Languages Again

31 Aug, 2026

Taking more of a generic OD&D approach compared to last time. The little brown books kind of skim over "What languages are there?". B/X helpfully gives a 1d20 list, with one entry reserved for "Human Dialects". I could just use real-world languages or make something up, but what support is there in the original text that could guide me to what languages exist in OD&D's implied setting.

In Monsters & Treasure, we have nine types of men: Bandits, Berserkers, Brigands, Dervishes, Nomads, Buccaneers, Pirates, Cavemen and Mermen. If we assume each of these groups has a language, and add Common as the language of the culturally dominant group, that gives us ten. We could do a 1d10 table like the one below:

After rolling your first language, also roll 1d3 to determine your background. If you roll a language twice you can both speak and read it, if you roll it a third time, you can read and write with the skill of a scholar or poet.

These kind of seem like jobs rather than cultures, but they all have the sort of "Pejorative applied by the dominant culture" feeling that a word like "Barbarian" has. The "Pirates" are a seafaring people who don't recognize our authority to put trade routes through their waters, of course they attack our ships when they refuse to pay for safe passage. The "Berserkers" are the warrior caste of a whole people whose lands we occupied and settled, of course they raid our villages to steal enough food to survive the winter. The "Bandits" are just what we call the occupied underclass who tend our horses and till our soil when they decide to live in the woods rather than accept our rule. Obviously this is not to say that player characters should be from the hegemony, but the hegemony gets to decide how other people are talked about. Just like in real life.

I like that this centres human conflict, I like my fantasy nonsense to be something hidden underground while the rational human world provides enough drama to fill the surface. A raid of orcs or giants should feel like an aberration, not just another Tuesday. Incidentally "Cavemen" are men who live in caves, not temporally displaced neolithic hunters. Likewise "Mermen" are men who live underwater, not half-fish-people.

One of the criticisms I got on my last language post was that there were too many languages. I think the fix for that mechanically would be for adjacent languages to form clusters, like how I as an English speaker in Canada can understand enough French to tell if someone is talking about dogs or grapefruit, someone who speaks Pirate can catch the gist of someone who speaks Merman or Buccaneer.

I'm going to resist the urge to give all the languages names. I feel like keeping them symbolic like this hits the tone of OD&D better. I'll probably map the language names from the old post over for my own table.

For completeness, here is a 1d20 table of nonhuman languages, along with their most similar human languages. Every language you know after the first has a 1-in-6 chance of being nonhuman. There's not a lot of symmetry here, it's kind of just what felt right. A nonhuman creature can obviously speak human languages as well.

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Reading: Werebeasts of Hel by Asa Drake
Listening: Resiliancy by Syberia

#metaludology #od&d