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There's two ways that I can think of. If you want a really simple solution? Declare that "Common" is a common second language. It's by no means universal - and as you move further away from major borders and trade routes it can completely disappear - but it's common enough that almost anyone could know it without straining plausibility. In mechanical terms, ...

What's important to the setting? Rude words are rude only because we decide they are. The word and phrases that a society feels are inappropriate say a lot about the people and culture, so you're going to need to start with a solid understanding of the values and beliefs of the society. Consider what is commonplace in your setting, what's sacred or ...

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 ...

Ars Magica is the pride of its fans for this very reason—its core and supplements are founded on the principles of science, magic, and mythology as were believed by the people of the middle ages. The basic premise of the game is that all the things those people believed about the world are true: demons, humours, goblins, fairy circles, aether, etc. As a side ...

Excerpt from the Shardmind racial description (PHB3, pg12): Telepathy: You can communicate telepathically with any creature within 5 squares of you that has a language. Note that it does not place a restriction on whether you speak the same language, nor does it provide details about the nature of the communication. Excerpt from the Sending ritual ...

You can communicate with anything that has a language whether or not you share a language. from the Rules Compendium pg. 316: A creature that has telepathy can communicate mentally with any creature that has a language, even if they don’t share the language. The other creature must be within line of effect and within a specified range. Telepathy allows ...

As written, the Linguist feat seems to be a poor choice for most players in most campaigns. If languages are useful in your campaign, then the feat will be desirable. Making languages useful is difficult. If you make language use essential, then you run the risk of frustrating players when they cannot communicate with NPCs. "Hand signal" role-play is only ...

Creating slang and dialect is an art, not a science, and there are two basic strategies: invent it, or steal it. If you invent dialect, don't invent words Berk, from Berkeley Hunt or a rhyming insult. Cutter, definition 11. Barmy, Etymology 2, from balmy. and chant is just a description of oral news services. You can see that the slang used in ...

Some background: languages are shared only as far and wide as they can be communicated. Any farther than that, and variations start. Soon you have comprehensible dialects, then incomprehensible dialects and other languages. As you say, technology is what made entire countries speak the same language. Example: BSL is the British Sign Language. There's one ...

How would you approach the creation of setting-specific curses? Now when I think of swearing my mind goes to, as Spock put it, "colorful metaphors". This is keenly a product of how I, and my society, seem to use profanity (swearing, cursing). It's a way to express displeasure with another or a situation in general. With that in mind, here are a few ...

The feat has great utility... if you are not running 4E in a boardgame mode. In non-combat encounters, most of the action should be taking place in a single area, and the PC's should speak the primary language. They also should be speak their ethnic tongues. If you want to make it both more realistic in play and more useful, have most people in towns ...

This thread implies that Deep Speech uses the same alphabet as Elven; namely, Rellanic: Found a font someone created for Rellanic on EN World (registration required); it works rather nicely. And since character who know Elven aren't supposed to be able to read it, I'm also rot13ing it.

Other people have already discussed keeping Common around as a 2nd language, so I'll describe another approach. Consider modern Europe: The average person speaks their native language fluently, and anywhere from 1-3 more languages with anywhere from crude skill to fluency depending on how often they use it. The more tightly-packed the language regions are, ...

There are many options, and as always which one works for your group will largely depend on the system and the players. So long as everyone agrees to abide by the chosen convention, whichever your group likes is great. Colors You're already experimenting with colored text, and @JonathanHobbs pointed out the excellent Is there an optimum set of colors for ...

Likely you are recalling the alphabet used for various races in Forgotten Realms. In general you want to use the (alphabet name) followed by truetype in google to find fonts for these alphabets. For Forgotten Realms you want to look here at the Candlekeep website. For Middle Earth you want to search on Quenya, Cirth, Tengwar. I prefer using Tengwar as the ...

That entirely depends on the setting your DM is using or has created. Apart from setting-specific languages, it is typical (though not guaranteed as it's again up to your DM) for there to be one language for each major race; i.e. elvish for elves, goblin for goblins, dwarvish for dwarves, etc., etc. This is typical of AD&D simply because such "racial ...

http://Omniglot.com hosts a comparison of literally dozens of scripts, including the Tolkienian ones. You'll especially want to look through the con-scripts section; scripts for conlangs (constructed languages) and alternate scripts for English. Plus the site has most of the currently used real-world scripts. Also has links to fonts for many, and entry ...

Just wanted to add that for bluff/intimidate/disguise checks, language is incredibly helpful. I had a character (shapeshifter) who didn't have many language skills, so his disguises weren't nearly as effective. Another character does have a lot of language skills, so everyone goes to her when there are clues in a foreign language.

GURPS has a world called Yrth that has cultures that were sucked in during an event known as the Banestorm (which is the title of the book). The languages and people are essentially "borrowed" from other cultures, and are placed into a fantasy context. It's an interesting concept, and I'd highly recommend it if you're looking for something a little more ...

Many campaign settings are either based on existing novels/media (such as Wheel of Time or Star Wars) or have novels written about them later on (such as the Forgotten Realms). In this case, your best bet is to read up on existing media and let established authors do the work for you. If you're playing in a custom setting, @Zach's comment is a good place to ...

I'm not sure I fully understand the problem you want to solve, but I'd take a stab anyway. Suppose you are the DM textually describing a scene and want to remark if something is said (or written) in a specific language: Seeing your party approaching the man at the gate raises a hand and says: < Common>"Hail, travellers"< /Common> Of course you ...

Montsegur 1244. You play Cathars in a city under siege by angry Catholics. When the game ends, everyone has chosen to flee like a coward, convert to Catholicism, or die in a fire as a heretic. Grey Ranks. You play one of the young Boy Scouts or Girl Guides in 1944 Warsaw. You have to balance the needs of a teenager against the violent environment of ...

Quick Thought: I would describe it like the slow grinding of words upon each other, like that of one tectonic plate upon another with a ponderously slow cadence and a grinding intensity that flares into heat from time to time when the social friction becomes the greatest. So less focus on actual pronunciation, but more on the evocative nature of the spoken ...

Some research leads me to believe there's no real "correct" answer here. That said, if you want to make up something on your own, I'd suggest using Google Translate and picking one of the obscurer languages. You can use the translated text as examples of the writing, and click Listen to hear it spoken. Here's an example using Macedonian.

An excellent example of a modern day RPG that fits this description is Unknown Armies. Intended as a vehicle for contemporary urban occult games, it supports street level campaigns through to global and even cosmic level campaigns (and the seemless transition between them). In the past few years, I've played in a couple of long running UA games. One, ...

It's a world with powerful magic at play. Common might exist because of that. For example, it could be the gift of some appropriate god, like a trade god or a god that's all about peace and unity. Or I suppose a god all about conquest and ruling conquered territory. If so, it can work however you want it to work, including being more limited than a real ...

Represent your languages with a visually distinct set of colours. As a group, create a shared set of colours you'll apply from then on. Agree what colour represents, say, Dwarven, and have everyone use that colour when speaking Dwarven, always when speaking Dwarven, and only when speaking Dwarven. The difficulty in this is creating that visually distinct ...

There are only 3 situations where I think language ought to matter in a game: You can't communicate at all. You can communicate, but there's a single word or phrase you don't recognize. You can communicate without any difficulty. Here's what we've used in our campaign. (And it's worked quite well for us.) Language names are changed, of course. All the ...

I've always viewed 'Common' as the 'Human language of the area'. So not 'common' in the sense that its specifically a 'shared' language that is common among races, but 'common' in the sense that its the everyday, 'most common' language of humans in the area. (assuming a human-centric world) So with that, the Common in one area is different from the Common ...

Realism in language diversity can become a major impediment and shift the focus from the characters & plot to the intricacies of the setting. Keep a Common language in the game to facilitate play (and fun). As noted here, it need not be fully known or ubiquitous. As a suggested mechanic: If you're interested in linguistics and the players aren't very, ...