{"id":26659,"date":"2020-01-21T00:13:55","date_gmt":"2020-01-20T13:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=26659"},"modified":"2020-01-21T00:13:55","modified_gmt":"2020-01-20T13:13:55","slug":"runes-and-writings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/runes-and-writings\/","title":{"rendered":"Runes and Writings"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by Alex Volodsky<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

I have a professional interest in Runes.<\/p>\n

The Mage in my superhero campaign (Zenith-3) uses Runes as the focus of his spell-casting, and I’m always looking for ways to invoke the resulting flavor, and for the implied limitations and benefits that come from this approach.<\/p>\n

It has been established, for example, that it’s not enough for him to simply scrawl some runes onto a convenient surface with a piece of chalk, that it requires something more substantial.<\/p>\n

There are times when I have pictured runes of fire hanging in mid-air as he casts a spell, but the player wasn’t in favor of that – even if only a handful of people could read them.<\/p>\n

Something that has worked well are small glazed and fired tablets of clay, about an inch square, with a rune carved into the surface, that release a specific spell when they are crushed, as a way of “prepping” a spell in advance.<\/p>\n

Another feature of the magic system is the capacity to ad-hoc construct a spell or spell variant. It has been established that these “rune-stones” are not strong enough to hold an ad-hoc spell. However, something more substantive like a cast metal rune-stone (hard to crush by hand!) might be a horse of a different color – we’ve simply never explored the question. (It’s relevant that he’s the ONLY rune-based mage to appear in the campaign, other spell-casters have each had their own styles). – (I dread the day when someone decides to play a poetry-based spell-caster, because none of the players I know are exactly poetic in nature – and poetry often bores me, anyway. And the first person to suggest a rap-based spell-caster will get a rap of my knuckles around the vicinity of their head!)<\/em><\/p>\n

Runic Fascination<\/h3>\n

I probably first encountered runes in The Lord Of The Rings (the books, not movies), which I read before<\/em> I read The Hobbit. I immediately found them to be fascinating and frustrating in equal measure – but was deeply impressed that an English-alphabet rendering did not<\/em> sound like English, but sounded completely internally consistent – and informed the names of places and things in the Dwarfish lexicon – lessons that I have remembered throughout my time as an RPG career.<\/p>\n

I found the fact that Elvish looked a lot like the English alphabet subtracted from the “alien-ness” of the Elves – they seemed more mundane, a perception at odds with their almost religious position within Middle-earth society. It was an inconsistency that nagged at me every time I read the books.<\/p>\n

– Hieroglyphics were equally fascinating for much the same reason.<\/em><\/p>\n

As an aside, I also find it fascinating that this would be less of an issue where I younger – my schooling was in an era when cursive handwriting (“running-writing”) was taught as preferable to printed letters, something that is no longer the case in Australia (I can’t speak for the rest of the world). My mother, in comparison, was educated in an era when the specifics of construction of cursive letters was much fancier, and had to be perfect or else – and in those days, corporal punishment was both accepted and widely-used. So the cursive script that Tolkien used would have been even less alien to my mother and considerably more alien than that taught to my just-married young niece.<\/p>\n

(This has an impact that is both subtle and profound in other ways as well – the modern way places more importance on <\/em>what you are communicating than in the <\/em>mode of that communication. In mum’s day, the clarity of communication was more important than the substance. My generation falls somewhere in the middle, in what I now perceive as a phase of transition from one emphasis to the other. Most of my generation write more rapidly and fluidly than the generations to either side of us, but also arguably have far worse handwriting in terms of legibility. Which actually makes us better at deciphering barely-legible handwriting – which is ironic since the stated purpose of “running-writing” was to make it easier for students to achieve a satisfactory standard of handwriting…<\/em><\/p>\n

These various impressions and observations have all contributed to my handling of language in RPGs ever since.<\/p>\n

The Tools Available<\/h3>\n

Using Runes and other non-English alphabets used to be virtually impossible unless you spoke the language (and I’ve never been good at Languages, as my French teachers would testify – in fact, it reached the point where I was planted into the School Library and told to educate myself on something<\/em> instead, because I was holding up the rest of the class.)<\/p>\n

This is no longer a handicap, and there is no longer an excuse. There are three tools available to the GM in the modern era, and their use in combination presents a vast palette of choices. <\/p>\n