A year and a half ago, I wrote a post about the honorifics associated with the five primordial elements of the sha-Arthan. In the time since, I've been further developing these aspects of the setting, including their visual representation. Thanks to the talents of Zhu Bajiee, who's already provided me with so much evocative artwork, I now have glyphs for each of the elements, as shown below.
The glyphs derive from the Exalted Speech of the Makers that is also employed in sorcery and alchemy. Whenever an honorific is used in certain languages (e.g. Onha), the glyph is appended to the start of the word, like so:
From a gameplay perspective, none of this matters in the slightest. It's purely a linguistic/graphical indulgence on my part, but I like it, because it's helped me to nail down the look and feel of sha-Arthan. That's not nothing, especially in a science fantasy setting that strays from the conventions of vanilla fantasy.
The image reminded me immediately of the Five elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Do you place any mechanical aspects to each of these elements? I have taken similar for my own world building, though admittedly used Chinese language as a naming device.
ReplyDeletePresently, there no mechanical aspects to this. It's purely setting detail.
DeleteIt reminds me of the diagrams of Cabalistic magic. The sha Arthan script looks more like Hebrew to me, but I could see how the honorifics could resemble Chinese.
ReplyDelete