Re: Conlangs in RPGs...

First of all, I really like your page. Good job. You already have the
links I would suggest, so I don't have any to contribute.

A couple of interesting (I hope :-) ) stories of laguages in RPGs for you:

Diom ( www.bloomington.in.us/~dstokes/diom_intro.html ) strated out of the
RPG I was in for many years, although much of the current development of
the language has been done after I am no longer associated with the game
(I think it is still going on somewhere...). In its case language concerns
drove the development of much of the world background. The campaign world
developed rather haphazardly, because I got a new ruleset an we wanted to
give them a try. I threw together an adventure based on a module and we
went from there, just to try things out. AS we kept playing we had to go
back and fill in lots of holes in the world. One question that came up was
our characters seemed to speak that RPG artifact "Common Speech" as our
native language, but when we traveled to other places people spoke Common
and a regional language. This was eventually explained by deciding that
our homeland used to be the center of a vast empire, now fallen, but their
language had been adopted around the world as a trade language. This
generated a vast amount of back stroy and provided a new direction to the
campaign. All of which came out of a question about language.

The other story is from when I was studying in the Soviet Union (can you
tell how old I must be ?). My frined and I found some Russian who wanted
us to teach them about role-playing games. My friend GM'ed based on his
old campaign setting. In the party we had two humans who spoke their
kingdoms languae and common, and my gnome who spoke Gnomish, Common, and
badly accented human language. Among the players we had the two Russian
who spoke Russian and English, and me who spoke English, badly accented
Russian, and had a book on Ket (a Siberian isolate lang) which I was as a
base for Gnomish. So I pointed out a mapping could be made English -->
Common, Russian --> Human Kingdom, and Ket --> Gnomish (which we had
already used to find a name for my character). It made sense; we could
ecah speak and the level of comprehension would match that of our
characters. Well, the GM wen wild when I suggested it. Turns out, he had
modeled the Human Kingdom on Tsarist Russia. Unbeknownst to me I stumbled
onto the perfect mapping. SO it stuck. The lagnuage of the human kingdom,
Vilnar, became Vilnarskii Yazik, the two humans could speak quikly to each
other in their language and my character would have to ask for an
explanation, and I could mumble phrases out of the Ket book and no one
would know what the gnome was going on about (he was kind of that way,
even when he spoke common). In later years when my friend ran another game
in that setting the mappings remained, and a bunch of new ones were added.
That stopped conlanging in that campign, but it added lots of color.

Well, sorry to go on so long. I'm at work and bored waiting for the
computer to finish a big job, so I got carried away typing. Those are some
of my experiences with languages and gaming.

David Stokes

Ampiros sernost sharusae, vi at Enfors Vilandenae, vi je tais zhangoln.
The Empire's greatest strength is not the Iorn Army, but its language.