I was working on my belated postfest submission (my second article about Marisuda and the Cloak of Frogs), and wanted to refer to Suel characters.
I did some digging through the archives and Jason Zavoda's index, but all I came up with were the Hepmonaland Runes [?] in Scarlet Brotherhood on page 37, as well as the usual runes from the Folio and 83 box set.
Are there any canon references to runes? If no canon exists, does anyone have any alphabetic/runic/hieroglyphic/etc. systems that they've developed for Flan, Suel, Oerid, etc. writings? _________________ Allan Grohe (grodog@gmail.com)
http://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/greyhawk.html
Here's a repost of my reply from the Language Comparison thread from a few weeks back... it might be helpful to you:
Try this site: [url]http://www.omniglot.com/writing/atoz.htm[/url]
For Ancient Suel, I would recommend Akkadian (Mesopotamian origin), which was written in cuneiform, or perhaps Assyrian, because the Suel seem to have that "cradle of civilization" feel to their ancient culture, with the rise of their city-states, ziggurats in their architecture, etc. Maybe even Persian, Pahlavi or Farsi?
For Old Oeridian, perhaps Etruscan or Old Italic, which then evolved into Gothic (sort of a Latinized Germanic language) or Latin itself.
Flan:
Ur-Flan: Tocharian (an extinct Indo-European language thought to have been spoken by caucasians in western China circa 600-800 AD)
Sulm: Aramaic or Ancient Berber
Rovers: Apache, Cherokee, etc.
Blackmoor: Hungarian or Russian
Tostencha(Skrellingshald): Old Danish
The rest: Gaelic, Celtiberian, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, etc.
Baklunish:
In Ket: Azeri
In Zeif and Ekbir: Arabic
Tusmit: Turkish/Turkmen
Rhenee: Romani, which has elements of Sanskrit/Hindustani
A while back I created an alphabet for Baklunish. Stylistically it is similar to Arabic, but doesn't look anything like it really. It is a simple letter to letter translation, with only one form of punctuation: the "." .
If I knew how to create a font, I'd submit it to Canonfire. If somebody can help me with this, I'd be more than happy to share it with everyone. At the very least I can probably find somebody to scan it for me and submit an image...hopefully...although I really woudn't mind learning how to create a font.
I've also done an "arcane alphabet" in a similar way.
If anybody can help me with this then PM me.
Other than this, the Desert of Desolation had some alphabets in them. The original adventures(Oasis of the White Palm, etc.) had a very different alphabet, while the compilation had a somewhat decipherable alphabet. Deciphering documents was great fun in the adventure. Towards the end I could read them right off the page. These alphabets would be most suitable for Baklunish script.
I've never seen any treatment of the other human alphabets, though many of us have seen Dethek and Elven runes from the Pool of Radiance "code wheel", which can be a useful tool. _________________ - Moderator/Admin (in some areas)/Member -
High Logic's Font Creator is the easiest, most intuitive font program I've found. It runs on all versions of windows, and although it's shareware with a registration fee, there's a full function trial period.
As far as languages in the campaign, I tend to assign a style or real world counterpart to the alphabets, but don't bother mapping out the entire language. It's easier, and equally as immersing for the players, IMO, to describe what the words look like than to have custom fonts for every language.
As an example, I tell players that the Ancient Olman alphabet looks a lot like Ancient Mayan, and I've got a couple pages of sample glyphs to give them an idea of what they are looking at:
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