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Literacy in Legend


nerdvana

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You might be interested in a thread I started in the BRP forum.

Short version: instead of a general "Literacy" skill or a "Read/Write X" for every spoken X, you could define a new skill for every script, e.g. Latin Letters (most languages of Europe and the Americas), Cyrillic (mainly Slavic languages), Arabic (most languages in the Muslim world), Hanji (Chinese characters), etc. Some alphabets are wholly phonetic, making them trivial enough to pick up (e.g. Japanese Hiragana and Katakana or Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics); others might be trivially similar to other alphabets (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, and Greek letters). Adapt as needed for your fantasy world.

Frank

"Welcome to the hottest and fastest-growing hobby of, er, 1977." -- The Laundry RPG
 
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So after careful consideration (and discussion with some of my RL RPG think tank... i.e. my players) I've decided that each language gets its own literacy skill (assuming the language has a written form) because knowledge of one language using a script and another using the same (or similar) script really doesn't map that well IMO (looking at English to Spanish for example).

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I've decided that each language gets its own literacy skill (assuming the language has a written form) because knowledge of one language using a script and another using the same (or similar) script really doesn't map that well IMO (looking at English to Spanish for example).

English is a bad example. Other European languages have far more regular spelling, e.g. Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish. That said, your fantasy world works however you want it to.

Frank

"Welcome to the hottest and fastest-growing hobby of, er, 1977." -- The Laundry RPG
 
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