"Do you speak Common?" "Of course I do! Everyone speaks Common…"
My group is starting a somewhat experimental campaign. We're using a setting that is neither canon (e.g. described in a book) nor entirely homebrewed: it's "what we could remember from the book that we read once" plus the world map from the book, marked up some added locations and country borders, and a short political history we developed.
My problem is that according to the book (Endival) every race speaks their own language and Common. In my opinion this has two downsides. First, it does not feel right that just anyone can communicate with people from the other side of the world. Second, this strongly diminishes the value of learning another language. It means you can go from one side of the world to the other and still fluently speak the local language (i.e., Common). Also, all humans speak Human, all dwarves speak Dwarven… but there are several warring human kingdoms and yet they all share a common language?!
I would like to make the world resemble our own history a bit more. My concerns are:
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You and I speak "Common" – it's called English. But this is the result of the recent globalization made possible with the advent of the Internet. Even though the setting I am talking about is more sophisticated than the historical middle ages (due to widespread powerful magic), they are far from anything equivalent to microprocessors, space exploration, freight in the millions of tons and so on. There should not be a Common language.
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On the other hand, suppose we decide that there is no Common language. Then we run into problems during character creation: A very basic and classic player freedom is to choose their character's race. Now we have a colorful group in which no one can speak with the others (why waste a skill to learn a language, when your squishy starting-level character could learn to swing an axe or cast spells better). Even if they agree to all invest skills in a shared language, once they begin travelling (i.e., adventuring) they quickly run into people with no shared language.
What are some ways to handle this? How can we have a realistic set of languages without making adventuring prohibitively difficult?
Best Answer
Latin (and to some extent Greek) used to be the lingua franca during the middle ages. Later on, French became the language of diplomacy and nobility. Everyone that mattered(1) speaks a local variation of said language which should still be understandable by another speaker. For example, Quebecois and French or American and English.
So, you could have such a language that all the PCs speak. They should be able to interact with everyone else. Now, make sure that each PC speaks the language from where they will go adventuring. If not, they will have to find a teacher and learn the language. This does not take that much time. You can learn everyday grammar and vocabulary in about three to six months of (hard) study. This is what I do for all my games.
Well, almost all my games. If the game is set in a bounded location, then only those languages that are around said location will be relevant. If I set a game in 14th century Venice, I do not need to worry about the PCs speaking Japanese. If I set a game in the Crusades, you better believe that everyone will learn Latin, French, and Arabic pretty damned quickly if they want to get anything done.
If you have boogly powers (aka magic or psionics or whatever), then learning languages could be done via it.
As a side note, Middle Earth started as a setting to play with the evolution of different languages yet most characters manage to communicate quiet well -- and were delayed at the gates of Moria because of a translation error!
Philology is just cool. And just because it is hard to implement in game setting should not be a barrier to trying it out provided that it enhances the enjoyment of the game.
(1) Why, yes sire, I do have blue blood... What about Peasants? They don't need to speak to outsiders, they need to work harder and pay taxes.