Languages Expanded (Whiteleaf, In Progress)

[willpell]

Sylvan

The forest is surely Nature's greatest triumph, for in no other ecosystem does such a diversity of life exist in such inextricable symbiosis. Even when nothing sentient walked in the wilderness, it was in a state of constant communication, a wordless tongue of mutual codependence where all survived through their entanglement with all others. So perhaps it was inevitable that in time a common form of expression, for concepts too complex to understand purely through instinct, must have arisen among even the most dimwitted of creatures in such an ecosystem. This hasn't stopped the Elensetharsai ("elves" to the impatient Mayfly People who have "recentlY" surpassed the extent of their once-superlative civilization) from claiming total and unapologetic credit for the Sylvan language's existence. Exclusively thanks to them, these ancients boast, every creature in every Terrestrial in the known cosmology - from elephants to field mice, dryads to paper-wasp hiveminds, and extraplanar spirit-wolves to fungus-encrusted jungle demons - is capable of holding a dialogue with every other such creature if the situation demands it. If the still-older denizens of the deepest sylvan morasses know otherwise, they've yet to contradict the elven boast, at least anywhere it would have wound up on the public record.

By necessity, given the absurd variation among the creatures who know it, the Sylvan tongue is entirely percussive; it matters not what sounds the speaker makes or at what volume or speed, only the rhythm in which they are made. Inevitably this also makes its dialogue relatively prolonged, limits it to the simplest of communicable concepts, and leaves it rife with potential ambiguity outside of the most obvious of situations. The only creatures who can claim to speak Sylvan "well" are those both highly intelligent and possessed of the inordinate patience that comes with longevity; the two largest categories of such beings are elves and treants (dragons come in a distant third, mostly due to having some trouble with the "patience" part in their own relative terms), and these are responsible for virtually all of the relative handful of actual conversations in Sylvan that ever occur, as well as for the fact that it has a written form (consisting of what one human druid referred to dismissively as "dots and dashes", to the substantial annoyance of his elvish peers). The intricacies possible in these discussions are unheard-of in the mainstream tongue spoken by animals, plant-creatures, tempermental dragons and attention-span-challenged fey; such "High Sylvan" is virtually a separate language, and a more codified version of it forms the basis of the secret Druidic speech.

Benefit: Nothing moves through a forest without disturbing its intricate equilibrium slightly; even the elves who pride themselves on their natural discretion, if they manage never to snap a twig underfoot, at least cannot help but have nudged a few leaves away from where they fell. And should a creature mystically obfuscate his actual trail completely, his presence was doubtlessly still observed by the eyes, ears and noses of literally thousands of lifeforms, and a few of them will manage to chatter of the fact to their kindred before the memory submerges into the tumult of their tiny, presentient minds. As a result, no one can have ever been in a forest without, to be a bit less than technically precise, the forest itself having noticed. And those who can overhear the gossip of its residents will learn at least some of what the forest knows in very short order.

Any character who knows Sylvan receives the benefit of the Track feat while within any forested area (excluding extraterrestrial "forests", but including extraplanar ones, even if they are as alien as the poison jungles of the Abyss or the black-metal "woodlands" of rural Acheron). If the character already has a feat, he gains a +2 bonus to Survival checks made to follow trails in such an area. Additionally, characters who pass through such areas are considered to have left a record of their passage in the "consciousness" of the local fauna and flora, and thus are counted as having a trail even if they are under the effect of a pass without trace spell, which only Sylvan-speakers may find or follow. The trail-maker's Wisdom modifier is applied as a penalty to rolls attempting to detect this path, and once the character is outside the bounds of the forest (DM's discretion, but generally a stone's throw or so beyond the treeline, or instantly at any sort of dividing line such as a road unless the woodlands resume on the far side), the spell once again conceals their passage completely.