Our first guest post on Rising Phoenix Games is from a good friend of mine, the great GM, home brewer and scholarly gentleman MushroomAlien. MushroomAlien is one of those super intelligent guys who doesn’t make you feel like a moron when you talk to him, but rather like a bit of a genius yourself. He also has a cool user name. Please don’t get him started on Dungeons And Dragons Miniatures and how many times he has thrashed me at the game.
In virtually every pen and paper RPG, you will find a box or skill labelled “languages” somewhere on the character sheet. In most cases, the only time you would be requested to consult this box, is when your GM confronts you with the question, “do you speak west cobarian under-orc?” The answer is usually a simple yes or no, and in many games the issue of language becomes moot as soon as the negotiator in the party gains the ability to cast “comprehend languages”, or the equivalent thereof. Recently, however, I based an entire game session on learning a new language.
I run a home-brew Sci-Fi campaign once a month or so for a group of friends. All PCs are human, as there is very little to no communication with intelligent alien species in the Kulindar galaxy. The day before our last game was to commence, I was struggling to come up with innovative ideas for the crashed space ship which I wanted the party to explore. Then came the news that the leader of the party would not be able to make the game. In order to preserve the plot as I had planned it, I needed him to be with the party when they explored the crashed ship. So, I had to occupy the rest of the party for a session, and I was suffering from terrible GM block. I had originally planned a simple confrontation with a human survivor of the crash. She was a fairly powerful psionic, and the encounter would have involved her and a number of local primitive monkey-like creatures she had under her control. I remembered a comment my very first GM made once about a campaign he had played in where the party had to learn a new language in a foreign land. I decided to use this concept to expand the encounter with the NPC crash survivor into a full game session.
I made the tribe of sufeebok (as I had named the monkey creatures) semi-intelligent. Under the guidance of the NPC psionic, they had developed a language of their own. I scribbled down a brief vocabulary on a blank sheet, and made up a three basic syntactic rules:
1. Sentences would take on the basic form of subject-verb-object.
2. Words could be combined to form new concepts, such as “pezhopat” (territory) being constructed from “pez” (very/big/good) and “hopat” (house).
3. Rules 1 and 2 could be disregarded at any time in the name of fun.
I mentioned none of this to the party. They had previously encountered a wild sufeebok tribe that attacked them on sight when the party entered their territory. They were perplexed when they met the first civilised sufeebok dressed in a plain tunic, and the frowns around the table deepend further when the creature greeted them with “pez pezhua bok!” (good day friend!) It took a few minutes of slow talking and gesturing for the party to establish that “ra hopat” meant “walk home” and that the creatures wanted the party to accompany them to their home.
Once the party had met the NPC at the home of the tribe, I stopped play and laid down a couple of rules the players could use to learn the new language. Each player could roll a number of language checks each day equal to their language bonus. A check of 15 would result in a success, and the player could ask for the meaning of any word they had heard before. Any player rolling a 17 or higher could make up a new word which I would add to my dictionary. I would also explain the meaning for a word if the players had picked it up in conversation with the sufeedak, and were using it correctly.
The players were so taken with the idea of learning this new language, that I had to remind them at one point of their main quest. They spent almost two days in game time talking to the sufeedak, learning words and making up new ones. As conversations progressed, I had to make up new words to convey concepts that could not be explained with the existing dictionary. My basic vocabulary of 25 words grew to over fifty in less than an hour of play, and soon included a counting system up to ten thousand. The players loved the intellectual challenge, and the fact that they could contribute to the language stimulated them creatively. Soon the players were even including sufeedak words in their conversations with one another.
Here are some of the words the players figured out:
amo = I
amosa = we
as- = opposite/not (prefix)
aso = no
bam = how/in what manner
bok = friend
gam = food
ort = fire
pez- = very/big/good (prefix)
pezo = yes
ra = walk/go
-sa = [plural] (suffix)
sota = find/fetch
sub = you (singular)
subsa = you (plural)
sufee = plant
takla = fight
ume = help
Unfortunately I can’t post the entire vocabulary here at this point – our next game session is this coming Sunday, and I have to preserve the mystery and challenge for my players!
The session concluded with a heartfelt farewell (pez ra) from the sufeedak, and the party headed off to the crashed space ship. I concluded the session without a single weapon being drawn. I got a lot of positive feedback from the players, and they greeted one another in sufeedak before going home.
If you find the idea of playing with a limited vocabulary entertaining, have a look at Og, an RPG with a vocabulary of only 18 words! I also designed a semi-homebrew system based on Og, which I might tell you about another time. Have you ever learned to speak a new language by playing an RPG? Please share your experience with us, or feel free to comment on the article.
Pez ra!
Mushroom Alien
Image by Arne Nordmann, modified by Rodney Sloan and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.