The Red Curse of Language

Everyone wants cool, mysterious languages for their games. But no one wants to deal with the annoying fiddly bits that come from it. Solution? Magical languages!

The Magical Tongues

• Carsek: Supernaturally easy to learn. Pushes out other languages, slowly, in the brain. Crawls its way into texts, slithers across pages and inscriptions, translating and destroying both. Because of this, the Carseks tend to see other tongues as particularly strange, like weeds groing in the cracks of a neatly-tended sidewalk. Speakers of other tongues call it the Red Curse.

• Shalk: Supernaturally hard to forget. Borne in the blood of it's people. All Shalk can learn the Language, it grows like a tree in their mind from the smallest seed of exposure. It can be suppressed, but will rise again. There are many dialects and ways of speaking, which a non-Shalk would have to learn individually, but all quickly become familiar to another speaker of the Language.

• Abati: Supernaturally universal. Words which reconstruct themselves before you from base principals. Although named after one culture, dialects, all different but relatively intelligible, spring up all over the universe like mushrooms after a rain. Spoken by wizards, understood by rocks and trees and birds. Fire speaks this language. As wizards walk by hidden ways throughout the many planes and cities, they carry this language with them, like sparks fanned out from a fire. In secret places all over the world, you will hear this language whispered. Those without magic speak this language haltingly, with leaden tongues.

All PCs should share at least one starting language. You think it'll be fun to have a language barrier, but... I mean, you do you, but in my experience it gets old fast. Shalk characters know the Language for free, spellcasters can know Abati, and anyone can know Carsek. In addition, humans probably know the local language, if it's still spoken at all.