This is a collection of languages for modification and use in your games, along with houserules to make languages more engaging.Language as it is typically used in TTRPGs is not all that interesting - in DnD and other systems that take cues from it languages often end up picked at character creation and then forgotten until some awkward moment when it is needed. Players are often not incentivized to make their characters linguistically useful or spend any downtime learning languages because they are essentially just a checkbox. This is a shame because human language is perhaps the most interesting thing we've ever made as a species - let's try to put the care that language deserves into TTRPGs.
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| Shout it from the rooftops, let the ignorant and the learned alike know the beauty of your mother-tongue. By Ferenc Pinter |
First, some changes to how languages work mechanically before we get onto the list:
Each language now comes with an attached ability. These abilities are often focused around information gathering and social interaction. Fun fact, there is some speculation that the language in which you speak affects the ways in which you think and interact with others (see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, very interesting Wiki rabbit-hole)
Languages are now marked on your character sheet as Written, Spoken, or Fluent. If you have a language with the Spoken tag but not Written tag, you may be able to speak conversationally in that language but be illiterate in its script - the same works in reverse. If a language is marked with Fluency you are able to detect subtle nuances in tone when that language is spoken, read the script at a very fast pace, and write with it in a way that is considered beautiful or poetic. When you take a downtime action learning you may now do the following:
Add a new language to your sheet - mark it as either Written or Spoken.
Add Written or Spoken to a language you already know - if you already have Spoken on a language you must add Written and vice-versa.
Add Fluent to a language you already have Written and Spoken tags on. Fluency requires a tutor who is also has Fluency in that language - if you want to learn Goblin you need to delve into the dungeon and find a way to convince (or force) a Goblin to go to safety with you and teach you. This costs a downtime action for them as well
- Each language now comes with a flavor. This is just a description of how it sounds when spoken, what it looks like when written, and who it is primarily used by, along with other notable details. I recommend keeping these to roughly 3 sentences.
- You gain +2 to reaction rolls to those who share the same Fluent language as you. This is far truer to life than one would expect and is a great incentive to gain Fluency. This bonus does not apply to the one most common language in your setting. Some languages have extra bonuses for achieving Fluency.
Some extra notes - languages may be unable to gain the Written tag if they have no script - some may be unable to gain the Spoken tag if the language is purely written - some especially esoteric languages may only be able to get the Fluent tag. If a language lacks the ability to gain a certain tag it will be noted in its description. Even if you only have 1 tag on a language, it is enough to benefit from its ability.
You gain Fluency in your native tongue on character creation unless you come from a very strange background. Extra languages gained during character creation do not start as Fluent - instead gaining 1 tag per language you would normally add to your sheet during this stage. Both Written and Spoken are still required for Fluency at character creation, but a tutor is not.
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The abilities attached to each language often pull from reaction rolls. As a refresher for those less familiar with this old-school mechanic, the GM may choose to make a reaction roll if the encounter/interaction's attitude toward the party is not immediately obvious. A reaction roll is done with 2d6:
2 or less: NPC is immediately intensely hostile.
3-5: Somewhat hostile and standoffish.
6-8: Neutral, uncertain, may be won over or turned against you with the right words.
9-11: Somewhat friendly and welcoming.
12 or more: Immediately very friendly.
Reaction rolls are often made at the start of the encounter/interaction with an NPC, but the GM may choose to make a new reaction roll if the situation changes in some very unexpected way or a very glaring social faux-pas / extreme gesture of friendship is made by the party. The GM does not need to roll individually for each NPCs reaction in a group - instead rolling for them collectively. The GM should actively apply bonuses or maluses to the reaction roll as would make sense and fit the situation.
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With that out of the way, let's get onto the list:
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| You cannot have a wholeness of knowledge without direct and earnest immersion. By Ferenc Pinter |
Common - The language of The Empire - it has a droning tone and a script that is overburdened numbers and expressions of equivalence. Common is more often written than spoken, as merchants from all corners of the world use the language in documents and ledgers. The concept of humor and irony has been slowly eroding from the language - to the wealthy and powerful these are tools that get in the way of business at best and can be wielded as weapons at worst.
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Any merchant or vendor you meet has a 4-in-6 chance of knowing Written Common no matter what corner of the world you may find them in. You can appraise the price of anything given a minute of observation.Thanks - The language of the people across The Sea - it has a slow and beautiful cadence like auditory honey with a script that is so informationally dense that some entire sentences can be condensed into one character. The language is notably obsessed with politeness and decorum - spoken rudeness comes out like a retch. This language is often learned for its script, as quite a few accomplished authors have made poetry penned in Thanks that can bring even the strongest of men to tears.
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Given a minute of observation you can tell what habits and etiquette will serve you best in your current situation. Just by hearing someone's voice you can immediately tell if they conceal genuine hate or love in their heart for you if applicable.Chuckle - The language of wandering Knights - it lingers in laughter of all kinds and has no Written component. The Knights often use Chuckle as a way to conceal short messages and warnings to fellow fighting-men. The more esoteric and experienced the Knight is, the more ominous and strange their laugh becomes.
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You can tell someone's HD and class by hearing their laughter. You can also tell the reason for their laughter - is it genuine, faked, nervous, hiding a message in Chuckle, etc.Serpentine - The language of Exiles and reptiles - it sounds like hissing and has no Written component. In order to accurately speak Serpentine one must split their tongue down the middle. This will forever mark you as one who has business with criminals of The Empire at best or an Exile at worst.
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Gain +2 to reaction rolls with outlaws and -2 to reaction rolls with the law if you expose your split tongue to them. With Fluency you understand and speak with reptiles - even mythical ones.Skull - The language of lost Undead - it sounds like nothing save the occasional clatter of bone and has a thin, trailing script. Lacking the organs to speak clearly, the Undead who still cling to humanity developed Skull. Only the prideful Undead such as liches use written Skull.
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You have an uncanny anatomical knowledge and can accurately assess all humanoid's injuries or anatomical anomalies with a minute of observation. With Fluency this knowledge extends to beasts as well.
No matter what, you will have a very rough time communicating in Skull without both hands free.Arcane - The language of Wizards and Sorcerers - a mindbogglingly complex and delicate script of strange shapes with no Spoken component. Arcane is less of a language for casual communication and more a notation for casting spells, found in spellbooks and scrolls. Older Wizards view Arcane as a pure language only meant for the purposes of spellcraft - younger Wizards and other adventurers occasionally leave written messages in Arcane much to the chagrin and distaste of the old.
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You can tell if something is magical with a minute of observation if you are not a Wizard - if you are a Wizard you can tell at a glance. With Fluency you can get a hint of the nature of magic present and its intensity.Oath - The language of starry-eyed do-gooders and esoteric orders of Paladins - it sounds something like rhythmic choking and its script is written in large, inky blocks. The concept of a lie is completely foreign in this language, as such it is impossible to communicate any untruths in it. In ages past The Church used this language, it now uses Common swearing that this shift it is just to reach the ears of more believers.
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You may reroll any reaction roll with +2 if you only use Oath for the rest of the interaction. If you go back on your word during this time, take the result of the reaction roll as nonlethal damage - your blunder will be very obvious and unforgivable to those who know Oath.Jest - The language of contentious folk and birds - it sounds vicious yet rhythmic and its script can be easily mistook for chickenscratch. The choice to learn Jest is one born of strange circumstances - as the language has the capacity to be wielded in such a way where insults actively hurt others. There are tales of Jester-Kings of the hinterlands who would depose enemy warlords with one Jestful breath.
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If you purposefully insult someone who knows Jest with Jest, you deal 1d4 nonlethal damage to them with your insult - no roll to hit. With Fluency these verbal attacks can be lethal - completely crushing the victim's spirit and giving them a heart attack on kill. Increase the dice size a step (1d4->1d6->1d8->1d10) for each of the following the insult contains:
An accusation which preys on the target's deepest insecurities or regrettable past actions.
A rhyme scheme, kenning, or strict meter.
Something which makes the GM and other players laugh or applaud.
If the target does not know Jest, the insults fall on deaf ears and do nothing.Haunt - The language of survivors of The Dungeon - with no Spoken or Written component - only Fluency. You can tell someone knows Haunt by their empty eyes. The natural way to gain this language is to get very lost in The Dungeon and stumble back to the surface. Tutors of Haunt are often uncooperative if the student is unwilling to take risks for their education.
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You can listen to messages hidden in notable dungeon architecture. The GM shall decide what counts as notable and what counts as a dungeon. What the architecture has to say is often strange - rock and stone thinks differently than flesh and blood. Given a minute of tracing a finger across your surroundings you can tell which way is North.Tracks - The language of everybody - its script is written in bootprints and has no Spoken component. Everybody is not an exaggeration - you can leave messages in Tracks completely unknowingly. These uninformed messages often consist of random babble occasionally interrupted by very accurate tellings of your whereabouts when the message was left. You can very clearly tell someone Fluent in tracks by their unique gait.
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Given a minute of observation of footprints, you can tell what somebody was doing at the time they left them. The Fluency reaction bonus for those who share languages in Tracks is +3 instead of +2 - Tracks tends to attract lonely souls.Screech - The language of Warlords and ghosts - there is only one spoken tone in the language (screaming your head off) and has no Written component. Speaking the language makes your throat raw and bloody, but it is very effective at making the ignorant tremble. If Screech is used in a conversation, someone is more than likely about to get killed or maimed.
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If you open an interaction with Screech whoever you're talking to must immediately test morale if they do not know Screech. There is no reaction bonus with Fluency, instead flip a coin. On heads, count the reaction roll as a 12 - on tails, 2 - Warlords and ghosts are a mercurial lot.Abyssal - The language of the strange wretches in darkest depths of The Dungeon - it sounds like methodical tongue-clicking and snorting - its script is swirling grooves carved into smooth rock. Lacking light, the wretches have developed their language to serve as both a form of communication and navigation - it serves as a way to echolocate. Abyssal is incredibly difficult to learn for humans, as their ears are not as finely tuned to "feel the space" as the deep ones like to call it.
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You cannot be moved by fear or charm effects and are twice as resistant to the effects of cold and exposure in darkness. With Fluency, you can use Abyssal for the purposes of echolocation.Absolute - The language of Gods - it sounds as it is called, absolute and terrifying and has no Written component. This language cannot be learned, only given or stolen from a God's divine lungs. It is a legend that eons ago the Gods demanded that the early mortals of The Empire develop writing to record their declarations in Absolute - but over the ages sinful mortals used writing to skew their declarations in their favor.
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You count as a God, with all that entails.
All names of places and people in the table above are generalized for ease of modification. Feel free (in fact, I encourage you heavily) to modify these as they fit your fancies and your setting - make your own languages now that you see the structure of one. Let your imagination run wild.
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| No little prose about language - I just find this painting hilarious. By Ferenc Pinter, you can find the tarot set this belongs to here. |
This has been a long post and it shall stretch longer. You can skip this if you don't want to hear my playtesting results and observations, there's no more mechanics or table entries beyond this point.
Now since the referenced rules and languages are out of the way it's time to be a little more casual and less organized. I playtest most of the things I write before posting to make sure they actually work at the table and not just in theory, when I was a fledgling GM I was pretty commonly lead astray by strongly worded advice and mechanics which only work in theory. Obviously for some things playtesting isn't all that necessary - see tables or more casual classes à la GLOG - but in terms of giving advice or large and unusual overhauls of classic mechanics I do think it's responsible to playtest at least a little bit. I don't include playtest notes all the time in my posts but the results for this bout of playtesting has been interesting, this post has taken a while to write and experiment with, and I thought I would share the fieldwork I have done.
When I made this system of languages my design goals were really just to make languages engaging for players of all kinds, even ones less immersed in the world who may just want to have a good time with friends or kill goblins on a Saturday night. I am confident I was largely successful.
The game which this system was largely playtested with was an open table focused around exploration of a large dungeon I had constructed using a hacked version of OSE - you can find the SRD here if you are unfamiliar. We had 13 rotating players all of friendly and lovely temperaments but vastly different playstyles. In total, 23 different player characters were made as some characters died or retired.
In my less lore-brained players the ability incentive really encouraged them to at least dip their toes into languages that interested them mechanically. This sort of developed a fun feedback loop in these players that encouraged curiosity. They would learn a language for its mechanical benefit and all of a sudden they could gain more info about the world since they could read and write or simply speak the basics of Goblin or whatever, of course this is new knowledge is fragmented because they typically only took 1 tag in the language they were interested in so they could benefit from its ability without spending "unnecessary downtime" learning. They would become far more curious about the world when languages they partially understood were involved - I think this is largely because if you give the players nothing to work off of they will simply pass by things they don't understand, but if they have fragmentary knowledge it becomes a challenge and information can be actively interpolated.
My more lore-brained players also had a blast with this new system - it created interesting situations in which they would genuinely consider kidnapping befriending dungeon denizens to gain Fluency when normally leave these NPCs be. These players also seemed to get very excited and immediately drawn to certain languages based on their flavor and history behind the language. In a few cases characters would tie a lot of their identity around knowing some language and tie their short backstories (in this game all players would get 3 sentences to describe what your character's deal was before adventuring, no commas or dashes allowed) into why they know certain languages.
The games I typically run are centered around exploring very large dungeons as opposed to political intrigue or wilderness exploration or linear adventure or what have you. Languages fit a very awkward space especially in dungeons but I feel that this new way really grew to fit this mode of play quite well. The gameplay loop that developed became delve, downtime (possible new language), delve again and gain more information where you may have been unable to glean in the previous adventure. This said - I am unsure this system of language would be a good fit for a very laid back beer-and-pretzels style dungeoncrawl, which I also occasionally enjoy running.
During downtime when I would restock the dungeon I would also stock the starting town with 1d4-1 translators-for-hire along with the normal set of hirelings available. Each translator would be Fluent in 1 language, rolling 1d12 on the list above. I let all characters gain the ability of the languages they knew and NPCs such as translators were no exception. The times in which there were no translators in town often there were players vying to have certain PCs in their session that week which I found to be an incredibly interesting and enjoyable interaction.
Making 13 very unique languages was somewhat difficult with this new way of doing things, if you have a constructed setting you're comfortable in it's far easier - the playtest setting I ran had 17 languages because I was able to work with more specificity. I think I've said it before and I will say it again that you should really prefer smaller tables over larger ones if you wish to have the results be meaningfully different. It's a hot take, but I find d100 tables to be wildly overused in this space. If you wish to make a large table like a d100, maybe try creating 5 different d20 tables each with different themes. I do this with my equipment tables on character creation and it works wonderfully. Do not try to make a d100 table of languages in this style - it will take you forever.
I use +2 for many of the reaction bonuses that languages give because +1 did not give me the results I wished for. +2 made languages far more cliquey in-world which I again find very true to life and also leads to characters of certain languages fitting fun archetypes and finding themselves in more interesting interactions with those who share their language. It also makes Fluency far more worth it to pursue for the time, money, and potential risk spent getting a tutor. The bonuses allow for players to sort of live up a fantasy where they can be a roguish diplomat which I feel is rare in TTRPGs where the sort of lived fantasies are more focused on violence.
One group of players managed to kidnap a dungeon denizen, lock them in a cabin in the starting town, and then force them to tutor. I have no insight to give here - I just found this endlessly funny.
I tried to make all languages unique - I've always had issues with "Common" as it exists in TTRPGs, all languages have their quirks aside from being spoken a lot. The modern day Common would likely be English or Chinese - if you think of these two languages for even a moment you can find unique properties or associations with them. I made my Common unique by giving it mercantile associations and abilities - I'd suggest you find a way that suits your setting to make whatever is your Common-equivalent its own unique identity.
Something for comfort's sake - I'd recommend only including Jest as an option with people you know or trust. It's a great language that opens up a lot of really fun gameplay although I can imagine that the insults would make people you don't know as well slightly uncomfortable if they are sensitive around this type of thing. I can give all the advice in the world but this shall always trump any words I can say - don't play with dickheads.
Many of the listed languages were heavily inspired (read, ripped and hacked to pieces) by friend of the blog Locheil's asynchronous domain game Ashes to Ashes and fellow friend Gokun's other asynchronous domain game Daughters of Necessity. Check out Locheil's blog here and Gokun's blog here, they're good people who have equally good ideas.
