Realmspeaker: Introduction

Conlangs for Role-Play

Good day dear readers. I thought since I have plenty of irons in the fire that I would share one particular work in progress with you. I’m basically here working out a justification for what exactly folks can do with 8 fantasy languages. As it turns out, they forget the real world with them, and enter (almost) into a fantasy realm.

Realmspeaker is an in-progress resource for role-players to achieve immersion in their worlds, using conlangs. It is a collection of 8(?) generic fantasy languages, each built around a particular theme. There will be:

1. An underwater language (Merish), with an acoustical quality reminiscent of whale-song, and a writing system that uses knotted seaweed

2. A insectoid language for expressing hive-minds

3. A demonic language for undertaking deceptions

4. An angelic language for uncovering the “true names” of things

5. An aerial whistled language, spoken by bird-folk

6. A warrior’s language (or gheriala) for doing martial arts with

7. A long-winded, shape-based forest-speech

8. An ancient language, from a long-gone civilization, dripping with mysterious hieroglyphics

WHY CONLANGS?

Because a conlang is, point-blank, the best world-building tool available to a creator.

Does this scene sound familiar to you, dear reader? It’s 5 o’clock on a Friday and you’re at home...waiting. The stress and anxiousness of the workweek still lingers in the back of your brain; the clamor of the professional world still rings like a broken record in your ears. Under such circumstances, you might normally head for an early expedition to the Land of Nod, but not tonight. Tonight, you are prepared to forget weariness, to forget the day-to-day routine. You are prepared, for a time at least, to forget even yourself--because tonight is game night, and the people of distant Kherelig need you and your friends to become divine heroes who might save them from the Dragon Tyrant Ghazh.

Raoarrr!

The hour comes. Your friends arrive, ready and eager to help you tell a tale. You gather around your table, like a council of elders getting ready to hand down sacred lore. Character sheets rustle as they fly from portfolios; the dice-goblin shows off her diamond-encrusted d20; a soda-bottle erupts with volcanic force, and that is the signal to begin. A hush falls over the assembled players, and the game master starts to draw you in.

Come Away Oh Human Child, to the Woodland and the Wild

Slowly, as the game progresses, it becomes less and less important that you are humans in the 21st century, with 21st century lives. The lives unfolding right under your very noses are becoming real, with real emotional consequences for you. The snack-bringer spends a whole ten minutes describing the intricate details on his enchanted mandolin. The dice-goblin works herself into a rage over the imaginary pickpocket whole stole her imaginary sweet-rolls. The lives of the people of Kherelig begin to seem like actual lives, because you find yourself being genuinely moved by them. And so, filled with curiosity, you start to ask questions about the fantasy folk that captivated you. “How do they dress? What do they eat? What religion(s) do they practice? What language(s) do they speak?” The GM may have answers to these questions, or they may not--but the point is, something prompted you to ask the questions in the first place, prompted you to think that they might have answers. What was that something? What is the mysterious ingredient that keeps friends glued to their seats for hours on end telling a tale that only they will understand or remember? I will tell you. It is immersion, or what Tolkien calls “enchantment”. It is the sense that you have entered really and truly into another place.

Now, all fantasy has its origins in the real world. There are, to be sure, no dragons alive today, and yet a snake, a crocodile, or a lizard is just a few daydreams away from becoming Smaug or Placidusax. But immersion doesn’t come from a fantasy story just amping up stuff already in reality--no! That would be boring! Immersion arises when a fantasy story invokes the real world, while not being bound to it. As a matter of fact, it would be more accurate to say that immersion happens not when the real-world is invoked, but rather when a sense of reality is invoked.

So, how do you get the sense of reality to emerge in your world-building? The impression that a fantasy is real arises when you have two things:

1. The player feels that they have real stakes in the scenario at hand, i.e. they will be happy if it goes well; sad, if it goes badly.

2. The player’s interrogation of the world (almost) never bottoms out

So, we all know that breaking the 4th wall is a bad thing, not usually recommended in any medium. There’s nothing more annoying than hearing your favorite epic action hero deliver a message on the importance of saying “no” to drugs. The real-world, with its intractable problems, has burst through the 4th wall to infect your morning funnies, souring your cereal and putting you off cartoons for the rest of the day. But that’s 4th-wall-breaking coming from the real-world. It’s your story’s 4th wall being broken into. And all that does is remind you that a story is a story, is a lie.

The 4th wall is broken, and the dream is dead

There’s another option. The story breaking out of the 4th wall to enter reality. When the wall is broken this way, neither fantasy nor reality is essentially harmed: they both stay basically what they are, but fantasy becomes more real; and reality becomes more fantastical. When it breaks out of the 4th wall, a story presents itself as having really come from the world that it tells about. In his essay on fairy-stories Tolkien mentions an example of such tales-- the Faёrian Dramas, “which according to abundant records, the elves have often presented to men... If you are present at a Faёrian Drama,” he writes “you yourself are, or think you are, bodily inside its secondary world.” This isn’t because the descriptions of the elves’ activities or attributes seems plausible or believable--quite the contrary. The sense of immersion that comes from the Faёrian Drama has its origins in the tale’s presentation. Of course you’re going to get immersed. The story itself claims to come from another place. You can easily dismiss magic or dragons or lich-kings as pure fabulation--cause those things don’t exist. But you’ll have a much harder time dismissing stories about magic and dragons and lich kings as non-existent. Because such stories most definitely do exist. A story is experienced as real, thus, not when it includes cell-phones, and cars, and pollution, and mortgage payments, but when its presented like it’s real.

Fantasy lies just over the Horizon

And this is why a conlang is the best world-building tool, a secret short-cut to immersion. Because when the Game Master begins to intone a prayer to Umberlee, unfathomable goddess of the depths, in the Merish Tongue; when the players make an effort to insult the goblin shopkeeper in his own language, they have already stepped “bodily into the secondary world.” Using a conlang in an RPG, causes it to become a Faёrian Drama, because the conlang itself is conceived of as an artifact hailing from the secondary world.