Quote:
Originally Posted by Anomylous
One puzzle I haven't quite been able to solve yet is what to do with Sorceror's Tongue. The description under Word of Command implies one could use it to communicate with any sentient being. I'm also thinking it's the language of magical lore, full of technical terms for incredibly abstract concepts which natural languages can't describe, and therefore necessary in order to learn high-IQ spells from books. (Aaaand we're back on topic again!)
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That's right, we can't talk about books without talking about language! We had been starting to drift there :)
I can't comment much on the Sorcerer's Tongue rules in relation to books or scrolls though, because my group never used it. Like many differences between how my group played TFT and the official RAW, that came about because we started our campaign world in early 1978, with only
Melee and
Wizard to work from. We'd been developing our own rules (for jumping, climbing, swimming, fencing, riding, skills and languages) to fill in the blanks years before ITL and the Advanced rules were published. And where those books disagreed with what we were doing, we stubbornly stuck to how we'd done things before.
In our cosmology we had a language we called Runish. It was more than just a magical language, it was
the language of Creation. The commands the gods issued to create the World were spoken in Runish. All the first races, the intelligent ones, Elves and Dragons and all magical creatures, spoke Runish as their native tongue from the moment they were created, long before Humans evolved to appear on the scene.
It was the Elves that developed a written form for that language (written in runes of course) and all spell books had to be written in Runish, and all spells learned in Runish in order to work. You couldn't cast a spell without speaking it (or thinking it) in Runish. So Humans and other races had to learn Runish in addition to their native tongues in order to become wizards. But Elves had a slight advantage, because Runish was their native tongue; so for them it was a "free" language. (There was no separate Elvish language in our world; Runish was also called Elvish though by many of the younger races, but they were in fact the same language.)
Runish was tricky. You couldn't tell a lie in Runish. If an Elf or Dragon or wizard wanted to lie, they'd have to speak it in another tongue. Not a problem for Dragons as they all seemed to know every language in the world, and besides, Dragons tend to get their way without having to lie. So do Demons, although they rather enjoy lying; even they can't do it though unless using a language other than Runish.
There were, or tended to be, consequences to issuing any statement in Runish, because it was the language of Creation. If I were to say, "Look, there's a bear" in English, or Common, or Goblin, the universe would ignore me and there'd be no bear. But if I were to say "Look, there's a bear" in Runish, and pronounce and say it
correctly (which wasn't easy), then as far as the universe was concerned there
had to be a bear there, so it would summon or create one.
This then would have been a rather chaotic world, except for one handy thing: The Law of Conservation of Mana. Things couldn't just happen or appear even when commanded in perfect Runish if the energy cost couldn't be paid to rearrange the matter and energy as needed. And
that required the mind to be properly trained to focus Mana, a mental feat that could be extremely exhausting for anyone not a god themselves.
The few mortals who learned how to access and use this energy, how to read and speak Runish, and how to inflect the exact words exactly right, they got to be called Wizards.