Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Primitive Screwhead" data-source="post: 1952891" data-attributes="member: 20805">Language System..I have been looking for a decent language house rule, as the normal DnD response of 'everyone speaks common' gets annoying to me. Its hard to emulate eclectic cultures when someone in the party can talk to anything they meet. I like the rules Gez propose.. with a couple changes.   I added the concept of language trees, with related, distant, and archaic links to other languages. Each step down the tree incurs a -4 rank modifier. In this manner, Joe, who speaks Brelandish, a human tongue, at 5 ranks can converse with a Cryian merchant as if he has 1 rank in Cyrian.  I also added a modifer to Social Skills and Disguise based on your ranks. This means that Joe suffers a -2 to his Diplomancy rolls and will probably end up paying a bit more for the bolt of cloth than he would if he was fluent in Cryian. Someone with higher ranks enjoys a bonus to these skills, and can literally talk circles around the unaware..  Reading requires a skill check, but only if the text was written above your level. So if Joe runs across a term paper on economics, he would need to roll to see if he understands it due to the advanced grammer and verbage used. These changes mean I have to have a listing of all the languages available in the world setting, and add on to any important written text a number denoting at which rank it was written in. My world also has a Trade language, which is related to most of the civilized tongues, but based on the Human tongues. This allows for a trade to exist without the need for everyone to learn each others language, but it is still a poor way to communicate. Some countries based in non-human stock must spend the time learning Trade itself.. making those countries a bit more exotic. In Eberron, with these rules, you initially learn the language of your home country and must have exposure to other languages before learning them. It is very possible for a Dwarven PC to not know the language of the Dwarves! I also changed the Magic portions that make these rules pointless.. No more 'Comprehend Languages'.. instead I use TEOM rules and the Translate spell is changed to be able to temporarily grant ranks in a given language.Anyway.. Gez, good system! Thanks for sharing!</blockquote>

Verification