Editing Midnight RPG - Orcish Written Language (section)

==Andrew==

I like that idea for the later written adaptation of Orcish. However, one of the main points I wanted to make with the written version of Black Tongue was that it could be picked up with relative ease by beings who had no previous knowledge of any written language. The one syllable = one character system works very well for this; you see a picture of something with a two-syllable name followed by a 'word' made up of two characters, and now you know what syllables those two characters represent. Given orcs' capacity for language, I'd bet most of them could commit it to memory in a week. (Assuming they had the skill points to spend ... </metagame>)

If the Cherokee syllabary only has 84 characters, I'd say we could get away with lowering Black Tongue to, oh, 67. The Cherokee people were obviously a lot smarter than ogres, orcs and filthy, filthy goblins, and besides, the Black Tongue seems mostly limited to short, gutteral bursts. How many different elaborations on "ugh!" do you really need?