I like
alignment languages.
There, I said it. At least, I like the
idea of them. The concept of a fundamental, cosmic language, writ on the souls of mortals and into the very fabric of the universe? Sign me up!
One of my favourite elements I noticed in a recent watch-through of Fellowship of the Ring is how they
dont translate the black speech. They just kinda intone sinister sounding things and leave it at that. Now, being the huge nerd that I am, I sometimes have an idea of the gist of what they are saying, but it's still mysterious as fuck.
I wrote in
this post about using the idea of a 'Common' language as a kind of magic tongue. But let's expand on this.
Abati is 'Neutral' with a capital '
N'- that is, it's a 'natural' language, in the sense of natural philosophy. It springs up everywhere, like norse runes, just lying around in the patterns of sticks on the ground, in the flight of birds, in the way the river carves the landscape. It's inscribed on every atom of the universe, like the ten commandments on a slab of stone. There are many different varieties, based on the biology and culture of the interpreter (because that's what speakers essentially are- they're speaking a language that already existed). The 'elemental languages'
Terran, Ignan, Aquan, and
Auran are non-human forms of this language.
How to describe it spoken: to non-speakers, it sounds familiar, like maybe you've heard it every day of your life and just can't quite remember. It feels like if you just concentrated hard enough, you could figure it out- and in fact, sufficiently 'mystically attuned' characters might be able to make a concentration or meditation-type check to grasp a few key words or the gist of a sentence. However, it takes a lifetime to unravel the full language, and there's always more to learn.
Because of this, and because of the language's universal nature, many speakers develop inflections, vocabularies, and whole dialects of the language, which reflect their own nature and being. Most of the time, this is just an accent, but in it's extreme form this gives rise to
Alignment Languages.
Cosmic good and evil: imagine if the question of whether you were a good person wasn't simply a measure of ethics. If the nature of a person was stamped indelibly on a person's soul, for anyone with wise enough eyes to read. Where, in extreme cases, not only the persons past actions, but their future ones, figure into this universal evaluation.
This is kind of like the anti lovecraft ...but only kinda. At a certain point, whatever is making this decision is so far removed from human experience, you have to wonder if it's version of evil really meaningfully relates to any human priority or understanding at all. It's not optimizing for 'good' or 'justice' it's optimizing for something humans aren't capable of understanding. Unlike lovecraft, where the universe fundamentally doesn't care about humans, where we're just too small, in this formulation the universe cares hugely - but not necessarily in a way humans would find 'meaningful' because 'meaning' is a human hobby
But, humans being humans, I'm sure such a force would still massively influence culture, religion, and understanding of morality. After all, it might not be meaningful, but it's
testable.
The Way of Nine Swords: the Church absolutely believes in alignment, but there's is a more old-school view. There are but three alignments: Law, Neutrality, and Chaos. The 'heresy of the Nine Swords' is a grave slip into sin in the eyes of the church. The nine swords philosophers contend that there are nine alignments, each as perilous to mortals as a sword. Like a sword, a person's alignment can be studied and mastered, but such a path is a burden, like the burden of a warrior, and not to be taken up or turned aside from lightly. The Church condemns this as obfuscating acts of iniquity: what the Nine Swords monks call 'Chaotic Good' is simply someone slipping away from the true path of morality, their soul tainted by chaos (but perhaps not permanently- the Church is very adept at conversions)
What do the Elves think? Non-humans don't have much truck for all of this. Elves see themselves as above all this rigmarole, although they ALSO see themselves as intrinsically Good (in whatever manner is most fashionable these days in the courts of the Fey). Dwarves insist there are five alignments, although they refuse to elaborate more on what that means. Elves care more about Beauty vs Ugliness (and elf characters should have an alignment based on such), and Dwarves care about things like Work, Honour, and Tradition. Other beings have likewise varying preoccupations. Most human-like beings do mostly understand what humans are going on about when it comes to morals, ethics, good and evil, etc, they just think we're a little
obsessed with it, in the same way Elves are kind of overly preoccupied with Beauty. And just as there are humans who don't 'get' art (a failing no elf has ever suffered from), there are elves who don't 'get' morality.
There should be a lot of Alignment Languages
More than there are alignments, by a long shot. Make room for culturally specific variations. It always bugged me that vanilla D&D has
Sylvan and
Druidic and
Elven all as separate languages. Not anymore!
Druidic is a language that is attempting to get rid of language. Based on Shalk, a language that sings in the blood of those born with it, it uses Abati loan words to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible, especially avoiding nouns, and avoiding names almost completely. Part of the language is one of signs, both gestural, in the lynx-like shrug of the shoulders, and physical, in the acorn tucked in the crook of a pine tree, left as a sign to another speaker of the nonlanguage. Much of the language is comprised of periods of silence.
Sylvan is the alignment language of the Fey. When the elves were exiled and fled into the Long Earth, they found many similar exiles there: gnomes, sprites, and nature spirits such as dryads, who call the Green Lands their home.
Tuathan is the non-alignment language spoken by Eladrin today,
Elvish is for Elves,
Bolgish is for Firbolg (the cousins of the Eladrin), etc.
And then there should be other languages: one for Paladins,
Thieves Cant for those CN types. Sounds like there's some material here for another post
