Language Dungeon Spitballing

I've had an idea floating around in my head for a puzzlebox dungeon (system and setting indeterminate) centered on decipherment of the dungeon-builder’s language, Chants of Sennar or Heaven’s Vault style. Pulled off right, it could be a really fun diegetic challenge for players; pulled off wrong, it’ll be a tedious pain in the ass. This post is me thinking aloud and seeing what sticks.

Need: Complementary Components  

The concept would naturally attract language enthusiasts, but I don’t want to limit the focus so that they’re the only people who would enjoy it - for that, I could just make a wickedly hard decipherment puzzle. Things like pronunciation and spelling would also need taken into account: it’s no fun for anyone if the DM is constantly stumbling over describing the puzzle.

Ideally, the language-puzzle should exist side-by-side with the dungeoncrawl without overwhelming it, serving as another tool players can use to navigate the environment and the hazards therein. 

Need: Onboarding Clues / Trailheads

Throwing players directly into the deep end with no leads would be a bad move if the goal is engagement, but I also don’t want to give them a complete key to the puzzle from the beginning.

 

Trailhead Option: Give players a document written by a known party.

Epitaph did this nicely by giving players the one Roman source mentioning this people has a few root words and the names of two kings, and that worked pretty well for that game. You just need to give the players some context clues so they can identify the dignitary or god or what have you:  if you had a king named “Ran the Tiger” and then there’s a statue of some imperious looking guy with a tiger pelt, you can make some guesses about which words on the inscription are what if you have “here’s how Ran is spelled in the ruin script” or another king nearby to compare inscriptions to (could get titles or numbers from that).

Trailhead Option: The script is still used in the modern day 

This would entail giving the players the key to the known version of the script (or just using the Latin alphabet) as one of the opening clues. Some of the symbols would be used for the same sounds, while others would be repurposed, left out, or used in nonstandard ways.

Trailhead Option: The children’s book

Hand someone a copy of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish in a language they know nothing about, even if they can’t read the script, and within moments they’ll know five words, where adjectives are placed in relation to their nouns, and maybe even plurals. 

This option requires a bit of finagling for your typical generic vernacular fantasy setting, but it’d work excellently in Mothership or other sci-fi settings; stumbling across the classroom of an abandoned colony would be a treasure-trove in this sort of puzzle-dungeon.

Pulling on that thread a bit…

Trailhead Option: Use players’ existing knowledge as starting point

Making up an original text for the above scenario would be easy enough and a good clue; but you could also hand the players a book titled “Ozad Shungan Hluneitsan” with a little girl, a metal man, a scarecrow, and a lion on the front cover. Players will immediately clock that the words on the cover translate to "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and that’d be both a good clue and a way to encourage engagement because it’s something players already know.

Question: Script or no?

Script here meaning anything not the Latin alphabet; nearly all games of this sort involve translating glyphs directly into their semantic equivalents in English. This is a method that works (Heaven’s Vault, Chants of Sennar) but it's a method that bypasses phonetics and most grammar: relying on it is going to typically result in a logographic language, and those tend to have enormous glyph lists (hello, hanzi) to make up for the fact that you can't really just spell out a word as it's pronounced. So that's either a very truncated glyph library, or a load of extra work.

Using a different kind of script drastically decreases the number of symbols but introduces the new step of symbols no longer being directly connected to concepts. But that's not as big of an issue as it could be, because even if you don't know how the symbols are pronounced, Pattern-Seeking Brain will still be able to figure out that this string of glyphs means this or that with the right clues

Real-World Example: Koga's Koffing

So back when I was 8 or 9 or so, I was able to pick up that の meant possession in Japanese despite knowing absolutely nothing about the language, because I had some Japanese Pokemon cards (couldn't tell you how i got them) and when you've got cards you know are "Koga's Koffing", "Koga's Weedle", and "Misty's Starmie", you can process-of-elimination your way through it.

• The strings of matching kana on the Koga cards must be his name, so the rest of those names must be Koffing and Weedle, respectively.
• If I port the word order over, Misty and Starmie's names should follow the same pattern.
• の is a shared element on the cards that isn't part of their names, so the only thing remaining is that it marks possession (or, as I understood it at the time, it's the Japanese version of apostrophe + s). 

**

 All right, I think I've got enough to work with here.

• Mothership adventure set in abandoned colony previously inhabited by a group that kept to themselves (for whatever reason); colonists have their own language spoken nowhere else.
• Computer systems are either down (so you can't just google-translate them) or locked behind figuring out passwords, program names, and executable commands.
• If there are any survivors, they need to be encountered after the main language puzzle is solved. 
• There's a classroom for the colony children with books printed on-site. Since this is a treasure trove for solving the puzzle, there needs to be some sort of obstacle between the players and getting in that can't just be forced. The reveal that it's a classroom could be really meaningful if the players don't know what's behind the blockage until they get in.
• Signs, warnings, and maps are easy ways to get some clues and basic words in.
• Assigning sounds to symbols will need some sort of video or audio component. There could be subtitles on a video, or you could cross-reference the A/V clue with another document (a work schedule, an attendance sheet, etc)
• This is going to involve a LOT of handouts: these will need to be formatted for home printing & cutting out sections (numbered index cards?)
• Add a horrible monster and some reason the PCs can't leave until they do something, and you've got a stew going.  

Solid start, I'll keep you posted if it goes anywhere.