The monk halts mid-step and tilts her head. Yes, those are voices! She silently drops down next to the sarcophagus and presses her ear to the granite floor. There must be some sort of chamber below!
"Everything is falling into place," a sinister voice echoes from below. "That earthquake will have awakened the Unconquered Bull."
"The people will also take it as a sign of divine disfavour. Their faith in the Emperor will be shaken. We need only push, and he will fall," a deeper voice responded.
"Yes, soon the People of the Bull will topple this decadent society and usher in a reign of blood and fire! We must return to the capital and complete the rituals."
"Indeed. It is best we move as far from the coast as possible; the tidal wave will come shortly."
The monk sits up, puzzled. She pulls out her Hyksaean-Zhengi phrasebook and flips through the pages with a practiced hand. "I wish I knew what they were saying."
Language is key to how we interact with and interpret the world. As such, it naturally comes up a lot while roleplaying as well. The character from a distant land. The ancient inscription above the doorway. The conversation overheard between hobgoblin guards. Yet the rules for learning, speaking, and reading languages are surprisingly slim in the d20 and PFRPG systems.
This sort of thing bugs me, so I came up with a new set of rules that govern how a character learns and uses languages. It works fine if your approach to languages is as simple as "Common, Dwarven, Elvish, Orcish, etc." but it also includes optional rules for those GMs who want to lend some realism to their campaign settings by including regional languages and language families (Try going to Latvia and see how far speaking "Common" gets you). So if you are looking for a more comprehensive rule set for languages in your campaign, look no further. Actually, look a little further; the rules are below.
The following gold text and its associated tables are available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is (C)2014 Jonah Bomgaars.
