What would your character do with this silly adventure seed?

[Jon_Dahl]

I'm trying to slowly kill Common in my campaign. Very slowly, like it should be with the death of any dominant language IRL. I'm trying to get my players to participate in this work. The idea is very simple: A group of leading academics of the region is offering a vast sum of gold for the best effort of the year made to promote a widely spoken regional human language (which is certainly not Common).

So your PC would get a nice sum of gold if (s)he made the best effort of the year to promote a regional human language. What would you do?

P.S. The group is not evil.

[riku2131]

Promote learning of the second language, then just start speaking the new regional one. Refuse to speak Common. I would write books, and sing songs of my tales, but exclusively in the new regional language. Promote the regional language, and start the slogan "Speaking common is for the commoners". First the royalty will change, wanting to speak the native language of their region, then out of necessity the middle class will change (since all news would be in not-common), and it would trickle down into the commonwealth.

Since the party isn't evil, associating Common with evil/necromancy would probably be off the table.

[Apricot]

I know this is going around the "my character" option, but...

In history, the only way languages die out is if the groups which speak them get so incredibly marginalized that it's a massive social, economic, cultural, and whatever-else-you-want-to-tack-on disadvantage to speak that language in favor of another language. So if I were in your game world, I'd check the gold sum, see if it's worth my time, go around teaching young children how to speak the language as a "secret code" to keep from their parents, and then laugh at the futility of even offering such a reward.

If I were actually trying to make it happen...

I would organize an extremely large fighting force of a group that speaks a different language, make a tenuous claim to the lands held by Common-speakers, and then invade and massacre as many Common-speakers as I could. My Uncommon Legions would spread out to inhabit those lands, keeping the remaining Common-speakers in small, tightly-knit, scattered communities, shuffling them about as much as possible and mixing them with their historical antagonists to break their morale and their culture. If I lack the military might to finish off all Common-speakers in one go, I'd do it again and again, breaking down the remaining nations and sending the poor, feeble citizenry on forced marches as I take over more and more of their land. With that done, I'd wait, carefully building stereotypes of the Common-speakers as mere common rabble, taking their children away every so often and "educating" them far away from their families. Crimes against Common-speakers would rarely if ever be prosecuted, while the most mild Common-speaker offenses would receive disproportionate penalties. In the end, any Common-speakers who want lives above the gutter would have to learn the tongue of their ruling race, and a few generations later, their ill-begotten language would have faded away into the annals of history. Some choice purges of written material after, and not even that would remain.

Sounds like a fun, silly adventure, right?

[Svata]

Why do you want to get rid of something as unifying as a nigh-universal language? Are you trying to cause division, mistrust, and misunderstandings between peoples in your game world? How is getting rid of a way for everyone to understand each other not and evil act by definition?

[nedz]

I've never really done common. Now if the campaign takes place in just one region then I may refer to the local language as common, but it isn't really.

As to your question: Linguicide is very difficult and normally requires genocide as a pre-requisite because people can be very stubborn about their language.

Historically: breaking up lines of trade and then waiting a few centuries can work. I'm thinking here about the Roman Empire which had Latin as it's common tongue. Now, most of those regions speak a variety of languages derived from Latin so the commonality has been broken - though not completely. If you are being pedantic, by Latin I mean Vulgate - whatever.

Before the Romans: most of what is now France spoke Gaulish, a Celtic language, but even that didn't die out - it just got pushed to the margins of Europe.

[SirNMN]

not sure what you are OK with level wise but there is a 9th level spell that changes memories. use that liberally to actual replace common in the minds of the leadership so that they can't speak common and keep spreading it

[AvatarVecna]

not sure what you are OK with level wise but there is a 9th level spell that changes memories. use that liberally to actual replace common in the minds of the leadership so that they can't speak common and keep spreading it

As usual, there is no problem that can't be solved with liberal application of Mind Rape.

[Svata]

Mind Rape: It only does everything.

[Segev]

Planar bind a series of Efreeti, probably spending a number of spell slots daily on this, to the task of travelling far and wide and granting the "most fun" thing he hears spoken in Common as if it were a wish, making it true even if it wasn't before.

If needs be, to empower them to do this, phrase a wish for each of the Efreet's own in a fashion of the sort, "I wish for you to grant the most amusing thing you hear in the city of Agrabah today that is spoken in Common as if it had had the words 'I wish...' or 'I wish that...' in front of it."

Make sure to negotiate this with them, letting them "in" on it as a prank so they'll be cooperative with you even as they get to flex their Literal Genie muscles elsewhere.

Maybe spend one wish from any that seem particularly cooperative on spreading rumors and belief such that people will start subconsciously making anything they hear in Common be self-fulfilling.

Essentially, I'd work to spread the notion that Common is a language of True Speech that should not be spoken except with great, great care.

[AvatarVecna]

Planar bind a series of Efreeti, probably spending a number of spell slots daily on this, to the task of travelling far and wide and granting the "most fun" thing he hears spoken in Common as if it were a wish, making it true even if it wasn't before.

If needs be, to empower them to do this, phrase a wish for each of the Efreet's own in a fashion of the sort, "I wish for you to grant the most amusing thing you hear in the city of Agrabah today that is spoken in Common as if it had had the words 'I wish...' or 'I wish that...' in front of it."

Make sure to negotiate this with them, letting them "in" on it as a prank so they'll be cooperative with you even as they get to flex their Literal Genie muscles elsewhere.

Maybe spend one wish from any that seem particularly cooperative on spreading rumors and belief such that people will start subconsciously making anything they hear in Common be self-fulfilling.

Essentially, I'd work to spread the notion that Common is a language of True Speech that should not be spoken except with great, great care.

For a plan that started with "planar bind a bunch of genies and force them to grant wishes", you seem to have taken a very complicated route to get to "eliminate the common tongue"; why not say "I wish that every instance of the language known as Common was replaced with the language known as Druidic, both in the minds of creatures and in written records". There, now Common is gone! Even better, now it's a bit easier to become a Fochlucan Lyrist, since being an actual druid is no longer required.

[JyP]

So your PC would get a nice sum of gold if (s)he made the best effort of the year to promote a regional human language. What would you do?
Find a monastery full of pious guys which only talk in an old language. Spreads rumours everywhere that their language is the first one, and as such they have Truenamer powers (or Words of Creation from Book of Exalted Deeds). Really make it so.

[Gallowglass]

Ithink apricot had the most realistic answer to your question, and I think in a world of high magic, the efreet plan has legs. But you asked what would -I- do with that adventure seed?

My character would almost certainly be suspicious of the motives of this group of academics and why they are funding this obscene and impossible task. My assumption would be they are up to no good.

Perhaps they are powerful outsiders who fear the common tongue because certain words in it can harm them?

Perhaps they are powerful outsiders who are trying to get people to speak this new language because there are words in it that, when spoken by humans in normal conversation, actually give them some power or ability.

Perhaps they are trying to bot-net-learn through the many groups of adventurers, hoping some of them come up with ways to do this task which can then be used for some other task. "Oh, they developed an efreet delivery system that was partially successful. Now I will do the same thing, but instead of spreading this new language, I will be spreading a linquistic based disease we learned from some Mechanus Cryptics."

Who knows? But I certainly wouldn't believe their professed story of being academics with deep pockets trying to reestablish some hobby tongue. So my character would try to convince the other characters to play along while investigating these academics. Follow them home, bug their houses, raid their labs.

If, in the end, it turns out they were just what they said they were and not some outlandish ploy well... I'd be disappointed but I'd still feel like I had some fun.

[Segev]

For a plan that started with "planar bind a bunch of genies and force them to grant wishes", you seem to have taken a very complicated route to get to "eliminate the common tongue"; why not say "I wish that every instance of the language known as Common was replaced with the language known as Druidic, both in the minds of creatures and in written records". There, now Common is gone! Even better, now it's a bit easier to become a Fochlucan Lyrist, since being an actual druid is no longer required.

1) My plan is more fun (especially for the genies), and therefore
2) is less likely to be screwed by said genies choosing to screw up my wish.
3) I'm not sure a single wish can do what you describe.

There are doubtless more efficient means. This is just how I'd do it for kicks, grins, and Evil Mastermind points. After all, it's way more likely to be something that would make for a good story.

...what, just because I usually don't want to encourage heroes to come after me doesn't mean I can't scheme up a good way to do so!

[Red Fel]

For a plan that started with "planar bind a bunch of genies and force them to grant wishes", you seem to have taken a very complicated route to get to "eliminate the common tongue"; why not say "I wish that every instance of the language known as Common was replaced with the language known as Druidic, both in the minds of creatures and in written records". There, now Common is gone! Even better, now it's a bit easier to become a Fochlucan Lyrist, since being an actual druid is no longer required.

I actually like Segev's plan, because it makes people want to stop speaking Common. Anything you can Wish can be un-Wished by someone else. Any spell can be broken. But making people afraid to use Common because of what might happen isn't a Wish. It can't be dispelled. It's a perfectly rational fear based on documented reports - if you speak Common, things will happen that you did not intend. There is no check to dispel that.

Once people become aware that their words in Common will have nasty consequences, they will simply stop speaking it. The language will still exist, it's not like we're making it vanish completely, but it will be one of those forbidden languages, the use of which people expressly avoid. And that is frequently how languages die - when the population simply refuses to use them, refuses to teach them to children, instead insisting on the use of a local or regional tongue.

Besides, if we use magic to make Common no longer Common, how can we be rewarded for killing it off? If we replace Common with Druidic, the reward is now for making Druidic a dead language, isn't it?

[Deadasadoor]

I'm stealing this from a thread that was floating around a while ago, but there's a Monk Archetype in Pathfinder called Healing Hand. The capstone of this class is an ability that lets you resurrect and fully heal all allies within a certain radius, but you die, removing all traces of your name from books and it can never be spoken again. Have your name be something common, like "the", for example. This would make Common incredibly inconvenient to speak, and could probably make a good push towards people switching languages. The hard part is actually getting a monk to 20 and then dying/convincing them to die for a weird cause.

[Segev]

I'm stealing this from a thread that was floating around a while ago, but there's a Monk Archetype in Pathfinder called Healing Hand. The capstone of this class is an ability that lets you resurrect and fully heal all allies within a certain radius, but you die, removing all traces of your name from books and it can never be spoken again. Have your name be something common, like "the", for example. This would make Common incredibly inconvenient to speak, and could probably make a good push towards people switching languages. The hard part is actually getting a monk to 20 and then dying/convincing them to die for a weird cause.

A work-around word would substitute, more likely. It might create several, leading to a number of definite articles which all mean the same thing, or it might lead to the language simply lacking a definite article.

Spanish uses its definite articles far less than English; with some alteration to colloquial grammar, English could get by without it. It just would seem stilted for a while.

[Orderic]

I'm stealing this from a thread that was floating around a while ago, but there's a Monk Archetype in Pathfinder called Healing Hand. The capstone of this class is an ability that lets you resurrect and fully heal all allies within a certain radius, but you die, removing all traces of your name from books and it can never be spoken again. Have your name be something common, like "the", for example. This would make Common incredibly inconvenient to speak, and could probably make a good push towards people switching languages. The hard part is actually getting a monk to 20 and then dying/convincing them to die for a weird cause.

I don't think I have seen name optimization since Madness Tarrasquekiller. I like this idea. Maybe if the name where a phrase containing several words of crucial importance?


Anyway, I really like the efreet idea. Imagine the chaos it may cause...

[Malroth]

Only works in 3.P but Find an orphanage with 100+ orphans in it, Mind Rape them all into changing their names to be one of the most commonly used words in the language and wanting to train to become healing hand monks, then make a non lethal trap corridor such that surviving it would be high enough DC for a lv 19 character to gain XP from the encounter and push them through it repeatedly untill they hit 20 then let them run off and use their capstone on their parents or non monk friends or something.

[Apricot]

That Efreeti idea is brilliant. There's only one problem which I can see for it, which is frequency. No character is going to be able to reliably Bind more than a handful of Efreeti a day, and those Efreeti only have three Wishes apiece. So, if you imagine some highly optimized level 20 character, you might (might!) get 21 Wishes per day. That's a highball. Now, let's say you have a large party, which means six of these characters. So that's 126 Wishes per day. (You can get more with Leadership, but that's the nuclear option.) That's not a ton, considering the sheer number of people you can expect to speak Common. So the question then becomes, can you ramp up the prominence of those limited Wishes to draw everyone's attention and superstition without actively destroying the world? How can you get people to act as though Common is a magical tongue without having it work in a scientific and consistent manner? That's a bit of an awkward question. Most superstitions work because the topics involved are either rare or vague. But people speak the same language every day, and having the literal result of your words come true isn't vague. With this kind of variance, you'll almost certainly attract the attention of some other highly skilled spellcasters, who will be very interested to hear why you're mass summoning Lawful Evil spirits and letting them loose.

Overall, it's ingenious, but I think it might run into some nasty difficulties.

[ericgrau]

The main thing is to get signs, official documents, schools, libraries, etc. changed to the new language. You can speak common but not if you want to go to school, trade, or engage in any business or other venture that's legally recognized. Common dies off as that countryside language that only some poor commoners speak, and fewer and fewer of them as time goes on.

Granted poor country farmers make up the majority of the medieval population, but if they want to bring anything to market or engage in anything outside of their farming community they'll have to learn the new language. Only the poorest of the subsistence farmers who only grow enough to support themselves and struggle during every bad harvest will have no reason to learn it.

Limited spells per day makes it difficult to convert millions one by one with magic. Converting the leadership is at least a start to changing the standards though. Infinite wishes can do anything but it's cheating a bit in that it shouldn't be allowed in any campaign ever.

[Âmesang]

My longest running character can read/write/speak Ancient Suloise, so I suppose she need only join up with her kin in the Scarlet Brotherhood, unlock the octych secrets deep within Castle Maure, attain the aid of the Silent Ones of Keoland (by force?), and restart the Suel Imperium.

Could probably start in Greyhawk, since the 2nd edition Player's Guide said that its lawyers speak Suloise.

[Segev]

That Efreeti idea is brilliant. There's only one problem which I can see for it, which is frequency. No character is going to be able to reliably Bind more than a handful of Efreeti a day, and those Efreeti only have three Wishes apiece. So, if you imagine some highly optimized level 20 character, you might (might!) get 21 Wishes per day. That's a highball. Now, let's say you have a large party, which means six of these characters. So that's 126 Wishes per day. (You can get more with Leadership, but that's the nuclear option.) That's not a ton, considering the sheer number of people you can expect to speak Common. So the question then becomes, can you ramp up the prominence of those limited Wishes to draw everyone's attention and superstition without actively destroying the world? How can you get people to act as though Common is a magical tongue without having it work in a scientific and consistent manner? That's a bit of an awkward question. Most superstitions work because the topics involved are either rare or vague. But people speak the same language every day, and having the literal result of your words come true isn't vague. With this kind of variance, you'll almost certainly attract the attention of some other highly skilled spellcasters, who will be very interested to hear why you're mass summoning Lawful Evil spirits and letting them loose.

Overall, it's ingenious, but I think it might run into some nasty difficulties.

Good points. There's the obvious game-breaking Candle of Invocation cheese, but I find that an unsatisfying answer.


I think the solution is, in fact, to bring the party into it. Get yourself a bard ally who has a good diplomacy score, and a fighter who can bodyguard for both of you. While you're binding efreeti, one thing you offer them is a choice between this task and one to go recruit efreeti to help with the overall scheme. The bard's job is to travel the Plane of Fire to chat them up and sway them to your side, so that you can stop having to bind them and start just using the spell to get them here. Get them to help you out by creating scrolls of planar binding meant to conjure them.

The fighter's job is to help keep you from being double-crossed; you can have a rogue spying on the prospects to see who intends to double-cross you, as well. The main pitch is just how delicious the chance is, but you're going to be asking them to help you with something, so you'll probably have to bribe them, somehow. Or bully them.

Get a cleric with the Fire domain in on it, perhaps, for additional authority and muscle.


This approach pleases me less, still; it's relying too much on forcing a lot of powerful entities to work for you, because getting them on board just be "it'll be fun" is too unreliable. (You can try it, but you shouldn't count on it.) What we need is something "in it" for the efreeti who work willingly with us, preferably in a way that also furthers the elimination of Common as a desirable language to speak.

You could, alternatively, start in a small region, perhaps with a village. Bind your genies to work only there, for a time. The repeatability will happen there. Wait for that to spread out. Then bind genies to follow migrants away from it, granting the "wishes" of others who they encounter. In fact, yes, this is the way to go.

When you bind your genies, disguise yourself as a different person each time. Get your party rogue to help with this so it's a mundane disguise at least as much as an illusion. Double-blinding it by having an illusion over a mundane disguise may be your best bet. Get potions of glibness from your allies, too; you'll be lying through your teeth while pretending to be an atrocious liar.

Let slip during your negotiations that you're trying to thwart the plan of this organization to make Common die out as the most popular language in the area, and so you want to make it the language of reality so everybody WANTS to use it. Then, be willing to make the efreeti mad at you. Make threats as much as promises. Insinuate how this could be fun by warning them off of doing exactly what you want them to: interpreting words too liberally. Then "slip up" in your binding, letting some of them choose to remain without coming back to see you and almost all of them have the ability to twist the "wishes" of the common-speakers exactly how you want them to.

Plant the idea in their heads that revenge is possible against somebody who makes such sloppy bindings as you. Bonus points if, not only do you not look like yourself, but you actually resemble (in your disguise) some people who ARE trying to preserve Common. Your goal here is to trick the genies into wanting to come back for revenge by willingly granting the twisted wishes, when unbound. Hopefully with friends.


You can also probably get a little more mileage out of it by binding less powerful things to longer-term tasks of following around individuals from a "seed" village, where there are few enough that you can cover nearly everybody, with orders to do their best with their own capabilities to make anything said in Common that they hear come true. The village will start off saturated, so the rumors will start there with it being nearly 100% reproducible. As people flee, trying to escape it, those who have the bound outsiders following them will find the "power" isn't geographically linked. And, because your orders were to make "anything" they hear come true, the outsiders will also fulfill the words of anybody these people meet. If your later bindings are to follow a given individual until he meets somebody without another outsider trailing him, then hook up with that new person, this will spread like a disease vector. With longer-term bindings, you can get more bound outsiders into the field at once, and the more your "carrier" humans spread out, the more the bound outsiders will blanket a region around them.

It won't be "magic wish-granting" for the non-efreeti, but clever outsiders can accomplish a lot just by virtue of using their mundane and magical powers to obey orders. Like the genie in the original Aladdin story: they didn't actually have reality-warping "do whatever your master wishes" powers; they were just VERY powerful and skilled and worked to fulfill commands given.

Have the occasional efreet bound to not grant the FIRST "wishes" he hears spoken in Common, but instead to trail an existing bound outsider and grant the first "wishes" that outsider cannot.

Outsiders capable of suggestion would be particularly useful, here. You could have them spread the notion that the way to avoid this is to speak some other language, AND you could have them spread suggestions that convince mortals present to help fulfill the truth of the Common-spoken words they hear, preferably without realizing they're doing it or thinking they're helpless not to.

[Apricot]

Hmm... starting with a small village is fascinating, as is the whole deception deal. The latter is certainly a gamble: if it works, it works fantastically, but if at any point in time the efreeti figure out that you've hoodwinked them, you're in an even bigger mess of trouble. And that still doesn't get around what happens when the first high-level spellcaster investigates...

All in all, it's the best answer of how to do it in D&D without genocide, and I'm still on the fence about whether or not it would work. It's just such a crazy notion that defies any real-world analogy or any clear-cut mechanical solution that it's all but impossible to say how it would go down. I'm pretty sure that the biggest thing against it is that it's basically a conspiracy, and requires too many individuals as integral pieces. Individuals have a really nasty habit of being clever in the most unusual and unpredictable ways, and all it takes is one outsider or one spellcaster or even one incredibly savvy peasant who steps out of line for everything to come crashing down. So in the end, I'd say that it probably wouldn't come to full fruition, but I'll be damned if it isn't the best effort I've seen.