world. It's beneficial (though still unnecessary) if you have the relevant skill, but will be anti-immersive if you try to just learn enough of the skill to worldbuild with it. The lack of genuine ability will show, and your world will be weaker for having something so half-assed added to it.
For the most part, languages help a lot more with writing fiction than they do help frame a game setting. However, the mechanics of any game will will drive the player's narrative into incentivized paths. In terms of what a language does for a game, Languages need to have mechanical benefits for having them; if players are ever going to care. Players in D&D care about Infernal, Dragon and Elven far more than they do about Roper, Halfling, or Grimlock. Specifically b/c the first three are avenues to potential power; and the last three are languages for monsters that aren't clear avenues to power.
Right now I'm mostly thinking of "languages" as ways to help abstractly frame how communication will happen between groups meeting for the first time. Which is important because I'd rather aim for Frank's "hostage trade" military paradigm over the typical D&D "reduce to 0HP" status quo. I'd rather use pre-defined, abstracted concepts, of languages maps that PCs/NPCs can use to communicate with each other; over creating summary lexicons for concrete languages. As this is for a game instead of fiction, in-setting languages would be abstract lists of topics that players know their character is conversant in with other speakers of the same language.
The potential idea that seems to stick out the most is one where certain strata of society have their individual lingua francas as a result of chrono-cultural drift and that each stratum's disuse for unrelated topics, combined with focus upon its related topics has continually changed languages over time. Creating hyper-focused profession-specific jargon/pidgin/patois that only specialists can fully captivate and express. Ideally this will make various character archetypes have social circumstances where they alone can represent their party best.
One downside is that people in the [Origin Story/Black Forest] tiers would be limited to the Provincial Vulgate; and maybe a professional specialty language. However, I'm not conceptualizing a system where [In Media Res] PCs are generally unable to communicate with the people in the next valley. Ideally each [In media Res] PC would start with no less than three languages: their provincal vulgate, adventurer's cant, one specialty cant, the supernatural cant for the source of their supernatural powers.
Language can also help to keep the art style consistent among character types, as well help to distinguish and define cultures. Consistent art style, can help immerse, players into the setting. While noted inconsistencies can indicate potential adventure.
Right now I'm thinking of one of two models:
-Regional patois; with an Adventurer, a Trade/Faith, and a Secret cant that is used to communicated between areas. This would be like the "hardest" option Frank & Kieth describe for using languages (i.e. where Lapp, and Farsi, are options, and "Common" is not)
-The Kitchensink Model; borrowing ideas of what happened with Latin in the Post-Roman collapse (Latin military terms became Dark Ages Noble/Political terms; became an international language with high and common uses for theology &or law); and imagined as if applied the contemporary 2017 English language.
e.g.
Languages Villagers, Tradesmen, & Merchant Care about [Origin Story/Black Forest Tier]
-Provincial Vulgates (Regional; Agriculture, Neighbourliness, )
-Market Cant (Universal; Goods, Weight, Measure, Inventory)
-Non-Adventuring Guild Pidgins (Universal; Guild-specific)
Languages Nobles, Scholars and Priest care about [In Media Res/Action Tier]
-Adventurer's Patois (Adventuring, Equipment, Supernatural)
-High Ancient (Science, Engineering; Karmanics (i.e. AS' Universal Powers))
-Low Ancient (Honour, Purity, Longevity, Succession, Law; Arete (i.e. "Complicated" Combat RPS+ bid-mechanic))
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Languages Luminaries Know
-Psaimonology (the trifurcatry of Summoning, Trapping and Binding Psaimons & Goblins) (Fire, Burning, Salt, Wishes)
-Alchimerastry (the pictograph pentalogoue of Alchemy (Organic & Inorganic), Lightning, & Monsters (Elder & Shoggoth)) (Water, Suffocation, Seeds, Dreams)
-Cthonecromantic (the freezing undertongue of Revenant of Wraith flight and stay) (Ice, Numbness, Sand, Rebirth)
Languages Elders Know
-Anything from Lovecraft I guess; Yithian seems to stick out as being older and used as a catalogue of trans-chronal information, but there's likely a pile of others that would also fit the bill. Leng perhaps.
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