I've always hated D&D alignment languages.
As a result I've never used them.
I was listening to Stuart Robertson's Podcast of the Expedition to the Ancient Academy and heard him reference a house-rule whereby the characters of law, neutrality, and chaos may select Ancient, Thieves' Cant, or the Black tongue as one of their bonus languages.
I'll let his post outline the detail.
Stuart, consider this rule yoinked! :)
That's a great idea, that can be expanded to include other "secret languages" that are not really languages at all, but merely a set of code-words, common terms within a group, hand-signals, emblems and so on. That is what I always thought of Thieves' Cant and Mystery Cult languages as.
ReplyDeleteGlad you like it! :)
ReplyDeleteI repurposed alignment languages in an analogous fashion in my game, making them ecclesiastical human dialects that PCs could choose to take at character creation.
ReplyDeleteRather than write the whole thing out again, I'll just put up a link to my blog post on the subject: http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/parlez-vous-glantrian-dialects-and-alignment-languages/