Languages, Real and Imaginary

One part of the Silver Age of D&D that I'm not ashamed to admit to having liked is the obsession with creating "realistic" fictional languages and names. There were several issues of Dragon back in those days that dealt with the nuts and bolts of imaginary tongues and the impact they had on naming both characters and locales. I ate those articles up back in the day, which is why I created several languages and scripts for the setting for my old campaign.

I, unfortunately, no longer have the grammars, lexicons, and alphabets I invented for those languages (or, if I do, I have no idea where I've put them), so I can't share them with you. And while there's a part of me that's a little bit embarrassed about the obsessive lengths to which my youthful self went to ensure that my campaign setting was "believable," there's still also a part of me that's quite proud of what I did. If nothing else, the names used in the campaign were neither knock-offs of real world names or random strings of letters without any meaning of their own.

Perhaps the reason that imaginary settings like Middle-earth and Tékumel tower over most others is that their creators gave a lot of attention to the languages their imaginary inhabitants speak. Now, even at my most obsessive, I never did anything to compare to Tolkien or Barker. Likewise, I don't think it's necessary (or even desirable) that most referees create anything remotely comparable to Sindarin or Tsolyáni when describing a setting for use with a RPG. Yet, I won't deny that there's something admirable about a referee who does give due consideration to languages and names. The Dwimmermount campaign is a case of where I don't follow my own advice. As a "just in time," seat-of-the-pants, sandbox-style fantasy campaign, I've only given the slightest thought to languages or names. Most of the time I pulled my names out of the air, drawing on whatever inspirations were available at the time. The result is certainly workable, but my teenage self would have been appalled at my lackadaisical ways.

For my new Thousand Suns campaign, I did give some thought to languages and names. Since Thousand Suns is explicitly meant to recall the sci-fi of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, I felt justified in taking a page from its naive optimism about a "universal language." Rather than invent one -- I'm much too lazy for that nowadays -- I borrowed a real one, Esperanto, feeling that, if it was good enough for Harry Harrison and other SF writers, it's good enough for me. Plus, Esperanto sounds familiar enough that no one is put off using bits of it in play ("Saluto" instead of "Hello," for example) and yet has an appropriately exotic feel (to English-speakers anyway) that it gives the impression of world-historical change between A.D. 2011 and 500 N.K. In short, Esperanto does a lot of heavy lifting for setting immersion for me, so much so that there was no need for me to create my own version of Lingua Terra, as I might have done 30 years ago.

Plus, it lets me come up with tables for first names and last names that lets me easily and quickly generate appropriate names for Terran NPCs (or PCs) that feel right, which is a great boon when running a sandbox SF campaign.