Friday Encounter: What Is It, Lassie?

This encounter can be used anywhere - a town, on the road, in the wilderness, or in a dungeon. However, it's probably best used in an environment one might conceivably encounter a dog - having one turn up in the middle of a dungeon might invite unwarranted suspicion from the party. A PC with access to speak with animals or similar effects may make this encounter trivial to solve, so you may want to consider your party composition and determine if it would be suitably challenging for your table.

The PCs are approached by a large dog, which runs up to them wagging its tail and sniffing them excitedly. If they respond affectionately (most players will, in my experience), the dog will tag along with them, following them wherever they go. Even if they try to get rid of the dog, it will catch up to them as soon as possible, taking every measure possibly to keep up with the party, unless it is physically incapable of doing so (such as if the party crosses a bridge that falls behind them, and the dog is unable to clear the chasm). Notably, the dog will bark and try to get the party's attention once it is sure they are friendly. It seems almost like it's trying to communicate with them.

As a matter of fact, the dog is trying to communicate with them. It is in fact Athansios Panossias, a powerful wizard who, upon being defeated in a magical duel with his rival Hermokrates Nikolaios, was cursed into the form of a dog. Though he retains his memories and his learned mind, Athansios can only speak and act as a dog can, and thus is incapable of performing the gestures and incantations needed to work his magic. Desperate to lift the curse and get revenge on Hermokrates, he seeks out any passing adventurers who he might be able to lead to his mortal enemy.

Athansios cannot say or do anything a normal dog couldn't, but he will nevertheless attempt to get the party's attention and lead them in the direction of Hermokrates's tower, trying to explain his predicament as best he can. However, he faces significant limitations in doing so. The PCs will likely misunderstand his directions, and this may well lead them on a wild goose chase. It's okay if this happens - it's fun!

In the Lunar Lands, all animals are sapient, but have their own languages indecipherable to other species. Athansios might not be able to communicate with the party, but he can communicate with any dogs they have with them, and they will understand them. These dogs may try to pass on the same message if they're swayed to his side, but of course they face the same difficulties in doing so. If there's a Really Good Dog in your party, you should relay Athansios's messages to their player privately and have them try to relate things to the rest of the party without using verbal communication, to keep things balanced.

Friday Encounter: The Clever Stag

In the Lunar Lands, all living things - and some non-living things - are sapient. Every animal has thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, just like a person does; they just express them in their own ways, which make sense only to them. Each animal speaks its own language - they consist of certain sounds, gestures, and pheromones that are indecipherable to the uninitiated, but this is a true language, and one can learn to speak and understand it, though this is much harder than learning another humanoid language, and to speak it (rather than merely understanding it) may require the ability to vocalize subtle sounds humans cannot.

Here's an encounter that plays with that idea. It is best suited for a wilderness environment - ideally, it should be used if the PCs decide to hunt for game.

Background

Somewhere in this woodland lies an enchanted tree that has stood for untold millennia. If it is known, it is known only to the beasts of the wood, and any elves and druids in tune with its mysteries. This tree produces a sap that, if consumed, allows a creature to speak and understand any tongue - including those of the beasts and birds.

Also in this woodland there lives a stag named Barkbrowser (a literal translation from the cervid language, the subtleties of cannot be represented in text). Barkbrowser is a vain and conceited deer who is quite proud of his antlers. Although he, like all stags, sheds his antlers in the winter and grows back a new set in the spring, he is not content to let his old antlers be lost in the weeds, but would like to keep them at hand to marvel at his beauty. He regards his own antlers as a human would regard a work of fine art. Despite his vanity, Barkbrowser is a particularly clever stag, even by the standards of men. He fed upon the magic sap, and became fluent in all tongues - and quickly realized how he could use this ability to advance his own goals.

Barkbrowser's last set of antlers recently went missing from his stash. He learned from the birds and the squirrels that they were taken by Marielle Essert, an enchantress who dwells within a tower somewhere in the woods, who intends to turn them into powder for a potion. Barkbrowser knows that he, a mere deer, cannot hope to take on a powerful magician. However, he knows that the gift of speech can be quite useful for his purposes, and intends to use this to get his revenge.

The Encounter

The PCs should come upon Barkbrowser in the woods, perhaps while hunting, or by mere happenstance. Importantly, they should be led to believe that he is nothing more than an ordinary deer - up until they get close enough, in which he calls out to them in their own language!

He will claim that he is in fact a prince who was cursed by Marielle to take the form of a stag, and beseeches the party to help in lifting his affliction. He will not speak of his true name, or mention the magic tree - he wants the PCs to think that his ability to speak human speech is related to his "true" identity. He knows the location of Marielle's tower, though he has not gone inside of it and does not know its contents. What he does claim is that the PCs can find a set of antlers in Marielle's tower that, if touched to his skin, should lift the curse.

Should the party believe the "prince's" story and seek out Marielle, they will find that she mainly keeps to herself and has no outward hostilities to them - however, considering how she has set up her operations in the woods so that she is not bothered with meddlesome outsiders, she won't take kindly to intruders. She has a clay golem, inscribed with the orders to protect the tower, that she has constructed to ward off any strangers, and it will accost anyone who attempts to break into the tower. You can feel free to add other challenges you see fit to expand this encounter, or make the tower into a mini-dungeon, at your discretion.

Marielle keeps Barkbrowser's antlers in her workshop where she makes her potions. A skull is set in a niche over the door to the workshop and will scream if any unfamiliar creature attempts to enter the room (DC 10 Arcana check to identify this alarm). Marielle can hear this scream from anywhere in the tower and will come running if it is triggered.

If confronted, Marielle will have no knowledge of ever placing a curse on a prince and will be quite confused by the allegations. She will try to turn the PCs away, growing increasingly frustrated if they persist, but will not initiate violence unless she feels clearly threatened. She has the stats of a mage.

Further Developments

If the PCs return the antlers to Barkbrowser, they will of course do nothing - he just wanted to look at them. He doesn't care about any acts of theft or violence they may have had to perform to retrieve them - he's a deer, after all, and is hardly concerned with the notion of civilized morality. He's just happy to have his antlers back.

If the party was cheated into such deeds, there will of course be consequences. If Marielle is still alive, she will likely be displeased with the party for disrupting her research and interfering with her studies, and she may seek revenge. Alternatively, if she dies, her relatives or acquaintances may become enemies of the party. And the excuse that they were tricked by a talking deer likely won't hold up in the courts.

Of course, the PCs may wish to research why exactly there was a talking deer there in the first place, if he really wasn't a cursed prince. This pursuit may lead them to the enchanted tree, which could well be useful to them in their adventures. Barkbrowser himself might also become a recurring NPC, especially if the party decides to seek him out - a deer who can speak any language could prove the center of a useful spy network.

I Don't Like Languages

I don't think I've ever been in a D&D game that have used languages in a way I've been happy with. The most common way I've seen them applied is to have inscriptions that only PCs who can understand that language can understand...but then, picking languages when designing a character becomes a game of "guess what the DM is going to do," and if the languages everyone picked at character creation aren't the same ones used in the dungeon the DM developed, you're screwed. That, or the DM specifies what languages are going to be used in the campaign and has at least one player design characters accordingly, but that's not the best solution either - if the DM had to tell you what language to pick, then it's not really a meaningful decision. If it was that important, the DM could just have made sure everyone was able to understand whatever writing or speech was important to the puzzle they designed, and having it in a different language is just an extra step. The only time I could see this being useful is if one PC knew the language, but the others didn't, making it especially important to protect them to ensure that their knowledge could be applied - but, again, if that PC gets incapacitated, and future puzzles count on at least one PC knowing a given language, then the party is pretty much stuck.

Essentially, I can't think of any way to make language mechanics, at least the way they are in D&D, actually fun. And what's the point of playing a game, if not to have fun?

One way I've seen the problem addressed is to give characters a given number of language slots, but not having these filled in during character creation. Rather, when the problem of needing someone to read or understand a language comes up in play, a player could declare that their character would know that language and mark it off on their sheet. They can then understand that language going forward - but once all the slots on their sheet are filled in, they can't understand any more (at least, not without time for training). This avoids the problem of needing to guess what the DM is going to do, but some groups might find it contrived. Others might enjoy the opportunity for emergent discovery about the world and their characters that wasn't planned out at first. It's something that's going to vary from table to table.

In all honesty, I feel like languages shouldn't be handled by codified game mechanics at all. At the very least, I feel like they should be looser than the way D&D handles them. Rather than a list of languages to pick from at character creation, I would have languages be something that one could extrapolate from a character's background.

Under this assumption, players and DMs would work together to determine what languages a character could and couldn't understand as the question came up. Racial languages wouldn't be a feature of a given race statblock - it would be assumed that most dwarves could understand Dwarvish. However, a dwarf raised among humans might not, necessarily, while a human raised among dwarves could. Certain classes or backgrounds might gain accesses to languages as well, such as clerics being able to understand liturgical languages, or wizards knowing whatever languages are used to write about magic (think of all the Latin grimoires you see in fiction). Druids or elves might have access to the languages of animals, and be able to commune with them. If a character is to learn another language, they would need to find someone to teach them or get a translator, but it wouldn't be something tied to mechanical advancement, just progression in the narrative.

I forget where I first heard this story, and I can't verify its accuracy, but apparently this is how D&D used to work (or at least B/X D&D). In the old Mystara gazetteers, each region had its own language, with the assumption being that references to "the common tongue" meant the language most commonly spoken in the area a character was from. There wasn't a single language called "Common" - what "Common" meant varied from character to character, and if they later traveled to another area, they wouldn't necessarily know the language spoken there. But what languages a character knew differed from campaign to campaign.

Now, obviously, the idea of having a single universal Common language does have its benefits - it keeps things simple, so players don't have to worry about their characters being able to communicate with most NPCs. There are some DMs that find this more convenient. But what's useful about this approach is that is doesn't make any assumptions of the languages spoken within the setting, and allows DMs to customize the languages spoken in their world as they wish.

Some DMs might find it unrealistic that all beings would share a common language, or that it would be possible for people to learn the languages of extraplanar beings like Abyssal or Celestial so easily. With languages being handled by DM fiat, they wouldn't have to bring such assumptions into their setting. They could come up with different regional languages for the different parts of their world. They could have multiple racial languages, so that - for instance - one tribe of orcs wouldn't necessarily speak the same language as another. They could have multiple arcane or liturgical languages, which may be more or less common than others (think of the difference between Latin and Ancient Greek, for example) - I can think of some interesting game opportunities if the wizard finds a spellbook written in a language they don't know, and having to find someone to help translate it.

Of course, one could simply present the players with a set of languages for the campaign setting and have them pick from that, rather than the default list. But some players can be averse to being presented with too many unfamiliar options. By treating languages as something assumed about characters rather than tied to a specific build, you can streamline character creation by presenting players with fewer options, but also opening the door for new and interesting opportunities in play that may not have come up under the rules as written.