roll d20 for languages

Listen, guys, I’m bumping my Monday Mazes and Monsters article again for Essentials liveblogging. I promise I’ll get back to Mazes and Monsters soon. To make up for it, I will illustrate this post with inappropriate Mazes and Monsters screencaps.

Look! Where the light was pointing!

I was excited when the Red Box made me roll a d6 for my bonus language. In Heroes of the Fallen Lands that roll is now optional, and it’s a d20 roll:

1-2 Deep Speech
3-5 Draconic
6-9 Dwarven
10-13 Elven
14-16 Giant
17-19 Goblin
20 Primordial

A horde of one angry skeleton!

Fun! The different weights assigned to different languages is like an adventurer census. There are 4 times as many adventurers who speak Elven as Primordial. Giant is slightly less popular than Elven but still popular: after all, it’s SO frustrating when you can’t decipher what the orc is saying*. 10% of adventurers are weirdos who took “Mind Flayer as a Second Language”.

If I were making the chart, I’d probably have 1 be “Sheltered! no bonus language” and 20 be “Polyglot! Roll twice more”, but maybe that’s just the 1e in me!

*Don’t worry, I will translate. The orc is saying, “Attack them, you fools!”

More Essentials thoughts…

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