Barbarian Languages

From The Whereabouts

The system for barbarian languages doesn't really seem to be very good for getting much use, even if people wanted to take it the system for doing so makes it difficult or annoying. (I know cause I've dealt with it a couple of times.) Right now when you buy a dot of linguistics for barbarian languages you receive 4 different barbarian languages. However, it is never really defined how many of these there are or how different they would be based on region and tribe, on top of that there is not list to pick from what so ever. What this means is that people tend to be stuck with "4 Barbarian Languages" written on their character sheet, and then the first 4 tribes we come across are the languages the character speaks. Frankly this is just a bad way of doing things.

In order to simplify things I think we should reduce barbarian languages down to just 4 total seperate languages that characters can learn by taking a dot of linguistics normally. The languages would be the following:

  • Eastern Barbarian Languages
  • Southern Barbarian Languages
  • Western Barbarian Languages
  • Northern Barbarian Languages

Each language would cost a dot of linguistics like all other languages, I think this system does a good job of making it usable and making it a cool part of the game but also keeping the aspect that each different tribe speaks a slightly different language. Having all of these languages would allow a character to communicate with any tribe of barbarians in Creation, however a character will need a specialty or to be from a tribe in order to appear to speak it as a native speaker would.