Mothership Module Review: Orphans

I haven't reviewed much TTTRPG material on this blog—I don't feel good about reviewing things I haven't actually played, and most of the things I would feel comfortable reviewing, having played them extensively, are both daunting (because they're big-ass rulebooks encompassing entire systems) and unnecessary; the world does not need more opinions about D&D or even Stars Without Number. Adventures are much more manageable to review, but in the time I've been writing here, I've rarely run other people's adventures.

Lately, though, with a new group who are very keen on one-shots and short campaigns and not presently interested in a long mega-campaign, I've been running a bunch of Mothership modules. And I probably ought to review them, because as popular as many of these modules are, they don't always get much critical analysis from the blogosphere.

Now, because I'm a dumbass, I'm starting with one that has gotten some solid coverage already: Orphans. Valeria gave it a mixed-to-negative review months ago that hits a lot of the same points I will. Nevertheless, I think it's worth me digging into, both because there's a lot that's super cool about this module and because I keep seeing it suggested as a good introduction to Mothership (and it represents itself as such), which I think it isn't. Spoilers abound below.

 

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THE UNIMPEACHABLY GOOD STUFF

Luke Gearing is a great writer with a vivid imagination. The monster is excellent—tropey enough that players can easily grasp what its deal is, but novel enough to remain weird and spooky—and the whole “sanity-testing swampy fecundity on a should-be-sterile space station” atmosphere is outstanding. The progression track that leads to Auntie's arrival is well constructed and ratchets up the tension and eeriness steadily, without a bunch of ham-fisted messages scrawled in blood (well, mostly without; a note on that below). The figments are cool too; they are handled pretty inconsistently (as Valeria notes, and as I'll get into more below), but the concept is strong, and if the Warden is willing to put in a little elbow grease, they also help make things unsettling without going straight to jumpscare violence and other horror cliches.

As an extension of Auntie's general very-cool-ness, the potential for an epilogue or campaign-level consequences is strong. We know the kids are capable of summoning Auntie, or “inviting her into the physical realm.” It seems like they do so involuntarily when they're in grave danger—they were horrified by what she did at the lab, but they brought her back on Imuen Station when soldiers came to recapture them. They don't seem to be capable of banishing her again, although she apparently can't follow them through hyperspace (a thematically rich inference!). It follows that they're potentially a huge liability. If the PCs bring them along on their ship, or drop them off at some friendly port, they might summon Auntie again next time they're in a dangerous situation and cause another massacre.

There's an ugly but intriguing tension here: Auntie is the antagonist, but Auntie's primary objective (keep the kids safe) is probably aligned with the PCs' objectives, or at least with their moral values. The move that most decisively defeats Auntie, and arguably the best, safest one from a coldly utilitarian perspective, is unthinkable (kill the kids). Still, if your players are kind of evil, just not that evil, there are myriad ways to essentially weaponize Auntie and the kids, using them like a wrecking ball against groups foolish enough to try to exploit them. And Auntie has a ton of potential to be played as a less malevolent, more manipulative, not entirely antagonistic villain.

 

THE BIG BUT EASILY FIXED FLAW

The biggest obstacle to smooth, enjoyable play here is a simple circulatory problem. As written, the module is almost linear, but that isn't clear to players. PCs are clearly expected to enter via one of the docking claws (the only other option, the maintenance bay airlock, is broken, albeit potentially reparable)—the station diagram in the booklet even shows the “player ship” already docked there. They find that the cargo lift is unpowered, and probably go straight up to the ring, where they explore three areas that essentially constitute one big red herring (one minor but intensely felt gripe: having the third area in the book only reachable via the fourth and fifth areas is a perplexingly bad layout choice). When they've exhausted their options above, or if they persist in trying to go down the central spindle from the start, though, there's no obvious path. The Warden must extemporize: “Uhh, yeah, there's a maintenance area behind the lift with a door you can jimmy open or kick down or blast apart, and inside, there's a ladder that goes down the elevator shaft.” Unfortunately, there's still no path. The booklet is explicit about the elevator shaft: It's “blocked halfway by soil and wooden logs” and “digging through takes 1 hour.”

As written, unless the PCs can repair the maintenance bay airlock's manual controls (mine—a marine machine gunner, an android hacker, and a planetologist—had neither the know-how nor the tools) there's no way to get from the station's only entry point down to where the kids are, or at least not without using a laser cutter or something to explosively decompress the maintenance bay. Assuming the players are unwilling to vent the whole station, the Warden has to invent some other options for them. This is no big deal for an experienced GM, of course, and there are lots of possibilities (there's a fourth airlock down below that leads straight to engineering; there's a computer terminal up in management where they can remotely reboot the generators; there's an air duct they can crawl through), but it's reason enough not to recommend this as baby's first module. And it's just a weird oversight; this isn't a trifold pamphlet, and there's plenty of room for this level of detail (and plenty of entirely unnecessary detail, like multiple ways to acquire Staff ID cards that do essentially nothing).

Assuming the Warden invents the most obvious secondary route, the ladder in the elevator shaft (I didn't even have to nudge my players toward this, although I had prepped it; they immediately thought of it themselves), they meet that massive blockage of logs and dirt, an obstacle that (again, unless they have specific gear) seems more definitive than an unpowered cargo lift. In a scenario where there are dead bodies everywhere, swamp plants rapidly growing out of the walls, monstrous entities menacing them, and maybe even an imperative to extract two kids ASAP, this will feel like an absolute dead end to the players. One of mine happened to have a shovel and gave digging a try. “After five minutes, does it feel like I'm getting anywhere? Is the soil more densely packed or less?” Nope. He gave up immediately.

An hour? They would never. And because my crew didn't have a laser cutter or a vibechete or explosives, that was the end of it: They regarded the cargo lift as unusable for the rest of the session. It was so obvious to them that this was intended as a dead end that they went out the airlock again and started searching the exterior of the station for a fourth entrance (I gave them a maintenance hatch that led to engineering).
 

UNDERCOOKED AND EXTRANEOUS ELEMENTS

Auntie herself, as cool as she is, is presented in a muddled way. The booklet tells us that “if physically destroyed, Auntie reappears in 33 minutes.” The very next line seems to contradict that: “If Auntie is destroyed, its slayer experiences external thoughts.” Which is it? This circle isn't impossible to square (maybe with the kids' help, or PhD-level knowledge of xenoesotericism, you can banish the thing for good; maybe everybody who gets a killing blow on one instantiation of Auntie or another masters psychic dirt magic—although can you really say that you slew something that came back half an hour later?), but dropping those two sentences one after the other is confusing. It seems like two different versions of the module were clumsily grafted together here.

There are a bunch of other peculiar loose ends where you can see the imperfectly joined seams between dissimilar drafts. If PCs board the Vampire Squid, for instance, they find one of the crewmembers (the pilot, presumably) torn in half and bloody sigils drawn all over the cockpit. Gnarly, sure (if a lot more generic than all the cool swamp magic stuff), but…who did it? And how? And why? Shouldn't we instead find a punctured suit full of dirt floating nearby—a figment that floated over to the Squid pretending to be a soldier returning for more ammo or something?

Similarly, Limos Slobodan is dead in the mall. Limos is also recorded as the last person to leave the station. Is there supposed to be some significance to this contradiction? Surely it's not that a Limos figment went out into space and did a five-mile EVA to the Squid, which let him inside for no conceivable reason, and that's how the pilot got killed. But then what's this about? Tina Slobodan wants the PCs to look for her brother. Is this only a ploy to separate them, or is it an echo of something that happened before she was killed? Did Limos disappear before the retrieval squad arrived, and if he did, why is his dead body in the mall? If Limos is as irrelevant as he seems to be, why waste so much precious layout space on him? (On top of those damn Staff ID cards!)

The figments are another point of frustrating contradiction. On p. 5, we are told that “Auntie's disembodied form haunts the station, observing all that occurs.” On p. 9, however, “Figments are the eyes and ears of Auntie.” Now, it's clear from the back-cover table that Auntie has awareness of the PCs' movements beyond what figments perceive, and is capable of manifesting without the kids or any figments being present…but that's no fun. Restrictions on monster behavior are much more interesting than omniscience and omnipotence. Anchoring Auntie's ability to materialize to either the kids themselves or the agents she's created from dead victims grounds her a little, gives players a little something to leverage against her, and is more evocative.

“Auntie attacks whenever a single PC or two injured PCs are separated from the rest of the group” just leads to her one-shotting somebody without warning. “Figments try to get a PC alone with them, at which point Auntie will appear and attack,” though? That's cool. Even in a horror game, players usually aren't so jumpy that they won't even leave each other's line of sight. But an NPC begging one, and only one, of them to stay with her? That'll put them on edge.

Finally, another point in which I'm fully in agreement with Valeria: The characters and motivations of both the kids and Auntie are half-baked. The vibes are immaculate as long as things are mysterious and there's no end in sight, but once you've got the kids, well, what now? They have no plan, they're starving, and Luca at least wants to get off the station immediately. Great! Shouldn't take much convincing. “We're here to rescue you. We have a ship. Let's go before that monster comes back.” Makes the crowning social encounter kind of an anticlimax. You can introduce complications, of course (like Charis wanting to retrieve something from her room), and if the PCs haven't been sent to rescue the kids, maybe the encounter is more tense, but then again, if the PCs aren't there looking for the kids, they're probably not going to find the kids. As written, it's pretty deflating. Some guidance on how to play the kids, and in particular any motives for them other than “nothing, really” and “exactly the same as the players” would've been welcome.

 

NITPICKING

My first gripe germinated the moment I opened the booklet: I loved the design of Imuen Station. I'm a big fan of the semi-hard science fiction design quality of a lot of the official Mothership materials—the technologically plausible spaceships, the technologically plausible (looking) space stations—and I was pleased to see, right on p. 2, one of those neat little rocketships from the Shipbreaker's Toolkit, complete with ramshackle thruster assembly, docked to the station. And Imuen Station looks plausible! There are a bunch of residential and commercial functions in a ring, under spin gravity, and then a bunch of mechanical systems and storage and the maintenance bay in zero-G in the central spindle. Right?

Nope. It just has never-discussed artificial gravity that magically functions everywhere (despite the station running on emergency power). The artists tried, bless their hearts (note the great big SPINWARD signage on p. 12), but the writing doesn't follow their lead. This is a pet peeve of mine across most Mothership material, and I'm sure most people generally don't care about it. Here, though, more than in a lot of modules, it's a real missed opportunity.

The way Orphans is structured, there's a literal logjam between the residential/commercial ring and the industrial spindle below, pushing the players to visit the ring first. Having the spindle be entirely in zero-G would enforce the distinction between the two sections in a softer way than that clumsily designed dead end of an obstacle does, make the journey toward the kids after exploring the ring feel a little more ominous, and, specifically in this module, create an opportunity for Auntie's reality-distorting powers to get truly disorienting. Little tiny pockets of Earth-like gravity in odd places, pulling in improbable directions. Floating islands of dirt with trees growing out of them. Big Roadside Picnic vibes. Could've been so cool! Disappointing from Gearing, who in Gradient Descent made some of the most extensive use of zero-G environments I've seen in Mothership.

Another minor gripe at the start of the booklet, but one that I have with a lot of modules: The hooks for getting PCs involved in this situation are not compelling, and the economy is (perpetually) out of whack. How could a 70kcr bounty ever motivate anybody to make the trip to Imuen Station? If you have a ship, every jump costs you a million credits. If you don't, steerage-class passage and cargo space for just three people and their gear is going to cost 66kcr—for a one-way Jump-1 trip. And that's the only paying hook! The kids' parents spent all their money just tracking their location down; do they expect the PCs to do this out of the goodness of their hearts? The hooks that don't involve the kids, as Valeria observes, are likely to result in gameplay that doesn't involve the kids. They're in the last place anybody's going to look for them, if anybody's looking for them. If the PCs' aren't looking for teenagers, they might bounce as soon as they find valuable loot and/or get mauled by Auntie.

Now, several of these hooks are decent starting points for developing a stronger scenario and pointing the PCs either toward the kids or toward other concrete objectives. The PCs' ship is damaged or out of fuel? They'll need to get to the maintenance bay, loot the warp core from the life raft, use the utility pods to make repairs, fire up the generators to make refueling possible, or some combination of those things. One of the PCs has a relative on the station? They'll need to find the relative in hiding somewhere on the ring (and maybe the relative has befriended the kids and wants to go below to rescue them). If the kids' parents hired the crew, well, just change the prompt: They do still have enough money to offer a compelling payday. Likewise if it's a rival corp; just make the money make sense. Better prompts would demand less work from the Warden, though. Sure, space is limited, but 1) the booklet didn't have to be just 20 pages and 2) there's a lot of extraneous stuff in here that could've been edited out. Get rid of Limos and the Staff ID cards!

 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Orphans is a lot less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts have a ton of potential. Auntie is awesome, her figments are wonderfully creepy (as long as you don't use them like zombies), and the way she warps the environment around her is evocative and distinctive. Apart from some nice set pieces, though (there's a lot of pathos in the descriptions of the murdered station staff), there's not much else to the module. There's essentially nothing going on here other than the kids and Auntie; there are only two other NPCs, neither of whom the PCs have any particular need to interact with. Imuen Station itself is likewise almost entirely unremarkable once you look past Auntie's influence.

As written, assuming a scenario where the PCs are trying to retrieve the kids, the players have a single objective, and there are only two non-Auntie obstacles to that objective, both of which are ill-defined: They don't know exactly where the kids are, and they can't get from their ship to the lower part of the station. This is not a compelling premise to begin with (it has only one element and no levers, to borrow from Ty), and it's compounded by the fact that Orphans offers scant guidance for resolving the latter problem (spend an hour digging through the logjam or repair the maintenance bay airlock) and none for the former. Of course the Warden is free to invent secondary objectives and sub-objectives (restart the generators, fire up the computer system in the management area, use the station AI to locate the kids) and secondary routes, but as written, the expectation seems to be that PCs will just wander from area to area until, by process of elimination, they find their way to the kids in the fuel refining section. If you want the players to do problem-solving more fun than “dig for an hour” or “fix a broken door” and “just explore the whole station,” you have to invent problems almost from whole cloth. And if you're doing that, why not just write your own scenario?

Because Auntie is fucking cool, that's why! And that's what Orphans boils down to: There's basically nothing here other than Auntie, but Auntie is strong enough to make the module enjoyable almost as written, and she's also worth building a more complex scenario around. Below, my ideas to help get more out of Orphans, starting with the changes that will improve the scenario the most with the least work from the Warden and heading toward much more open-ended ideas about redesigning Imuen Station or discarding it entirely.

 

SUGGESTIONS

1. Remove the blockage from the elevator shaft. Not only is this the worst design decision in the whole module, you can just delete it with zero negative consequences. Give the players a ladder, and make it scary! It's 80 or 100 feet straight down, there isn't even emergency lighting in there, and everything is unaccountably wet and slippery. Why is it wet inside a space station? How is there moss growing on some of the ladder rungs? Ask the players leading questions about how they're spacing themselves out—if you slip, you might take down the person below you too!—and maybe you can create an opportunity for Tina, or a figment down in the maintenance bay, to pry the vanguard or rearguard away from the group. If the PCs go straight down the shaft without exploring the ring, and you really want them to see the ring, just have Charis insist on retrieving some personal effects from her room in the residential area before she's willing to leave the station.
   
   
2. Give the players a better hook. I borrowed from Warped Beyond Recognition: The Rimspace Liberation Front will pay a million credits for each kid you can safely extract from the station and deliver to them. Straightforward, lucrative, and leads to good follow-up scenarios and interesting complications if used in a campaign context. A similarly lucrative contract from a rival corporation might be even better, particularly for a one-shot (if your players don't mind being bad guys), because it's more likely to generate tension in the climactic social encounter.
   
   
3. Define the figments' behavior and relationship to Auntie more tightly than the booklet does. As Valeria notes, having them be zombie cannon fodder isn't in the spirit of Mothership, and they really aren't much of a threat to the PCs anyway. Instead of having them be combatants, lean hard into using them as Auntie's eyes and ears. Do have figments like Tina try to separate the PCs, but when they fail (“don't split the party” is second nature to a lot of players, even before a creepy NPC conspicuously tries to get them to do it), just have them follow the PCs from a safe distance, watching, not doing much else. An unarmed person in tattered battle dress just standing and staring at the PCs from a catwalk or tailing them through the foliage in the maintenance bay is way scarier than an easily dispatched zombie hurling itself at them. When they're sifting through the wreckage of the mall and they hear the crunch of broken glass underfoot, and they spin around guns drawn and it's just fucking Tina again, weepily asking whether they'll let Alia keep her company while they look for Limos, they will absolutely hate it (in a good way). At the same time, they'll probably be too uneasy about attacking figments to just eliminate them. My players, even after they found the real Tina's body, were too squeamish to shoot a harmless-looking person who was crying and begging for their help.
   
   
4. Following from that treatment of figments, be strict about using Auntie. She appears 1) if a figment gets a PC alone; 2) if the PCs directly threaten the kids; or 3) if the encounter tracker reaches 46+ and there's a figment present. The latter isn't much of a restriction from the Warden's perspective—just put a figment in ABD around the next corner—but for the players, it helps create a comprehensible set of rules for Auntie's behavior. It also creates some fun ambiguity; when Auntie appears in a swirl of black smoke alongside a figment, players wonder, “Did that guy summon this thing?” My players suspected for the first half of the session that Tina was a puppet wielded by a plant monster (they checked to make sure that there weren't roots or vines connecting her to the wall) and that the horror was a station-wide vegetal hive mind; Auntie materializing alongside one of the figments in ABD dispelled their theories and fucked them up a bit (and then Auntie absolutely pulverized one of them).
   
   
5. Brainstorm some ideas for how Auntie might be banished, destroyed, or otherwise defeated without killing or otherwise harming the kids. If players come up with good ideas themselves, of course, you just run with those, but you might find yourself in a situation where the PCs want the kids to give them some assurances that Auntie won't follow them, or just prompt the kids to “tell us what you need us to do to get rid of this thing.” Of course, if you're feeling ambitious and want to play out the consequences in a campaign, having Auntie be a permanent fixture of the kids' lives could lead to some interesting predicaments. While you're at it, flesh out the kids before your players meet them. Give them opinions, motives, and personalities.
   
   
6. If you're feeling more ambitious, redesign the station spindle to operate in zero-G, with gravity only on the ring. Put weird gravitational anomalies in the elevator shaft and elsewhere in the lower parts of the spindle. Have dirt islands floating around maintenance and engineering. Sanity saves and fear saves galore. You can still have a frog pond near the generators (inside a gravity bubble), but have the hydraulic system that cools them be separate, and just gunk it up with the dead body that's carrying the hardware key to the Squid.
   
   
7. If you're feeling really ambitious, throw out Imuen Station (or consign it to a background event in your campaign, briefly referred to in the news) and move the kids' timeline ahead to a point where Auntie has successfully guided them to a backwater world. The module presents Auntie in a somewhat contradictory way: Capable of at least simulating empathy toward Charis and Luca, and genuinely concerned with their safety (if for entirely self-interested reasons), yet hostile to basically all other human life, despite—can I get one last “as Valeria notes”?—craving worship. Why does she kill the harmless station staff, most of whom were kind to the kids? Play Auntie as more of a cunning manipulator, and you could develop a far more interesting scenario around her. In a hardscrabble colony on some brutally arid planet, her ability to transform the environment around her into a swamp could win her genuine worship. She could be a goddess of rain and fertility, making the desert bloom! And if she demands a few bog-body sacrifices once in a while, is that such a high price to pay? That's what visiting starship crews and passengers are for… 

Ranking the NYT Games

 

10. Anna Garcia is correct: Tiles is for Cocomelon babies

9. Letter Boxed is simultaneously too restrictive and too open-ended. Frustrating without being challenging! You finish it and you're like, Well, I could probably do better than that…but who cares?

8. Sudoku has been upstaged by Pips. It's a good and classic game, but it's slow and dry. It lacks pizzazz. I never even look at it anymore. There's a reason the app has banished these three to a lonely exile at the bottom of the screen.

7. I hate Connections. Emotionally, I want to put it at the absolute bottom of the list, although I know it doesn't deserve that. The format isn't the worst, although it's not great—the fact that the puzzle gets dramatically easier as you go is textbook bad game design—but the real crime here is how poorly constructed 90% of the actual puzzles are. Yeah, every now and then they do something genuinely clever, but do you really want to subject yourself to week after week of “FISH SPECIES MINUS FIRST LETTER” to get to the rare good stuff? No.

6. Strands is way too easy, but also fairly time-consuming. This is a bad combination. Adding achievements just made it worse, because you feel compelled to sit there and stare at it until you've got the theme, but then as soon as you do, the rest of the puzzle basically solves itself. Same poor design as Connections.

5. The Mini is also way too easy, but it's mercifully quick. We are now in the top half of the ranking: the realm of puzzles I actually do a daily basis. I don't think much of the Mini, but it literally takes 15 seconds, so why not? It sneaks into the winner's circle on a technicality.

4. Wordle hits the sweet spot the other baby games (Letter Boxed, Strands, the Mini) miss. It's pretty easy, and you can knock it out in under a minute most of the time, but once or a twice a year, it gets your ass. Knowing that you might fail makes it more interesting than all the too-easy ones, but also, when you fail, you're like, Dang, I fucked that up. You got me, Wordle! This is in contrast to when you fail at Connections and just screech inarticulately.

3. Pips is like Sudoku, but more varied, more colorful, usually much faster, and generally better. The easy ones are far too easy, but the medium ones are nice, sometimes taking a couple minutes to sort out, and although the hard ones are often duds, they are occasionally diabolical, and it's very satisfying to solve a truly tough one. Each really hard Pips puzzle feels like a unique challenge, too, whereas every hard Sudoku feels more or less the same.

2. Spelling Bee is a burden, but it's a burden worth shouldering. And at least it's just one burden per day and not a never-ending barrage of them (see note on Crossplay below). My dad, my sister, and one of my best friends do the Spelling Bee every day and we all must share our Genius status or be shamed. There are strict rules: no looking at hints of any kind until Genius, after which you may look at the in-app Hints page only to help you get to Queen Bee. Resorting to the Community hints is acceptable for satisfying one's curiosity but does not Truly Count. Any game that inspires this kind of fanatical behavior and sprouts house rules must be a good game, and indeed, the Spelling Bee is very satisfying and has the platonically correct difficulty curve (easy, easy, easy, hard, very hard, “I'm never going to finish this one,” “ahh, PITAPAT, thank God”). It takes way, way too long a lot of the time, but in the end, that just makes success sweeter.

1. The Crossword is, of course, the GOAT. If I could get my friends and family to give up all the other games and just do the Crossword, I would be happy, and my days would be a little longer. And also I would be the undisputed champ forever, which is probably why nobody wants to do this. I recently solved a Sunday puzzle in under 10 minutes, and I've almost gotten my average Sunday time under 20, so it's not even taking an undue amount of time out of my day—just over 75 minutes a week, on average. A puzzle that rewards an enormous vocabulary, a pathological command of obscure trivia, a love of puns, and a willingness to spend years absorbing its own idiosyncratic language and patterns? And it has the right difficulty curve not only on a daily, per-puzzle basis, but on a kind of fractal weekly basis too? It's perfect.

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One must also consider Crossplay, which does not live in the Games app but is in fact a proper game, whereas everything in the Games app, counterintuitively, is really a puzzle. Crossplay is both a temptress and a burden. In game design terms, it's quite good. It makes a bunch of little tweaks to the Scrabble formula (Scrabble being an obsessive family favorite of ancient vintage, going back to my paternal grandmother), a couple of which are questionable (too many S's now) but which are generally very well thought out. Tile values are much improved, tile distribution is somewhat improved, the board is a bit more interesting, and most importantly, the endgame is transformed, and entirely for the better. It's fast and decisive, and there's a nice element of gamesmanship about pushing toward an empty bag or holding back. However, unlike all the proper NYT Games app games, Crossplay has no end. My friends and family start two games at once with me. I'm in there for an hour every day now. This cannot stand.

Backgrounds for Early Modern Cairn

Despite being an inveterate collector of TTRPG books, I'm not much of a Kickstarter guy. I've gotten some reprints and second editions and that sort of thing via crowdfunding campaigns, but I've only ever backed one TTRPG book sight unseen: Beyond the Pale. In that case, I had a lot of confidence in Yochai Gal, whose work I greatly admire, but I also just couldn't resist the premise. As a history nerd, and as somebody with a personal connection to the place and people represented, if a somewhat tenuous one—one Ashkenazi grandfather, one Polish Catholic grandmother—it was so right up my alley I had to jump on it immediately. And I'm glad I did! The book is beautiful, it's full of clever and thought-provoking material, and I'm looking forward to running it…one of these days.

Yeah, I still haven't actually played it. And although that's mostly just because of the vicissitudes of game nights (my older group has been big on long-running campaigns; my newer group, turning away from fantasy, has been doing FIST and Mothership one-shots), but it's also because, almost as soon as I had the book, I got attached to the idea of writing my own backgrounds, more suitable to the quasi-historical setting than the fairytale-fantasy lore of Cairn 2e, more detailed than the 1e backgrounds (or the Barebones ones, now). Like the 2e backgrounds, I want 20, each with a couple small tables to make the characters more distinct and provide some story sparks and setting detail, but for the early modern Eastern Europe of the Pale. Or for a slightly broader early modern, quasi-historical Eastern European setting, somewhere in the borderlands where the tsar's and sultan's (and maybe kaiser's) empires abut one another.

It's slow going, obviously. I have like nine other projects I'm working on and my day job etc. etc., excuses excuses. But I'm getting there! I have all 20 backgrounds planned out and at least partly written, and I've got a few complete enough to send out into the world and solicit input about. Specifically, these:

 

Background 1:

Arithmancer

You are a diviner, capable of peering into the mysterious workings of the universe through the magic of letters and numbers. You can read a person's future in their name or in a random verse of scripture. With access to your favored text, some means to write, and a minute to work in a safe place, you can obtain a one-sentence answer to any question about the future (the words, probably very cryptic, come from the Warden; interpretation is up to you). You're also unusually good at math.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Favored Text (see table)
• Quill & Ink
• Notebook (halfway filled already)

d6: What did you foresee that got you into trouble?

1. Pressured into giving the local lord good news despite seeing only dire omens, you skipped town before tragedy struck.
2. You predicted the birth of an illegitimate child that would lead to an inheritance dispute and tear a wealthy family apart. Every party involved—the cuckolded man, the pregnant wife, her paramour—is united on one point: You are a liar and a charlatan.
3. You correctly perceived that one business partner was cheating the other. You just didn't see the murder coming.
4. After you warned the townsfolk that the mercenary company passing through was going to pillage their homes, they tried to bar the mercenaries from the village. Which gave the mercenaries a pretext to stab a few people and pillage everybody's homes.
5. You foresaw a love match between the teenage children of two prominent families who've been locked in a bitter feud. The teenagers fell in love, just as you knew they would, but now everybody thinks it was only because you put the idea in their heads.
6. You didn't get in trouble with anybody else—you just determined that you would have to go abroad if you wanted riches. And you do.

d6: What book of scripture or occult wisdom do you most rely on for divination?

1. The Holy Bible, of course.
2. The Noble Quran, of course.
3. The Babylonian Talmud, of course.
4. The Mandaean Book of the Zodiac.
5. Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia.
6. The Sefer Raziel HaMalakh.

 

Background 2:

Armatole

You belong to what one might generously call a militia, although those who've been at the wrong end of your gun would call you a pandour or bashi-bazouk, not a militiaperson; your area of expertise is more thuggery than warfare. In any event, you're an irregular soldier of sorts, raised from the local population at the ragged margins of the empire to keep the tsar's or sultan's law in the absence of the army. Your loyalty to the distant throne and dedication to the law are both extremely suspect.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Flintlock Musket (d12, bulky)
• Cartridge Box (with 20 rounds)
• Not-Entirely-Uniform Costume
• Dodgy-Looking “Official” Papers

d6: Why are you not with your militia comrades?

1. Sent alone (or perhaps in a very small group) on a secret mission. Word of honor!
2. Last survivor(s) of a disastrous ambush, despite your valiant efforts. Word of honor!
3. Ordered to muster for a transfer to a different post, far from home. Had a better idea.
4. Called upon to make a suicidal last stand. Decided discretion was the better part of valor.
5. They turned bandit, those treacherous rogues, but you remained loyal.
6. You robbed a few measly travelers, and those treacherous rogues tried to turn you in.

d6: What special weapon are you carrying?

1. Flintlock Pistol (d10): You just can't have too many guns.
2. Karabela (d8): A sabre with an open crossguard and a handle in the form of a bird's head.
3. Yatagan (d8): A forward-curved war knife with no handguard.
4. Hirschfanger (d6): A straight-bladed dagger with an elaborate horn handle.
5. Warhammer (d8): A small but heavy beaked club for puncturing armor.
6. Arnautka (d12, bulky): A lavishly decorated, deadly accurate flintlock rifle. Attacks with this weapon against targets you can see are never impaired. (Replaces your Flintlock Musket.)

Note: All firearms require a full round to reload, unless noted otherwise. 

 

Background 4:

Dervish

You are a mendicant mystic, trying to approach God by virtuous living and ecstatic experience rather than by religious scholarship. Your faith, or your meditative practices, have unlocked marvelous powers—karamat—in you. (These do not take up inventory space, but only one can be performed, and only once, before you must rest; they otherwise function like Spellbooks. The Warden may allow you, or other characters, to learn additional karamat via long, dedicated study.)

Starting Gear

• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Tabarzin (d8)
• Beggar's Bowl
• Tall Felt Hat (petty)

d6: What karamat can you perform?

1. You have learned the power of folding up the earth, crossing distances without moving. As Teleport in the Warden's Guide (but cannot be destroyed).
2. You have uncanny authority over the natural world. As Control Plants and Control Weather in the Warden's Guide.
3. You have faculties of superhuman perception. As Arcane Eye and Hear Whispers in the Warden's Guide.
4. You can perceive and manipulate the thoughts of others. As Charm and Read Mind in the Warden's Guide.
5. You can cure the sick and heal the injured. As Cure Wounds in the Warden's Guide.
6. You are capable of extraordinary physical feats. As Haste and Leap in the Warden's Guide.

d6: How do you achieve ecstatic communion with the divine? (Spend a few minutes doing this while resting in a safe place to restore your ability to use karamat. This does not reduce your Fatigue.)

1. Dancing. Take a Wide-Skirted Robe (petty).
2. Singing. Take a Small Drum.
3. Composing poetry. Take a Quill & Ink and a Sheaf of Paper.
4. Painting. Take a Paint Pot & Brush and a Sheaf of Paper.
5. Chanting. Take a string of Prayer Beads (petty).
6. Meditating in silence. Take a Stone of Contentment (petty).

 

Background 8:

Exile

Not so long ago, all was right in your world; the fall has been precipitous, and sometimes it's hard to believe what a low condition you've been reduced to. Still, you're safe at the moment, if far from home, and you've been resourceful enough to get through worse scrapes than the one you're in now. Maybe you're at the start of a long, hard climb back to the position of privilege you were once accustomed to. Or maybe you'll make a new life in this wild new land.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern 
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Stylish Cape (petty)

d6: What manner of exile are you?

1. Censored Philosophe: Your radical politics or libertinous ideas scandalized your native society. Take a Cane Sword (d6; passes for a walking stick upon cursory inspection).
2. Dekabrist in Hiding: You took part in a doomed attempt to overthrow the tsar—or you're plotting one even now. Take a Bomb (d12, blast, 1 use).
3. Renegade Janissary: When the sultan disbanded your unit, most of your comrades were massacred. You escaped. You had to leave your musket behind, but you still have your blade. Take a beautifully ornamented Yatagan (d8) and a Cloak (petty) to conceal your distinctive tattoos.
4. Jewish Excommunicant: Your heretical theology or philosophy saw you driven from your community. You are truly alone in the world; take an easily concealed Overcoat Pistol (d8) for protection. Also take a Bullet Pouch (with 6 rounds).
5. Outrageous Poet: Once honored at court, you had to flee after insulting the sultan—or perhaps after seducing the tsarina. Take a Kamancheh (or roll on the Muzikant's table of instruments).
6. Disgraced Noble: Some affair of the heart or of honor back home left ruined lives in its wake, and your reputation in tatters. Take a Brace of Dueling Pistols (d8+d8, bulky) and a Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds).

d6: What potentially dangerous documents are you carrying?

1. A Notebook full of material that would shock the court, whether back home or here in the empire.
2. Indecent Correspondence (petty) from somebody who would surely faint if they knew you had it.
3. State Secrets (petty) from back home, or which might win you a pardon there if you could smuggle them across the border.
4. Plans (petty) for a novel invention that might revolutionize an industry or shift the military balance of power.
5. A Letter of Introduction (petty) to an individual in your new environs sympathetic to your plight or cause.
6. Bearer Bonds (petty) that you cannot redeem here but that could make somebody fabulously rich back home.

 

Background 13:

Muzikant

You might be known as an ashik, a kobzar, a klezmer, or by any of dozens of other names. Whatever people call you, and whatever you call yourself, you are an itinerant musician, an important carrier of news to remote rural areas as well as a beloved entertainer. People will pay generously to hear you perform, and you've learned a few non-musical tricks and talents during your years on the road.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Musical Instrument (see table)
• Letter Case

d6: What sort of music-making do you favor?

1. You like to lay down a foundational rhythm. Take a Plucked String Instrument like the saz, kobza, or bandura.
2. You always want to be the center of attention. Take a Bowed String Instrument like the violin, gadulka, or suka.
3. You love the haunting wail of pipes. Take a Set of Bagpipes (bulky) like the dudy, gaida, or parkapzuk.
4. You enjoy delivering a blast of fanfare. Take a Brass Instrument like the trumpet, sackbut, or serpent.
5. You prefer the mellow expressiveness of reeds. Take a Woodwind Instrument like the clarinet, kaval, or balaban. 
6. What instrument is more beautiful than the human voice? Take a Sachet of Herbs (petty) with which to make a throat-soothing brew.

d6: What useful skills or connections have you acquired during your travels?

1. You're pretty good in a fistfight. (Your unarmed attacks do d6 damage.)
2. There's always a local magistrate somewhere around the area who owes you a favor.
3. You're an incorrigible, and generally pretty successful, flirt.
4. You're familiar with local lore everywhere you go, including some hidden dangers and rumored treasures.
5. You've learned enough of the healing arts to bind wounds and make salves and poultices.
6. You always have a standing invitation to perform at one nearby castle or lordly manor or another.

 

Background 14:

Poyer

Like almost everybody else in the world you know, you are a humble peasant. You might be called peon, mujik, serf, dihkan, or seljak; it's all more or less the same, in the big scheme of things. Unlike almost everybody else you've ever known, though, you find yourself on the road, far from your fields, with coins in your pocket and a weapon in your hand. Your lord, if he could see you now, would strike you dead on the spot.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses) 
• Hatchet (d6)
• Bucket
• Rope (25 ft)

d6: What dramatic event uprooted you?

1. You sheltered a fugitive from the “justice” of religious hatred. Now you are seen as halfway to being an infidel or heretic yourself.
2. Ruined by an unusually bad harvest, you sent your family to stay with relatives and went to seek your fortune abroad.
3. Bilked out of what little wealth you had by a charlatan, you followed him to seek restitution or revenge.
4. It came to you in a vision: You are destined for greater things than tilling the land for some rich man's profit.
5. You had a brief but torrid affair with somebody of a much higher social station. Their family would kill you if they caught you.
6. A nobleman sexually assaulted one of your family members. You struck him dead in a rage, and are now a wanted murderer.

d6: What token of home are you carrying?

1. The Holy Book of your faith.
2. A Pouch of Dirt from your fields.
3. A Sachet of Herbs (petty) from your kitchen garden.
4. A Charm (petty) containing a lock of a loved one's hair.
5. A Lucky Feather (petty) from your most beautiful chicken.
6. Your faithful Dog. No use in a fight, but has a good nose.

Music, Man

 

The two dozen readers of this blog who aren't close personal friends of mine might be surprised, given that this post is only the second time in more than two years I've used the “music” tag, to learn that I am, or at least still consider myself, a music guy. I was a minor fixture of the Seattle scene once, half a lifetime ago—played drums in a punk band (with the guy who has lately piloted Roman in my erstwhile SWN campaign), organized house shows (in a fairly slapdash way), spent years mostly hanging out with musicians and going to several shows a week, and of course, most important of all, had a halfway-encyclopedic knowledge of punk and indie rock, which I labored strenuously to pass off as truly encyclopedic.

Anyway, nearly 20 years later, I learned about Geese from the New Yorker, and the psychic damage of having become so old and out of touch that I discovered the band of the moment in a literary magazine nearly killed me. (I realized later that another of my best friends—also an old Seattle musichead, and the woman behind Sarai in that SWN game—had mentioned Geese to me months earlier, and had recommended Cameron Winter's solo album, but nothing really clicked for me at the time.) Reeling, I scrambled to listen to absolutely everything released in 2025 that seemed like it could possibly appeal to me. I would compose a personal top 10 list! I would become young and hip again, by sheer force of will!

It's February now, and I've listened to at least a hundred of 2025's new releases, so it's probably time to stick a fork in 2025 and start trying to keep up with 2026 in a more natural, sane way. Hey, there's a new Metric album coming! Maybe I was always going to pay attention to new music this year. But I do have a top six for last year, at least, and some honorable mentions. In case anybody out there reading this, also experiencing incipient middle age, needs to crib off my homework.

 

#6: Tropical Fuck Storm, Fairyland Codex

Of the moment without being didactic or topical in a way that becomes instantly dated; cynical and sinister but warm and inviting at the same time. The general atmosphere of ironic distance and ennui make the occasional moments of sincere emotion, like in the title track and my favorite of the bunch, “Stepping on a Rake,” hit unexpectedly hard. Opens strong with “Irukandji Syndrome,” which really sets the tone for the whole thing. No weak links.

 

#5: Viagra Boys, viagr aboys

Irreverent and laugh-out-loud funny in places but never unserious, varied but never incohesive, an album that rewards every new listen with newly noticed clever lyrical turns and musical flourishes. It's a little top-heavy, but given that side A (“Man Made of Meat,” “The Bog Body,” “Uno II,” “Pyramid of Health,” “Dirty Boyz,” and “Medicine For Horses”) is just wall-to-wall bangers, how could it not be? The B-side is no slouch either, even if it isn't quite as strong.

 

#4: The Boojums, s/t

Garage punk recorded at low fidelity but played with unusual virtuosity, and drawing on an eclectic range of influences—I hear a dash of Soundgarden here, some Springsteen there, maybe a bit of the Pogues. You can't miss the nods to Don McLean. Wears those influences lightly, though, and is very much its own thing. Just gathers more and more strength as it goes, with “Football,” “Yellow Lines,” and “Dan's Transmission," all from the B-side, being the biggest hits for me.

 

#3: The Beths, Straight Line Was a Lie

Earnest and charming, with hyper-specific lyrics about Beth Stokes's lived experience that manage to expand into universally relatable observations about life, health, change, getting older, and all that stuff you never think about in your twenties. The title track is a bop, but “Mosquitoes” and “Mother Pray for Me” are the highlights; the former is one of my favorite tracks of the past few years.

 

#2: Geese, Getting Killed

Well, what can I say? It really is that good. Winter has an incredible voice, they've got real musical chops, and the songwriting is both strong and distinctive. “Cobra,” “Husbands,” “Half Real,” “Au Pays du Cocaine”—it's one hit after another, and “Taxes,” the penultimate track, is the best of the bunch. Picking this as one of my albums of the year, and “Taxes” as my favorite song from it, chafes against my long-indulged contrarian instincts, but I have no choice. It's an immaculate little track with a super unusual structure for a pop song, and hasn't gotten old even after I've listened to it dozens of times. The video (by Noel Paul, who did “Bug Like An Angel” for Mitski, “Forever in Sunset” for Ezra Furman, and a bunch of videos for Bat for Lashes and Father John Misty, among others) also rips. 

 

#1: Home Front, Watch It Die

Like TFS and (most of) Viagra Boys, Home Front is a later-in-life project for a bunch of veteran musicians, folks who were in hardcore and metal bands mellowing out a little and making some thoughtful post-punk. Like Fairyland Codex (composed by Australians) and viagr aboys (Swedes), a lot of Watch of Die (Canadians, as are the Boojums) is about watching the United States and the ripples that we send into the world with a weather eye. Unlike the other two, though, this is a little less cerebral, less jaundiced, less ironic and detached. Home Front came in with just the right amount of earnestness—about getting older and reflecting on youth and about the decline of the American empire and hope for a better future alike—to meet me exactly where I am right now. Starts with a fitting sample; the intro to the title track is a snippet of dialogue from 1978's Killer of Sheep, a film regarded as one of the greatest of its era but long inaccessible (and never given a general release) because director Charles Burnett couldn't get any of the music rights. “Light Sleeper” might be the best track, but “Watch It Die,” “Eulogy,” “The Vanishing,” and the extremely au courant closer “Empire” are all favorites too. Here's hoping it all comes true.

 

Honorable mentions:

DITZ, Never Exhale
Spiritual Cramp, RUDE
Samia, Bloodless
Black Eyes, Hostile Design
Pool Kids, Easier Said Than Done
Heartworms, Glutton for Punishment
Saya Gray, SAYA
Faulty Cognitions, They Promised Us Heaven

On Languages in RPGs

There was an interesting conversation the other day over at r/osr about using languages in a hexcrawl. One person dismissed the idea of languages as a part of resource management, on the grounds that they're both binary and inexhaustible—you either have a language or you don't, and once you have it, it doesn't even take up space or get used up the way torches and rations do. I took issue with the “you either have it or you don't” claim, though:

But language isn't like that, even if a lot of game rules (which tend to assume that players don't care about languages, but throw in some options just in case they do, or simply for flavor) treat it that way. Language is a medium of communication, but it's also a medium of culture.

You can have enough knowledge of a language to interact productively with speakers of that language (in trade or diplomacy or just asking for directions or whatever), but at the same speak time it in such a limited (or stilted, or archaic) way that you're marked as an outsider. Greater fluency, mastery of idiomatic expressions, etc. can set strangers at ease and dispose them positively toward you in a way that mere comprehension of their words never could. (And of course even in terms of simple comprehension, there's a continuum—you can have enough of a language to go shopping, make small talk, and flirt at the bar, but be completely out of your depth if you find yourself in court.)

Definitely agree that the use of “Common” plus a laundry list of racial languages in many games is almost pointless (or at least largely redundant to simple non-mechanical character background stuff, its only real purpose being to establish that, say, this dwarf is cool with elves in a way most dwarves aren't). If you want to make language interesting, you need to tailor it to the setting. All the characters' languages of origin are meaningless (unless they're also spoken in the setting, or unless all the PCs share a single foreign language, which they can then use as a sort of secret code in front of NPCs), but knowledge of local languages shapes not just their access to information but their access to social resources.

And then, of course, I kept thinking about it. And because I've been doing some Outcast Silver Raiders prep recently, I've also been thinking about medieval Scotland a bunch. The Mythic North is a pretty detailed setting, with a lot of NPCs from different cultural backgrounds, and the game does have explicit rules about languages (explicit in that PCs speak 1–4 of them, anyway; the specifics of which languages are available and how language barriers are adjudicated are entirely up to the GM).

What languages can I plausibly offer the players? What languages, and how many, would it actually be sensible and worthwhile to offer the players? And then what kind of useful conclusions can I draw about languages in fantasy settings more broadly?

 

* * *

 

COMMON LANGUAGES

“Common” means “shared,” but it also means “low,” “base,” or “vulgar” (“vulgar” itself being a bit of language terminology, originally referring to the “low” Latin of common people in the Roman Empire). In medieval Europe, the vast majority of speakers of these language are illiterate; it's possible that no written form of the language exists at all, and they certainly won't have any kind of “official” written form. There are wealthy and relatively powerful people who speak these languages, but they—the pre-Norman nobility, for instance—stand outside the new dominant hierarchy.

In the Mythic North, or any medieval quasi-Scotland, we have at least two common languages: English and Gaelic. The farther south you go, the more likely people are to speak English; south of the border, almost nobody speaks Gaelic. If English is your native language, Gaelic speakers probably reflexively mistrust you. The farther north you go, the more likely people are to speak Gaelic, and not far north of the border, there will be scarcely any native English speakers at all. If Gaelic is your native language, English speakers probably look down on you as being halfway savage.

This is a nice built-in engine of conflict. In a setting without outwardly obvious racial differences that people care about, this is the main vehicle for prejudice, whether negative or positive. Your characters are on one side or the other of this divide as soon as they open their mouths; everybody can tell (probably even if you're speaking another language entirely, just from your accent) whether you're Us or Them. It's also naturally balanced a bit in the Mythic North: In most of the setting's geographical area, English marks you as an unwelcome interloper, but in the one big city (where PCs might need to go to buy equipment, find work, hire retainers, etc.), Gaelic marks you as suspect (maybe a yokel, maybe a seditionist).

You might give players the choice of being a proper foreigner—German or Magyar or Italian—in which case they get a softer kind of negative prejudice from everybody; nobody sees them as Us, but nobody sees them as the most troublesome, acutely disliked Them. You might also expand the number of common languages: In 12th-century Scotland, for example, there were still native Cumbric speakers in the southwest (Hen Ogledd) and native Norse speakers in the far north. Doing so creates more work for you and more complexity for the players without much of a narrative gain, though. Maybe Gaelic speakers are better disposed toward Cumbric speakers than toward English speakers, but so what? It's not very different, outside of Hen Ogledd itself, from making the characters Irish (or Germans, Magyars, or Italians, for that matter). You can get as granular as you want, of course. Throw in Pictish, start breaking all five languages into dialects, etc. You just don't gain much beyond the first division, which ensures that, everywhere they go, the characters are either Us or some flavor of Them.

In any setting, having two different common languages in the campaign region creates affinities or the potential for conflict everywhere the player characters go. Having more than two common languages might be good for verisimilitude, but it doesn't really pay dramatic dividends, because in any one place and time, a language is fundamentally just marking you as some kind of Us (we ourselves, our kin, our allies) or some degree of Them (the enemy, the invader, the infidel, the stranger). It might shrink the area where any given character gets to be Us without making their home region a totally isolated island in a vast sea of Them, though.

 

ELITE LANGUAGES

These are shared languages among society's elite. Nobody who's a native of the campaign region speaks them as a first language (and perhaps nobody anywhere speaks them as a first language), but they are spoken by the authorities—in the case of the Mythic North, or pretty much any British setting post-Conquest, that's both the foreign lords who've conquered the realm and the clergy, foreign and native alike, who minister to it. Native people who have wealth, ambition, or unusual opportunities might have studied these languages; it's almost impossible to make the leap into the upper echelons of the rulers' society without knowledge of them.

There are exactly two of these in post-Conquest Britain: Latin, which is the language of the Church and most scholarship, and French, which is the language of court and of the Norman nobility more broadly. All clergy read, write, and speak Latin, and so does just about anybody with a good education. Not every noble does, but those with pretensions of being learned men or patrons of scholars surely do. Meanwhile, all nobles speak French, and nearly all of them read and write it as well. Anybody who deals with the nobility and their courts—many clergymen, lawyers, sheriffs, scribes, etc.—probably does too. Unlike the common languages, elite languages have at least semi-codified written forms (there's no Académie Française yet, but there are notions of what proper French is, and manuals for mastering it), and the elite are generally expected not only to read and write, but to do so well.

In a different context, of course (France itself, or somewhere like Switzerland or Aquitaine), French could be a common language too (and different forms or dialects of French could be common and elite in the same region). Latin has a more distinct position, as a kind of universal language across the entire European continent and as the working language of the Church (an institution that's usually hard to replace or recreate in trad fantasy settings). Unlike French, it's no community's native language, so speaking it with an accent, or even speaking it badly, doesn't necessarily mark you as an outsider in contexts where it's used.

A society ruled by foreign conquerors isn't going to feature in every setting, but it sure is a good premise for drama and intrigue (and there are lots of interesting historical examples to draw on: Arabic speakers in Iberia, Persian speakers in India, German speakers in the Baltics, Turkish speakers in the Balkans, French speakers all over the place). Likewise, you don't need the dead language of the bygone continent-spanning empire to remain in use as a vehicle for elite scholarship, international law, and religious organizations…but it's not a bad idea, right? A language with no native-speaker communities but that's widely used in elite (or professional) circles can also show up as the secret language of mages or alchemists, thieves' cant, the constructed language of a utopian society, etc.

 

ARCANE LANGUAGES

These are languages that people, at least in this setting, pretty much only know from books—but they're also the languages that a lot of the most important, informative, dangerous books are written in. Latin is similar in many ways (almost nobody learns it as a first language, and it's used more in writing than in speech), but it's also the working language of the Church, which gives it far greater importance than the others in mundane matters, but also makes it less mysterious. These are the languages of alchemical and hermetic texts, the languages of magic.

Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic all fall into this category in the context of medieval Europe. If there's a secret druidic language (and it isn't just Gaelic or Cumbric), it belongs here too. A generous GM will probably tilt things to make a PC's choice of one or more of these worthwhile. A preponderance of the musty old tomes they encounter should be in whatever arcane language(s) they know. Let them run into some Moorish travelers, some Norse warriors who speak a little Arabic or Greek from their travels, that sort of thing. Maybe let them take both Hebrew and Aramaic with a single pick.

In a setting less closely based on medieval Europe, arcane languages can come from distant foreign nations, from ancient civilizations, or from other planes of existence. They can be associated with divination, theurgy, and alchemy, as historical magical texts mostly were, but they can also cover advanced technology, demonology, psionics, kung fu, or whatever else you want.

 

EXOTIC LANGUAGES

This is pretty much anything else. For the Mythic North or a similar setting, Norse is probably the most sensible “exotic” choice (if it isn't a common language in some part of the campaign region, nor an arcane language written in magic runes or whatever); there are some Norse NPCs in the setting as written. As with making arcane languages useful outside of wizards' libraries, the GM should probably put a finger on the scale here. If a player took Italian, introduce some Italian mercenaries. If she took Hungarian, place a Magyar diplomat at court or wherever.

In a generic sense, this is usually just a catch-all category for “my player has a concept that doesn't quite match anything in the campaign area” (or maybe “my player is determined to be a special, exotic snowflake”). You probably want enough “important” languages (widely spoken common and elite languages, plus arcane languages particularly relevant to certain adventure sites, necessary to learn spells, or what have you) that your players can't just take all of them from the jump…but not too many more than that. The rest can fall into this exotic, mostly decorative category—icing on the worldbuilding cake. You let your players know these languages aren't going to be super important, but then you treat them to the occasional little encounter where they do matter.