Alphabet

More lore?  This post is about alphabets.  

I'm not going so far in Geoshie as to actually make a language, or even the semblance of a language - for obvious reasons.  In any case, I'm not sure how much Geoshie would benefit from a system like that even if I could pull one off.  What I do love, however, are games like Aquaria that use their own alphabets.  Aquaria is actually a great example here because it doesn't teach you the alphabet - it gives you enough of a translation to figure out what symbols correspond to what letters and leaves the rest to you to do on your own time.

This seems to fit really well with the 'archeological' theme I have going with Geoshie, so I set up a similar system in my world.  It's less about crafting an actual language, and more about giving players a chance to decode a language and giving them large rewards in terms of lore and world-depth for doing something that's not explicitly required by the game.

You can see some of my current attempts below.  I've been trying to set up each language in a way that mirrors the culture it comes from.  Geoshie will feature three alphabets (more like two and a half), one for each religion (the Priesthood and the Sorcerer's Guild) and one that is used by the Sorcerer's Guild when they make magic.

I want the Priest's alphabet (first page) to be very deliberate and to use a lot of repetition.  Everything is very focused and straightforward, like their culture, and it uses a lot of repetition and simplicity to convey that.  The Priesthood puts a lot of thought into the way they word things, and their language is built to accommodate that.

By contrast, the Sorcerer's Guild (not shown below) is very fluid with their writing.  It's a very elegant language with a lot embellishment and a love of ambiguity and intricacy.  If the Priesthood values the functionality of a message, the Sorcerer's Guild values the beauty in how a message is delivered.  Their alphabet is decorated and detailed and everything tends to flow together, like cursive.

The runic system that the Sorcerer's Guild uses for magic (below) is a different beast; it acts less like an alphabet based language and more like a symbolic language.  It's built using a lot of eyes, and designed to be just a little bit unsettling, in a "the spirits are watching you" sort of way.  

I liked the idea that this system would be very very old and that the Sorcerer's guild might not necessarily still understand the complete details of how it works.  They'd have some theories of course, and they would be very very good at using it, but most of their time would have gone into building on top of it and not into breaking down the parts that already functioned well.  If they did come up with ideas, they'd mostly just be social conventions or things that sounded nice.  Sorcerers wouldn't be going out and modifying fundamental parts of the system to see what was necessary and what wasn't: really basic magic is dangerous, and you don't fool around with a dangerous process.

 Doing magic for a Sorcerer is a very religious experience, and since the Sorcerer's Guild uses intuition, intricacy, and mystery as a cornerstone for a lot of its religion, it doesn't necessarily bother anyone that a part of magic might be beyond the scope of their understanding, as long as it still works and allows them to explore and create on top of it.

Anyway, there's a little bit of grammatical structure for spells; basic symbols correspond to different ideas, and everything ends with a bit of a star symbol.  The Guild then embellishes and decorates each symbol in order to enhance and fine-tune the effect.  Magic is extremely detailed and precise, so a Sorcerer would want to put as much time and effort as possible into making and executing a single spell.  None of this would be a spur-of-the-moment decision.  

There's a lot of focus in modern day games to either make magic into a system similar to programming, where everything is very mathematical like engineering, or to make it really chaotic, dangerous, and unpredictable.  It's refreshing to me to take it in a different direction and to turn it into more of a "fine-art" form, where functionality is not necessarily more important than detail, intricacy, personality, and beauty.  You wouldn't hear a sorcerer talking about the time-complexity of a spell; the idea of optimizing spells to make them easier to cast or more consistent each time they were cast would have never crossed someone's mind.