Back in February, I awoke with a murky idea about language and writing systems. Here’s the podcast episode from February 7, 2019, where I talked about it before the article was done.

Writing

My idea was about how complex a writing system could be, for its level of specificity and differences in the way different species or aliens might read.

Most written languages have a standard horizontal and vertical movement across the characters. For example, English and most European languages go from left to right and top to bottom. Some oriental languages are written vertically from top to bottom with different characters.

A flowery flowing script might swirl around the page with little flourishes along the way signifying different information.

A writing instrument that can write with multi-spectrum ink. Ink that shows different colors and across the human visible spectrum to infrared to ultraviolet. Some sort of odor that is the equivalent of certain pheromones.

There are different kinds of writing systems, alphabets, syllibaries, pictograms, ideograms, etc.

Languages

Related to that is the complexity of languages. What if a language was so complex/advanced that it’s construction specified time of day, time of year, weather, etc.

I imagined a journey by these people from northern to southern hemisphere or vice-versa. They are in the time of cold & snow, but it’s sunny & warm. How would that language adapt to that?

Short of building your own language on the scale of Tolkien, how would one emulate that in-game at the table?

Some creatures might speak at a register to high or low for humans to hear. Some frequencies could cause issues. For example, elephants make sounds a such a low frequency that it can interfere with humans’ balance.

It’s a lot for an RPG. Perhaps a few tables with different concepts to help put a twist on things. Is there such a product? I don’t have my head wrapped around this idea enough to attempt it myself. Perhaps someday.