Language is a virus from outer space...

So. Languages. How do you handle ‘em?

The 1E handbook outlines the original take on languages: there are species-specific languages, culture-specific tongues… even alignment-specific tongues that characters can be fluent in. That’s entirely plausible, within the setting of the game system – as my friends used to say, “Don’t question the movie!...”

But my own take on languages has changed, over the years. I’ve never had much luck with learning languages other than my own; I’ve tried German, French and Russian, and none of them have “stuck”. I imagine there are a lot of people in the boat with me, for whom second languages are a challenge. So my fundamental attitude toward a character being able to speak six or seven distinct languages to start the game could perhaps best be described as… “skeptical”…

I think I hit a turning point when I started getting into “Ars Magica”; for those who aren’t familiar with it, AM is set in “Mythic Europe”, circa 1100 A.D. Players and game-master are encouraged to find mythical or mystical causation for real historical events. It’s a lot of fun, particularly if you’re a history nerd.

Anyway, magic is interesting in AM because it’s extremely powerful, but not omnipotent. I read a number of campaign blogs that were set in the Crusaders states of the Levant; almost all of them held forth that hermetic magic (with its basis in Roman and Druidic – i.e. “western” – theory and thinking) could not be used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The reasoning went along the lines of the paradigms and frames of reference were so diametrically different from each other, that there wasn’t enough of a “link” to magically “enhance”. You could make a similar case for Chinese characters, Arabic characters, and perhaps even Celtic oghams – you can use magic to allow a French PC to read Greek, but they’re unable to bridge the vast gulf between contemporary French and ancient Egyptian or Babylonian.

I’m not sure that there’s enough here for a hard-and-fast coherent rule, but I’d like to hear other thoughts on the matter.

Oh, and alignment tongues are straight-up bullsh*t. Just sayin’.