Friday, February 12, 2021

Random Roll: DMG, p. 24

Page 24 of the Dungeon Masters Guide contains a great deal of interesting information relating to alignment. Rather than discuss all of them, I'm going to focus only on one section, that pertaining to alignment language. While I've personally never had any serious misgivings about alignment in Dungeons & Dragons, the matter of alignment language is something with which I've struggled, mostly because I'm not at all sure what it's supposed to represent. Gygax begins by stating the following:

Secret organizations and societies did and do have certain recognition signs, signals, and recognition phrases – possibly special languages (of limited extent) as well. Consider all the medieval Catholic Church which used Latin as a common recognition and communication base to cut across national boundaries.

Almost immediately, it seems to me that contradiction sets in. On the one hand, Gygax suggests that an alignment language would be a language "of limited extent." On the other hand, he references the use of Latin in the medieval Church, which, far from being a language of limited extent, was in fact an immense, living, breathing tongue that was used for diplomacy, law, commerce, and scholarship, in addition to religious purposes. He goes on:

In AD&D, alignment languages are the special set of signs, signals, gestures, and words which intelligent creatures use to inform other intelligent creatures of the same alignment of their fellowship and common ethos … Furthermore, alignment languages are of limited vocabulary and deal with the ethos of the alignment in general, so lengthy discussion of varying subjects cannot be conducted in such tongues.

From this, I take it that Gygax sees alignment languages as a kind of pidgin or secret code. His reference to medieval Latin above is thus a poor real world example of what he has in mind. He elaborates in the next paragraph that

the tongue will permit only the most rudimentary communication with a vocabulary limited to a few score words. The speaker could inquire of the listener's state of health, ask about hunger, thirst, or degree of tiredness. A few other basic conditions and opinions could be expressed, but no more. 

Gygax then compares alignment languages to the class-based languages of thieves and druids.

The specialty tongues of Druidic and the Thieves' Cant are designed to handle conversations pertaining to things druidical on the one hand and thievery, robbery and the disposal of stolen goods on the other. Druids could discuss at length and in detail the state of the crops, weather, animal husbandry and foresting; but warfare, politics, adventuring, and like matter would be impossible to detail with the language.

It's a very strange conception of a language and I must confess I have a difficult time imagining a real world example of such a narrow, specific language. I know of several types of jargon that are limited in the way Gygax describes but they're overlays onto existing languages rather than distinct languages of their own. If anyone can offer a good example akin to what he's describing, I'd love to know them.

Regardless, I can't say that this section of the DMG did much to clarify just what an alignment language or what it would look like. Unlike many other aspects of D&D, which have obvious roots in fantasy literature, this one seems to be almost wholly a game artifact, something created to facilitate communication, albeit of a limited kind, between creatures who do not share a more conventional language. Now, I may be misreading Gygax's intent, but, if so, I don't think I can be faulted for doing so, as the DMG does little to shed light on this matter.

22 comments:

  1. I've thought a good way to think about it would be a set of shibboleths in which you could ascertain fellow travelers (alignment wise). Sort of a true form of "virtue signaling". Though you're not wrong that the description is all over the place. The limited nature in the description reads a little like other passages in the DMG that seem to be aimed at his players, or players he's heard about, that live to exploit all the loopholes and unintendedly powerful pieces of the game.

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  2. The problem I had with languages is that they seem to ruin the chance of an evil/chaotic NPC successfully posing as lawful to a party. The party would only need to ask for the "secret handshake" of lawfulness to prove that the NPC was not friendly. I played mostly B/X and didn't use alignment languages for this reason. Did anyone else interpret them this way? How did everyone else handle this issue?

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    1. Yea, this, combined with them changing if your alignment changes as mentioned below assures that outside of some extreme magic or something, they can be used as pretty guaranteed tests of matching alignment.

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    2. I have absolutely no problem with alignment languages as a concept, even if you treated them as a "magical" feature of the campaign. My only problem is that they potentially undermine a big aspect of roleplaying. It seems to me you don't need to ever cast "detect good/evil" on someone if you use alignment languages, and players will use it as a "bad-guy" barometer.

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  3. The more you think about it, the weirder it gets. Are people born with these languages (and therefore with an alignment) or do they learn them? Where, from who, etc.? What if both parents are lawful evil and their kid is chaotic good? What if your alignment changes because of your actions?

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    1. But perhaps we shouldn't be asking those questions? Maybe we should just accept the concept of alignment languages as one of those strange things one encounters in fairytales, and just run with it. Use it as something self-evident and not asking questions that go beyond the immediate gameplay. It would run counter to the common sense realism so important to Gygax, but it might work and maybe give us a more poetic, mythic, enchanted atmosphere.

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  4. I suppose the idea of the Latin example is that although it was the language of church and in some cases government, it wasn't the language of the common folk, which is why it was such a big deal when the Bible was translated to local languages. Heretical even.

    Another (better?) example may be how the English nobility spoke French for many centuries. It wasn't a "secret" language as such, but it was inaccessible to most of those outside a specific class. And the French, obviously. ;)

    I don't know if that's what Gygax was getting at, but it's the closest I've come to understanding it.

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    1. Seems reasonable. I think it is a better example.

      The French spoken by the ruling class in England was progressively inaccessible *even to the French.* By the fourteenth century, the French spoken in England was comprehensible but archaic; like us trying to talk to someone from the mid-19th century.

      By the fifteenth century, Henry V's armies actively struggled to find anyone capable of making themselves understood well enough to negotiate the surrender of French towns under siege.

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  5. I never could comprehend alignment language. Vestiges of it persist into 2e, but with even *less* explanation, so looking forward is no real help either. As near as I can tell, the core rulebooks don't discuss it at all, but many of the other products allude to the existence of "alignment tongue."

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  6. If I use Alignment languages, and I often do not, in my campaigns they are essentially liturgical tongues, like Latin, or cult tongues, like Old Akkadian. The Black Speech of Mordor is another example. Often these can be magically potent, as well, something inspired from Richard Snider's Powers & Perils gane system... He does Alignment up right...

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  7. Cockney rhyming slang feels like it originated as a form of thieves cant; a means of communicating in a public space that sounds 'normal' but contains other meaning. There was also a 'tramps' language of marks that could be scratched onto to gates or stones to record information about the attitudes of a building's inhabitants or an area's animal life.

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    1. See also 'Polari', which Wikipedia describes as:

      "a mixture of Romance, Romani, London slang, backslang, rhyming slang, sailor slang, and thieves' cant. Later it expanded to contain words from the Yiddish language and from 1960s drug subculture slang. It was a constantly developing form of language, with a small core lexicon of about 20 words... and over 500 other lesser-known words. ...there was once (in London) an "East End" version which stressed Cockney rhyming slang and a "West End" version which stressed theatrical and Classical influences."

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari

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  8. I agree the specific comparison to thieves' cant suggests that sort of argot is what Gygax had in mind - a set of codewords mixed in with normal speech. Considering you need to understand about a thousand lexemes to approach fluency in a second language, and alignment tongues comprise "a few score words" communication would be limited indeed.

    The best example I can find of a religious language that is actually deliberately kept secret from the uninitiated is Kallawaya, in Bolivia.

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  9. I don't remember if it was OD&D, B/X, or AD&D, but I recall that if your alignment changed - either from behavior or magic - your alignment tongue would also automatically change, and you'd forget the old one. This leads to a concept that 'alignment language' is a divine or other-worldly language. In the Law-Neutral-Chaos spectrum of D&D, this leads to a very Moorcockian concept that that universal forces of Law, Neutrality, and Chaos 'claim' each and every sentient creature (or at least adult) and 'imbed' in them a means to communicate.

    Game was, it is from Chainmail, allowing an Evil High Priest to control goblin, hobgolin, and giant units (etc) without needing to know multiple languages. They were all just "chaotic" and could communicate.

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  10. I think the best analogy for Alignment languages might be Hobo Code, as it's similar. Although Hobo Code was a written language, it conveys the secret needs of the community in a decent way.

    https://www.openculture.com/2018/08/hobo-code-introduction-hieroglyphic-language-early-1900s-train-hoppers.html

    Imagine a slang or secret language form of this for the oral communication piece. Maybe even sign language.

    This root makes the most sense as it's something Gary may have read about in his youth. It's also something he adapted to Greyhawk, I think in both the Folio and the Expanded Boxed set there were a series of glyphs that were like Hobo Code to convey simple warnings and alerts.

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  11. I’ve always thought of it as the inverse of the way the Inuit talk about snow. For example, Inuktitut genuinely has a ton of words for particular kinds of snow that English lacks. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuktitut-words-for-snow-and-ice

    Talking about politics in Druidic is like talking about snow in English. For my snow-related discussions, Inuktitut (which I note I do not actually speak). But for my internal combustion engine related discussions, English.

    Inuktitut is a great source for this sort of thing conceptually because they have a LOT of specialized language for specialized northern situations.

    Obviously, this isn’t a perfect analogy. But for Druidic and Thieves’ Cant I think it provides an example of how something could work. How they’d ARISE is a different question. Druidic makes some sense. Thieves’ Cant...not really. That’s not how thieves work.

    As to alignment languages...one way is to see them as Church-approved conlangs. I don’t know that such a thing really existed historically, but it does make a lot of sense to have followers of the same religion/ethical philosophy be able to communicate each other in a world where those philosophies are very immediate, the world is defined by their struggle, and omnipotent beings can tell their priests what the conlang should be. Especially with the divinely inspired element others have mentioned, where you lose it if you change alignment.

    Another way to see it (and the one I prefer) is as people communicating in the liturgical language, using bits of it they know but do not necessarily individually understand the words of. For example, if I knew the Lord’s Prayer in Latin and English, I could sort-of communicate with someone who knew it in Latin and Chinese.

    So the alignment language really only covers concepts you use in worship, that just happens to also allow people to communicate with each other. Learning a lot of hymns in Latin would allow me to communicate with people, but only in a fairly narrow window of concepts, and my grammar would be atrocious.

    Personally, I’d break it into Common Lawful and High Lawful, where Common Lawful is the minimal amount necessary to follow a service and High Lawful is knowing it as an actual language. Everyone who worships appropriately gets Common Lawful, and you can pick it up in a few months of not really trying hard. High Lawful is a language slot.

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  12. I love the idea of "alignment tongues" but always despair at their instantiation. I don't think my players ever used them in my games with alignment (currently I've abandoned it as less useful in a science-fantasy game); when I once used "Chaotic" in Jeff Rients' Vyzor game, he seemed amused and taken somewhat aback (the NPCs wondered aloud, "Why wouldn't you just speak Common?")

    I especially like the idea as a way to let alignment "intrude" into the game in a real way, whereas alignment otherwise just seems like something noted on the character sheet and then forgotten (or argued about--"That's not what Lawful Good means!"). This assumes that it will be used, which per my experience probably requires the referee to model its use to players not used to the idea (i.e. what I've failed to do).

    When I did model it, I envisioned it as a collection of imagery and metaphor that would transcend mere language. I can only recall ever using "Chaotic", and mystifying the non-Chaotic players with reference to imagery regarding "the Dragon". I thought about it as a series of metaphors or poetic images that Lawful characters could certainly learn and exploit, if so interested, the same way that they might learn about monsters or the environment or whatever. That in particular is in contradiction to further official explication of the "tongues", e.g. that change in alignment causes a change in the known tongue ... but there's only so far one can abide rules if one can't make sense of them.

    I can half-imagine the "change" as a genuine change-of-heart/conversion/μετατροπή/"turning-around" that renders the metaphors, etc. of one's former life incomprehensible. But incomprehensible to me is the idea that such a convert couldn't then turn around and "fake it" with former-fellows.

    Altogether, I think taking "alignment tongues" seriously is at least a good way think some things out and establish some setting details and metaphysics, even if one ultimately walks away from the idea itself.

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  13. I always think of Freemasonry and Yiddish combined as an example of alignment languages.

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  14. I'm also reminded of the Atreides and Harkonnen 'battle languages' in Dune.

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  15. Always makes me think of something like Polari,in having a wide user base but still kind of secret and capable of being specific all at the same time.

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  16. I can totally get behind Druidic or Thieves Cant as 'secret' languages but Alignment languages not so much.

    The only way I can see alignment language working is if it is more of a 'sense alignment' sort of thing...in that you can read someone's body language and unspoken 'tells' and get a sense that you and they are of the same outlook. But as an actual spoken language...nope.

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  17. I think mathematical script might be a good example. For the uninitiated it is unintelligible and it allows communication between people that speak entirely different languages, yet only within the field of math, physics etc.

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