In-universe Orthographies

For writers working on documentation, story prose, announcements, and all kinds of Wesnoth text.

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Alexinor
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In-universe Orthographies

Post by Alexinor »

Stumbled upon this little tidbit about the lore while translating the Timeline of Wesnoth and it got me thinking — could this kind of thing actually make it into the game?
51 YW:

Wesnothian New Writing (the script later called "steel-hand", to distinguish it from the more complex "brush-hand" cursive brought from the Green Isle) is promulgated by royal decree. From this date all royal documents and public inscriptions are in New Writing. It spreads rapidly via the mercantile class. The older brush-hand writing continues to be used for magical purposes, scholarship, and in certain elevated literary forms.
I get that ESR probably made it up in one afternoon, but wouldn't it be a great contribution to immersion if we could actually see different writing systems ingame? Making an actual conscript and implementing it would certainly be an undertaking that not many would support, but the devs could probably get away with Tolkien's good ol' "Rohirric = Old English" strategy and assign already existing writing systems to different races (latin as the aformentioned "steel-hand" for humans, tengwar for the elves, futhark for the dwarves, arabic for the dunefolk, greek for merfolk, etc.). Not talking about relocalizing the entire game of course, just throwing it out there that it would be cool to see different scripts used in newly developed campaigns (irrelevant stuff like village names on specific maps, or a character's name being written differenly before they introduce themselves, just for the immersion points).
mctom
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Joined: June 7th, 2025, 2:44 pm
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Re: In-universe Orthographies

Post by mctom »

I think that at most it could be added as a guideline for illustrators, but I cannot recall any single image that would contain any writing..
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