Scriptography: Druidic

So, ever since I read The Hobbit, I have had a love for language and linguistics. And, like many DMs, I have always strove to bring a bit of that mystery and excitement to my players. In that spirit, I have decided to begin sharing my work for others to use. The first one to get shared is probably the simplest of them all: The Druidic script.

In 5th edition, druids get their own secret language. It's supposed to be cryptic, mysterious, and hard to translate, a lot like Thieves Cant but less sneaky. My premise behind this wasn't to build a whole new language, but rather, just a way of transcribing English into a cipher that can be hidden in interesting and fun ways, as well as having traits that allow me to play games with the players.

I achieved this in three ways:

1. I made the alphabet limited and ambiguous, allowing me to use the same combination of letters to represent many words.
2. I gave the letters an extremely atypical method of inscription that is hard to intuit at a glance and easily hidden in other shapes.
3. I gave the language several modes of inscription which can change meanings, or even give the same sentence multiple meanings.

All together, these three traits give druidic the ability to be turned into a puzzle. A letter from a druid could seem normal, but there might be a message calling for help hidden in the artwork drawn at the side of the page. A sign might seem to be a compliment from a good druid, but actually be a disguised threat from an evil one. Determining the correct words for an ambiguous sign could be part of a puzzle in a dungeon.

More than that though, there's some degree of historic justification behind the structure of the language. Many ancient languages had either idiographic alphabets, or very limited alphabets which required some degree of intuition to understand. One significant theme is that of languages not recognizing vowel sounds until much later in their development. Hebrew, for example, has only consonants, and even these are not strictly phonetic. Ancient languages also tend to be built such that they can be written with the available tools of the time. Runic languages are built in straight lines so that they can be easily written with a flat chisel, and cuneiform is structured to be written by pressing a cut reed into wet clay, for example. My premise here is the idea that druidic is a sort of incredibly well preserved proto-language script meant to be written with whatever debris happens to be laying around, and was only later adapted for use with more advanced writing tools. An absolutely stone-age form of writing that could not possibly be preserved archaeologically, and persists exclusively by the oral teachings of druids passing the knowledge down across generations.

If that all sounds like fun to you, take a peek at the PDF!