Tags
Avalon Hill, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy, House Rules, Labyrinth Lord, Languages of Magic, Magic Spells, OSR, Powers & Perils, Spellcasting, Spells
I was going through my Powers & Perils RPG stuff and this particular piece of worldbuilding caught my attention. (Sorry, it is a phone photo instead of a scan of the table).
I love this kind of stuff. In the 3rd edition D&D Scarred Lands setting you could invoke one of the fallen titans when casting a spell and it would provide a minor boon to that casting.
Ditto for this – if you speak the appropriate magical language, you have a better grasp of how some magics work / are crafted / etc. While most casters use the language in question when casting those spells, they are speaking the words by rote instead of intoning the words with a knowledge of what they mean.
Now I need to figure out how to implement something like this in my games.
I would definitely make it a part of researching new spells – you need to learn a magical language that works well with the intent of the spell so you can craft appropriate verbal components for it.
I can definitely see how it would work with Zzarchov’s Neoclassical Geek Revival (which has a fairly granular skill check and mana point system), but I’m more interested in wrangling this into B/X D&D, a Black Hack variant, or with Wonder & Wickedness.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
Rolemaster 2nd Edition did something very similar and I ended up borrowing it for D&D as well. I remember they had created some interesting names for each language “school.”
I found a link here (google cache link, as the site seems to be down) with some of the names and associations. I agree that they’d definitely be neat with NGR.
Neat – I definitely get the vibe that the article in question is an attempt to convert these very same rules to Rolemaster. And RM is definitely a granular enough system for this to work well in.
Very cool concept. To implement it you’d have to have a system for learning new languages (above and beyond any you get from having high INT during character creation), but D&D really needs something along those lines anyway.
Thought of alignment languages, either Law, Chaos, Neutrality or the nine AD&Dish alingnments, if they are used. Maybe even if not, so they are kinda back in the game? A LE language for a certain aspect of magic in a B/X game where alignment ist just the Big Three has interesting implications? … plus maybe Druidic and Thieves cant, if they exist.
It’s “Wingardium Leviosa”, not “Wingardium Leviosa”.
Study your Latin, folks!