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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6769264" data-attributes="member: 4937">I would personally allow any sufficiently complicated mode of expression to encode for a spell.  Reading and understanding it might be a wholly other matter, but if a spell can be written down in a book than it can be written in some form anywhere and on any surface or medium.  Likewise, while there is - to my knowledge - only one language which has been invented in which to write spells on my homebrew world and which when written looks something like illuminated calligraphy meets complex musical notation, any language which could encode for the verbal, somatic, and material components of a spell would work provided you had a key to unlock what it meant.'Book' in my campaign is rather a loose term that just means 'a collection of writing'.  It's only recently coming to be a term for 'codex' or 'folio' as the printing press makes that technology more available and affordable.  Older 'books' might be written on scrolls, loose collections of hides, or even carved on clay tablets or stone stela.  Recently in my campaign the players investigated a tomb where the walls were carved with spells.It would presumably be possible to memorize a spell on the basis of an incomplete version of the language, provided that you had been taught the complete version of the spell based on the simplified mnemonic you used.  This would allow for a greatly simplified spell language.  But there would be a very high cost.  It wouldn't be possible to learn new spells by reading the language since much of the key was missing from any record.  The problem would be similar to the problem faced by a native Mandarin speaker who encounters a new word and either wants to know how to pronounce it or else wishes to know how to write it.   While the pictographs or ideographs might represent language very compactly, they don't provide complete clues how to decipher the relationship between the thing represented (in this case a sound) and the word itself.  Note that this is a different problem (but related problem) to encountering a word and not knowing what it means.   A language for writing spells has to do a very good job of both encoding the sound (and thought, and motion!) of the spell and also the meaning of the spell, something either pictographs or alphabets don't do a good job of alone.  A skilled student of the language encountering a new spell both gets the sense of how the spell sounds and what it means.</blockquote>

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