Languages in your campaign

A topic that's come up a couple of times in the past few days is what languages your players speak. This post was originally prompted by a thought-provoking tweet from The Umbral Knight (with which I thoroughly agreed!):

DM tip: Consider granting more languages, maybe a lot more. In many parts of the world where multiple languages are spoken it is not uncommon for ordinary people to speak 4-5 or more languages. Don't let America's monolingual tendencies hamper your players 1/ #dnd #TTRPGs

— TheUmbralKnight, aka Stefan H. #BLM #StopAAPIHate (@StefanHuddlest1) August 9, 2021

So, here's a look at Altrion. I'm not going to use the whole world as an example, but here's what the six characters in my party speak and why. I'm also going to leave out non-'mundane' languages like celestial etc.

First note - there is no 'Common' as such. In fact, I'd love it if D&D Beyond would let me remove 'Common' from my players' lists :D

The party met in Ambar, which is a Venice-like port on the east coast of the Meral Sea, the inland sea just west of the desert of Tabal.

• Jennan is half-elven and his family have been local to Ambar for several generations. As such, he was raised speaking Imperial Sasarkan and Elvish. The former is the official language of the Sasarkan Empire, which covers the north and east coasts of the sea. As Ambar is right on the border with Magar (also part of the Empire) he has a smattering of Magarran. He's also picked up the Meral trade talk, a pidgin used by sailors and merchants all around the sea, which is some basic Imperial Sasarkan peppered with loan words from Iannosian and further afield - in fact most of the party can make themselves understood in this, so I'm not going to mention it more. Because he's a priest of Verdana of the Nine, he's also had formal training in Old High Sasarkan, which is essentially the Latin to Imperial Sasarkan's Italian, and in which temple documents across the entire faith are written.

• Kiera is also half-elven, but her parents fled with many other half-elves from Meara (home of most of the half-elves) to Tabal (part of the Sasarkan Empire) during the Gerethian invasion a century ago. As such she speaks Elvish and Mearan by virtue of her heritage, Tabalin from where she was raised, and passable Imperial Sasarkan (though it's not her first language). In addition, as the first chapter's BBEG was from Taran, she has been making an effort to learn Tarani. She may have a smattering of Andorean, as it was probably her parents' second language. 

• Samira is from Tabal, but human. As you can probably guess, she has Tabalin as a first language, and more than enough somewhat accented Imperial Sasarkan to get by.

• Callie is a priestess of Kerila of the Nine, originally from Causeway, a city port on the far East coast, who is on secondment at the temple in Ambar. As a Causeway native, she speaks Andorean, which is the closest thing to a common language east of the central spine of mountains (the Grey Mountains), with a recognisable East coast accent. As a temple foundling, she has been formally taught both Imperial and Old High Sasarkan, and as one of her best friends for her teenage years was from the south-eastern kingdom of Madria, she also has conversational Madrian. 

• Aidan is a mercenary, originally from Greygate, high up in the mountains on the Andor/Sasarka border. His most recent work has been with a Mearan unit called the Hawks, hence he speaks Andorean and Imperial Sasarkan with almost equal facility, as do many residents of Greygate, and enough Mearan to banter with his comrades.

• Linus is from the north-eastern tip of Altrion, the chilly peninsula of Estariol. Andorean has even reached there as the predominant tongue, so it's his first, though somewhat accented, language. As a wizard, he's learned Imperial Sasarkan for research purposes, and he has a smattering of Estarolian, which is otherwise largely restricted to the more ‘native’ Estarolians who travel little or have no contact with the outside. It’s not uncommon for such folks to not, or pretend not to, speak Andorean.  

Andorean is probably the least pure of the languages on Altrion - it's definitely the one for which 'mugging other languages in a dark alley for vocabulary' holds most true, and it's been doing it for a long time, to the extent that most speakers have no idea where words originated. 

It is also probably the one with the most identifiable regional dialects, ranging from the relatively pure version spoken in Mirador to the dialect spoken in Zagarash, which is liberally sprinkled with loan-words from Draconic and Orcish. And, just to amuse my inner linguist, it's probably the only language on Altrion with no inclusive/exclusive 'we' distinction. 

A side note - half-elves in Altrion are, as I may have said before, a distinct race, not a human/elf cross - it's actually a mistranslation of the Elvish for 'second people', as they are, essentially, Corellan's second creation. For a long while, the majority lived in Meara, speaking a dialect of Elvish leavened with Mearan loan-words, but, since the diaspora, it's more and more common to find half-elves for whom Elvish is at best their second rather than first language.

So, we have a party who can actually communicate, as they do all speak Imperial Sasarkan to a greater or lesser extent, although some of the conversation may get laced with bits of the trade pidgin if someone is struggling for vocabulary. And several subsets of the characters can have private conversations if they so choose :D

How do things work in your campaign?

   

Gifts Money Can't Buy

 ...or, how to make your party unfathomably rich and voluntarily trade it away. A little tale from session 43 (wow) of my current campaign. 

This does, to a degree, require a party with a vaguely heroic, non munchkin mindset, but...

Our heroes are down in the bowels of Stonesplitter Deep, a lost citadel of a forgotten dwarven clan, when they (finally) find the tomb of the master smith/artificer, Kharin Stonesplitter, and some treasures, namely some mithril plate, Kharin's workbooks, and two 20lb mithril ingots. In Altrion, mithril is rare and pretty much jealously guarded by the dwarves, and you need a dwarven master smith and a lava/elemental-powered forge to stand any chance of working it.

Party very swiftly realise they can't break the ingots down, and a single ingot is more than just about anyone can afford, just on pure rarity value. They also have acquired (by doing a very very old white dragon a favour) a large pile of shed white dragon scales, and they happen to know someone who knows someone....

Specifically, the mage who's agreed to ferry them back from Stonesplitter Deep happens to know that the Crown Prince Gralin of the dwarves is in the city of Alcar (on their way home) overseeing the rebuilding of the city gates after a dragon attacked them, and doing a good job of drinking the temple out of ale. A meeting is arranged, and a deal struck. All the mithril, and the dragon scales, and the workbook, and the knowledge of where Stonesplitter Deep is, in return for a dwarf-forged suit of dragon scale armour for the ranger (which will incorporate some of the mithril as chainmail parts), and A Favour To Be Named Later (in the best NFL trade tradition). 

Both parties are happy, to say the least.

Paying your DM

It would appear to me that the easiest way to generate a massive load of diverse, and in some cases, flat out rude and judgemental, comments on D&D/RPG fora at the moment is to offer your services as a DM for money. 

And to be honest, this is starting to make me grumpy.

First off? Yes, I get that there are people who are not willing to pay someone to DM. That's fine. If you feel that way, then clearly you aren't the target market for the service being sold. That doesn't instantly make them bad, or evil money-grubbing so-and-sos, just because you aren't willing to pay them what they think their DMing services are worth.

I contend, though, that you projecting your value assessment onto theirs is just plain rude. Sure, there are lot of folks out there who DM for the love of it, who are willing to shell out for the paraphernalia [oo, good word] of the art of the DM just for the love of it, and because entertaining their players is reward enough. I happen to fall into that category, with the additional caveat that I personally don't rate myself highly enough to want to charge, and I don't enjoy DMing complete strangers. And yes, that's entirely possibly good old imposter syndrome and social anxiety talking.

But...

I have paid someone to DM, and enjoyed it and felt it was money well spent (cheaper than a night down the pub at current prices, for sure!). I learned quite a bit from it, too.

If you're good enough, and you can find willing players, then the sole judges of whether your DMing services are worth the money are the people paying for the game, not some self-appointed gatekeeping purist on the internet who thinks D&D should be free. (Because, let's face it, unless you as a DM are pirating your rulebooks, writing all your own scenarios, using a free VTT and video client if you're online, and making all your own figures and scenery if you're not? it sure as hell isn't.) And if you're overcharging for what you're delivering, you'll be the first to find out.

I very much doubt anyone's yet made legal minimum wage as a for hire DM, either. 

Joining the dots part 2

Some interesting comments and some further thoughts on yesterday's post - if nothing else I surprised some of you by actually posting for the first time since July!

Roger (via email) observes, wisely, (paraphrasing) that even if you're exploiting the players' quest for the interconnectedness of things, you still need to work to preserve the illusion that they are discovering connections that already exist, rather than having the world quietly morph beneath their feet to match their conclusions. Once you've broken the implicit trust that the players have that they're playing in a consistent world, it's hard to re-establish. As I commented yesterday, being able to bluff and keep secrets is a useful skill. 

To expand on that thought further, though: to be able to pull this off well when you have to, you need to earn your players' trust that you're not 'out to get them', to play fair with the dynamics of the story and make sure they understand and enjoy the fact that you are there to facilitate the telling of a story in which their characters are the heroes, with challenges thrown in their way.

Conversely, though, what you'd rather not do is throw your whole story line away because the players join the wrong set of dots - see the cartoon[1] Alan suggested for a rather excessive example. Sure, if the players want to go deal with this imagined threat, fine: but you can treat as a short distraction, or work out a way of weaving it into your wider arc... Or of course, they can just be wrong. I think part of your reaction has to depend on the tone of your campaign and the attitude of the players - if you're telling heroic fantasy and its a genuine misinterpretation by the players that has potential, it might be worth running with. If the players are, on the other hand, just doing it to deliberately derail the game, then maybe you need a wee chat.,., you should probably already have had one, in fact.

Which leads to the next point. Apophenia is a positive asset for a story-telling DM. It's the trait that allows you to look at half a dozen PC backgrounds, and pull out of it both a reason for them all to meet and perhaps give most or all of them hooks into the campaign you're planning. (Remember what we said about how good fantasy novels tie up loose ends). 

I tend to take the paragraph or so I get from each player (or my notes on the session I spent helping them generate a character), and weave a bit of backstory in that ties them into the spider's web of threads that is the campaign. Of course, at that point my spider's web can be a bit loose, with strands labelled things like 'this NPC and this one are connected because of something to do with X', or 'organisation Y is after information about Z for some reason", and my implicit contract with the players is that I promise to tighten it up with facts before it matters. Performing the background exercise with the players also prompts me to create new connections, as well as tightening up some of the loose links that are already there.

My session prep does, to a large part, consist of rechecking the connections I've already got notes on in the light of what happened last week, what's planned for this week, and what bright ideas hit me at 3am. I think my major need is to be able to understand why what's happening this coming week is happening. In addition, there's another unspoken contract I have with myself and the players that I won't retcon things that have in anyway 'appeared on stage' or influenced events on stage (unless it's because someone was wrong in a way that I can rationalise with existing facts, in-character), nor will I break connections even if the players don't know about them yet (especially if that connection is the prompt for an NPC's actions). I and my players have a story to tell, and for me and I hope for them, that story has to be consistent at the time and in retrospect. I am giving serious thought to using mind maps for this - stuff is already in LegendKeeper, which allows me to link things.

I'd be fascinated to know, for example, how far ahead someone like Matt Mercer plans. I'm very much planning the section headings a long way out, the nearest section probably has chapter titles, and the current and next chapter probably have outlines. I also think in, and am inspired by, images a lot, so in some ways the section headings may be more mental graphical storyboards, or scenes way in the future that I think I want to happen. Part of the truck, though, is not to get so wedded to those that you railroad players towards them, and there's an art to dribbling clues so that the party can choose their path based on them.

To wrap up - Phil (one of my players in the email campaign I mentioned a couple of posts ago, as is Alan) has useful apophenia in spades - he has a knack for looking at bits of plot and history and going 'oh, wait, so does that mean'... I love it when my players do this! But, anyway, he provided a quote that suns up, I think, why we play D&D, from the late Jack Cohen in one of the "Science of Discworld" books:

"[...] plenty of creatures are intelligent but only one tells stories. That's us: Pan narrans. And what about Homo sapiens? Yes, we think that would be a very good idea."

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[1] Apologies but this has a really obnoxious privacy cookie dialogue.

Apophenia, joining the dots, and the art of the Dungeon Master

...or 'why Marisha Ray enjoys putting clues together'.  

 ap·​o·​phe·​nia | \ ˌa-pə-ˈfē-nē-ə  \

: the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)

This is a word that's come up quite a bit frequently, in a number of interesting articles by some of my ex-colleagues, analysing the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and comparing them to ARGs. I'm not linking them, but there's enough keywords in the post for you to... um... find a connection :D

"What's an ARG?", I hear you ask.

Back in the day (around 2005) I used to work for a small company called Mind Candy Design, which some of you with kids of the right age may know as the creators of Moshi Monsters, but before that an ARG - Alternate Reality Game - called Perplex City, involving collectible puzzle cards and a range of websites tied to a story that... for want of a better world... manifested in the real world. It was the successor to games like The Beast (a promotional tie in to the "AI: Artificial Intelligence" movie), which again, posited a future reality overlapping the real world for the players to look for carefully placed clues in. 

One of the problems with an ARG is apophenia: in short, the players' tendency to see a connection where there isn't one, and go off on a wild goose chase. This can be a little bit more of a problem in an ARG, because the last thing you want is your players deciding that, for example, the letter counts of the words in the cryptic text message sent to all registered players represent a phone number via some transformation hinted at on a website (which you as GM never intended), or something more complicated. So they post their conclusions on whatever player forum they're sharing with other players. and good old confirmation bias and mass apophenia take hold, because people want the rush of solving something. And some poor sod who is absolutely nothing to do with the game winds up getting a whole load of cryptic phone calls....

I'm not going to go deep into the parallels with modern conspiracy theories, other than to note that the key difference is that in an ARG there IS a solution to the puzzle. And you can come down from On High and head your players off if they're causing a public nuisance based on incorrectly piecing together the facts - sure, it breaks immersion, but the alternatives are worse! Conspiracy theories, by contrast, just give you the dopamine rush of making the connections, and in the really scary variants, someone is feeding the 'players' with the clues to what they want them to believe. 

So, coming the other way? Do your players ever jump to the wrong conclusion and proceed to worry on it like a dog with a really juicy bone? That's apophenia. If you're at all the kind of DM who gives them clues and puzzles, that's what they're getting off you anyway, by design - the dopamine rush of having the bits fall into place (just watch Marisha Ray in Critical Role campaign 2 episode 111 - she even says she's unpicking a whole bunch of background clues 'conspiracy theory style'!)

But the connections are all fictitious, because it's just a game, except that you, the DM, know which ones are right. So... interesting question, then? If the players pull together some clues that aren't connected in your notes, and come up with some brilliant conclusion, what do you do? Can you actually exploit this human trait?

I think my answer is 'it depends'. It is (and I have done this), if you can bluff really well, possible to run a mystery scenario by throwing half a dozen clues out into the ether, and let apophenia do its work. Your players will find connections, and if you listen and keep a poker face, you can give them the rush of solving a mystery that never existed. As I said, I have done this - my players (we were sharing a house) demanded I run something when our scheduled Sunday afternoon event got cancelled. There were times when I was literally 10 minutes behind them in figuring out what was actually going on in the crime-solving scenario I set going - and they openly admitted afterwards they never knew. (I literally figured out 'Diamond' referred to a racehorse 90 mins after it cropped up in the scenario!)

Conversely, of course, you may have a brilliant set of interconnected plot threads, and your players have just managed to fixate on the fact that the BBEG and another NPC have the same colour cloaks and weapons, and draw a chain of conclusions that have precisely zip to do with the plot you had in mind. Again, what you do here is kind of your call. You can run with it, you can tweak your plot such that there's another clue to get them back on the rails at the end of this rabbit hole, or you can disappoint them when they find out they're wrong...

Part of the joy of D&D (as well as the 'winning' reward for beating up the bad guys) is that rush you get for figuring out what the BBEG is up to - 'winning' is at least partly predicated on hooking the clues together. In short, D&D and other RPGs reward your players' desire to join the dots. As a DM, sometime before that, it also rewards your desire to join the dots when creating the scenario or campaign!

Moreover... you are (at least, if you're running and plotting that kind of setting) telling a story. One of the tenets of the good fantasy quest story is that of not leaving loose ends. Part of the reward of reading, again, is that you get to share in the rush of seeing all the little threads tie up (except for the hook for book 2 in the epilogue, of course :D). D&D, at least for me, and I hope for my players, is like that: the story needs to wrap up (eventually) neatly, sometimes in one go, or in other cases with a thread that leads them on to book 2, the next session, the next chapter, call it what you will. 

For me then? I welcome apophenia. It helps me tell stories.