D20 Linguistics

Would you read/use a D20 Linguistics book?

  • Definately! That's too cool!

    Votes: 110 24.6%
  • No, I don't have a use for that.

    Votes: 135 30.1%
  • Maybe. I'd need to know more.

    Votes: 203 45.3%

I'd like to see something like that. The linguistics stuff in most of the D&D books makes me cringe. It's fantasy, yes, but the way that it is handled most of the time, we would be better off if the topic was left alone ;).

Then again, I'd like the treatment of this topic not to be too extensive. The link to fantasy should stay prevalent.
 

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Since I found this poll through the news page, a fair bit of what more I wanted to know was in the first post.

I'd hope for a lot of rules options, or better yet, game sub-systems and structures for world-building, out of this work. I'd like to see game applications as half of the table of contents, rather than just the last line. To be frank, of the three ingredients of crunch, cream and waffle, there's not much cream in this concept and you don't need most of your confection to be waffle.

Do you have an idea yet of how you want to change Speak Language, how it incorporates all of those good things that you mentioned in your first post, and how not to make it invalidate the skill choices that players and supplement writers have already made? How many skill points and feats do you think a player will want to spend on languages?

One thing that would be really useful to me, not specifically for d20, is a simplified but complete or even speculative family tree of real Earth language families, their taxonomy (if those are the terms I want) and major languages in each. It needs to be a fruitful game source and an engaging read in itself, both of which are far removed from the aims of a textbook: not a bad general description of my hopes for this project, in fact.

Please let me cast a vote not to include any sample languages. As someone else pointed out, you don't have room, and to me, someone else's con-lang is of interest almost solely to the creator, until it's applied in story to describe concepts that are interesting in their own right. I include Tolkien in that.
 


Linguistics has always fascinated me, and just recently I've been spending many late hours looking into Indo-European stuff on the net.

So yes, I suspect I'd be interesting in reading an entire d20 book on linguistics. Even if it included three college linguistics textbooks of information. :)

Especially if it was a free download because I'm cheap and Xmas is coming and all my money is going towards Gifts for Others right now.
 

Arbiter of Wyrms said:
I've been considering writing a book (or at least a fairly sizable document) on Linguistics for use with D20 games, particularly D&D, and I want to know how much interest this would generate. The work would almost certainly be free, rather than distributed through a publisher.
<snip>

This sounds really neat! If you write something like this, please let us know! I for one would definitely purchase something like this if it was available as I have always been fascinated by the languages (Unfortunately, I was far too "sensible" when choosing my college major, so I didn't major in linguistics...)

Cheers,
Meadred
 

Here's what I'd like to see in such a work:

1) An overview of phonetics & phonology - explain IPA representations of the more familiar sounds (maybe English plus more familiar foreign sounds like the trilled r), and some commentary about how to choose sounds to give a language a "feel"

2) Basic morphology - creating words and affixes from roots and advice on creating realistic variation

3) Introduction to syntax - maybe best through examples of different basic syntaxes (i.e. English vs. Japanese vs. Russian), particular highlighting features that differ from English (topics vs. subjects, word order vs. declension).

4) Emphasize the idea of "No stylistic variation." If there's more than one way to say something, there must be reasons why you'd say one version instead of the other in different circumstances.

Maybe I'm pipe-dreaming, but I would pay good money for something that addressed all of that.
 

Really, its something that needs to be written for sci-fi and fantasy writers in general.

As such, it could be a whole series of how to books.
 


Sure, linguistics is HUGE, but a d20 book doesn't have to cover everything.

I can readily imagine a lot of fun and useful information: The use of phonemes (I remember a Dragon article from like #65 or something on that topic -- it was GREAT), a half-dozen sample grammars, different types of scripts, and then a nice set of rules governing language acquisition, related languages, similar languages -- along with some "flavour" notes (not every campaign style needs the same language rules; you might want language acquisition to be completely unproblematic in one campaign (like it is in D&D), and very real-world-like and complicated in another) -- and I'll buy it.

You don't need to EXPLAIN linguistics. You just need to give enough examples and ideas to get DM's brains cooking.
 


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