Quantum Dungeons Languages

The current (2025-07-19) version of Quantum Dungeons addresses languages in the Character Creation checklist as follows:

Choose languages for your character. You know the Trade Tongue, any species language, and one additional language per skill level in Social.

Naturally, inevitably, I’ve come up with my own expanded house rules.

Beginning Languages

Each player character will know the Trade Tongue, their regional or species language, and a number of additional languages equal to their Social skill. (Game Masters may choose to restrict the list of languages available to beginning characters.)

Specific Talents also grant certain languages:

• Priest grants the language associated with their god, if any.
• Scholar grants an additional “scholarly” language of the player’s choice.
• Sorcerer grants Arcane, the language of sorcerers’ books and scrolls.
• Streetwise or Street Thief grants the character’s home dialect of Thieves’ Cant, a secret code for illegal commerce.

Note that player characters are exceptional. Non-player characters with little education might know only their regional language and Trade Tongue. They might even not know Trade Tongue.

Reading and Writing Languages

Player characters can always read and write all languages they speak, even if they learn more later.

NPCs may read and write all, some, or none of the languages they know. NPCs may never read and write languages they cannot speak unless they are mute or the language requires vocal apparatus they do not have. Even Extinct languages have a spoken form, even if only reconstructed.

Some languages may have no standard written form because its native speakers generally cannot read or write.

Learning New Languages

A character either knows a language or they don’t. To learn a new language, a character must spend six months of downtime then make a 10+ Lore throw. Alternatively, they may live among native speakers of the target language for a period of a year, then make a 10+ Social throw. If they fail, they can try again for each month of study until they succeed. The Target Number will decrease by one for each additional month.

How Many Languages?

Trade Tongue

To facilitate communication, these rules, like nearly all fantasy RPGs, presumes that there’s a ubiquitous “Trade Tongue” language. It may be a pidgin everyone uses to do business; it may be the language of a former Empire. Whatever the in-universe reason, most characters in the game world speak Trade Tongue.

Other Languages

The Game Master should define the other most frequently used languages in the game world. These may include languages of specific regions or ethnic groups, languages of specific sentient species, or even languages of extra-planar beings, long dead civilizations, and small secret societies.

One Language

The GM may rule that everybody currently alive in the game world speaks a single language. (Unrealistic, but, hey, this is fantasy.) In which case these rules are not needed.

Foreign or extinct languages, if they exist, therefore become puzzles a player must solve, or absolute barriers to communication.

Small Language Set

One can also get by with the following small set of languages:

Game Masters can tailor this list as they wish, but there is some underlying logic.

• A staple of fantasy is that Elves and Dwarfs speak their own ancient tongues. The same can be true of Lizard-Kin, who may not even have vocal cords that can produce human speech exactly.

• If the other species have their own language, why not humans?

• Orcs, goblins, kobolds, etc. all speak the Orcish tongue because orcs dominate them. Over time, oppressed people tend to lose their native language and take on their oppressors'.

• Arcane allows all sorcerers to use each others’ spell-books and scrolls. One can’t expect sorcerers to use the Trade Tongue for the mysteries of sorcery.

• Infernal, Primordial, and Supernal are more logical replacements for the “alignment languages” in old-school D&D. There’s no natural reason why a human of a particular alignment – if one uses alignment – can’t learn a language used by others of a different alignment. In the real world people of one faith can learn the liturgical languages of other faiths.

• Thieves’ Cant, a code using Trade Tongue in specific ways, allows thieves to talk about “business” so that only those “in the know” can follow the conversation. The lingo is specific to an area, usually centered on a large city, so it literally doesn’t translate to other areas.

Large Language Set

One can, of course, go wild with defining languages. (The author has.) The author prefers to give each major region, human or non-human, its own language, and then add Trade Tongue so that most people can understand each other; all of the “civilized” languages belong to the same Group. But that may be too much for some players.

Unless using the optional “Understand Languages” rule, the author recommends keeping it to about a dozen languages in common use, no more than a half dozen rare languages, and maybe a few esoteric ones for secret societies, extinct cultures, and perplexing manuscripts.

Optional Rules

Language Groups

(See also Language Groups.)

Languages with common ancestry, vocabulary, and/or structure fall into one or more “Groups”. If a character is learning a language, and they already know a language that shares a Group with that language, they have Advantage on the Lore checks to learn that language.

For example, let’s say Duri the Dwarf comes from Avenheim, a Dwarf community deep in human territory, but he wants to learn the language of Myrkheim, the “homeland” of the Dwarfs. As it happens, both Avenheimish and Myrkheimish descend from an ancestral Dwarfish language, i.e. they belong to the Dwarfish Group. Therefore, his attempts to learn Myrkheimish have Advantage.

On the other hand, Ragnar the Human knows Trade Tongue and Erudorean, both of which descended from a common Imperial language centuries ago. He would like to learn Dornish, a language of the eastern barbarians. However, Dornish is unrelated to the Imperial language, i.e. it shares no Groups. So Ragnar will have to learn it the hard way.

Language Rarity

Unlike previous rules, languages are classified only as Common, Rare, and Extinct.

Common languages include Trade Tongue and other languages large populations in the Known World use every day. Any character can select a Common language as a starting language, or find a teacher during play.

Rare languages include esoteric languages used only by small groups, secret societies, or beings from outside the Known World. Generally one must start with a Talent like Sorcerer, Scholar, or (in the case of Thieves’ Cant) Streetwise or Street Thief in order to start with these, and finding a teacher later will be difficult.

Extinct languages are no longer spoken, and thus the province of Scholars who study vanished civilizations or Priests who use them in their liturgy or sacred texts. Since there are no native speakers, one would have to turn to such a source to learn them, if one even wanted to take the trouble.

If a dungeon delver finds an ancient inscription that they can’t read, they may kick themselves later if it translates to “Stop! Turn Back! Beware the Dragon!”

Language Scripts

The author likes to define and categorize the written form, also called the writing system or script, of each of the spoken languages in a game world. In the real world multiple languages may share the same script, and in some cases the same language may be written with multiple scripts due to social or political change. E.g. Turkey changed from an Arabic-derived script to a Latin-derived script, and Asian languages with heavy European or American influence write their language in Latin letters as well as their native script.

The number and classification of writing systems makes no mechanical difference, but it does offer some roleplaying and puzzle-solving opportunities. For example, if a character finds a manuscript using the script for his language(s) but not in a language they know, they may attempt to sound it out. Perhaps they find an inscription in a script that doesn’t write vowels¹, and have to interpret its meaning. Perhaps the inscription uses such old or obsolete characters that the adventurers must employ a scholar to unravel their meaning.

The Understand Languages Test

If a setting has a large number of languages, the GM may institute the following rules, originally presented here.

A character begins play knowing specific languages, as in the main rules. When a character encounters an unknown language, spoken or written, the player makes a Social 10+ check to see if they already learned it in their travels. If successful, the player adds that language to their list of Known Languages. If not, the player adds that language to their list of Languages Not Known, and may not check for it again until they gain a Level. When the character gains a Level, the player clears their character’s Languages Not Known list.

The GM may lower the Target Number of the check to 9+ or even 8+ reflect the character’s understanding of similar languages, or raise the check to 11+ or 12+ for particularly difficult or esoteric languages. See the original article for more formal rules.

Language-Related Sorcery

Comprehend Language: (1st Circle, Touch) You can understand but not speak, or read but not write, the language of a being or piece of writing you touch for the next ten minutes. Once the spell expires, knowledge of the language vanishes. You may have only one such spell active at any given time.

Obfuscate Language: (1st Circle, Touch) You can obscure the meaning of a piece of writing for any who later read it. Readers must make a Lore 8+ check to realize the writing has been obfuscated and is not simply gibberish. Comprehend Language removes the obfuscation, but only a second casting can translate writing in a language the caster doesn’t know.

Tongues: (3rd Circle, Touch) When the subject speaks, all those within earshot can understand them, and they can understand any speaker within Far range. They can also read, but not write, any language they see. They do not understand languages as such; they are merely translated for the subject. After 10 minutes the spell ends.