Literacies

The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

What languages can the character read?¹ Reading may open up a lot of opportunities for clues and information from people who are not physically there, and illiteracy may make it harder to communicate with others - though it’s not a huge stumbling block.

Literacies are a piece of narrative information - they don’t have a direct mechanical advantage, but they gate what a character can or can’t try to do².

How does one gain a literacy?

I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s worth as much as a skill (or at least, a second literacy is worth less - the first may be worth that much, but there’s a lot of diminishing returns, especially after Latin), and it’s not something most characters would try to fill out just for completionism’s sake.

How Illiterate are the Middle Ages?

Probably not as much as you’d assume. Literacy was definitely lower, though more so among the poor³ than your characters, but gentry do often try to learn and teach, including for women as well as men.

Reading, not Speaking

We’re not tracking what languages a character can speak. It’s assumed there’s enough of a lingua franca⁴ that most characters can understand enough to get by⁵ in most situations.

Some rpgs do interesting stuff with spoken languages - including The Wildsea - but in this campaign most situations don’t really rely on that kind of plot point, or rely entirely on it⁶.

We’re also not tracking writing so much as reading⁷

What scripts?

There’s 3 bold options - because there’s three scripts you are much more likely to learn than any of the others⁸. Of the rare scripts, there’s also a few which are not always available… because they haven’t been invented at the start of the campaign⁹.

Common	Rarer	Constructed
Latin	Arabic	Edenic
Ogham	Gothic	Lingua-Ignota
Futhorc	Greek	Paracelsan
	Hebrew	Utopian
	Tironian
	Trojan

Footnotes

1. To some degree of proficiency. They may still struggle some, but also characters without this may still be able to know a few letters or even a couple words. ↩

2. You cannot just roll the information out of a book you can’t read (though you can try other things, like finding someone who can read and using all your other tools on them) ↩

3. But literate peasants are not that shocking a sight, and the rich and powerful are not all literate. ↩

4. Primarily vulgar Latin across the Roman world, some close enough Brythonic language across the Isles, and proto-English/Frisian across the North Sea. ↩

5. Augmented perhaps by explanations, translators, gestures and pictures, etc. ↩

6. i.e. if you’re in a situation where you are really fish out of water, it’s deliberately a place where you wouldn’t be expected to know the local languages, so a hypothetical language mechanic would always be either trivially useful or trivially useless ↩

7. There is a difference at this time! Writing skills are ↩

8. In fact, it may be more common to know just Latin (by far the most common of the common scripts in this area) than all the rare scripts combined. Think of the rare scripts as an odd special quirk, not necessarily something that will get exercised often. ↩

9. For obvious reasons, these tend to be especially rare. ↩