Help! I can't read!

[princekelwyn]

Here's a new campaign quality I came up with:

Illiterate Heroes (Permanent) Reading and writing are not the province of everyman.  Characters start off knowing how to speak their native language but not how to read it.  It costs another interest to know how to read.  Furthermore, all additional languags costs two interests, one for the spoken language and another for the written.

I thought this would be good for a more gritty historical game.

[Catodon]

For my Bronze Age world all characters without the Inscription Craffting Focus are illiterate. If you gain this focus you can read and write all the languages you know. This is just another alternative, and an untested one at that.

[Crafty_Alex]

Here's a new campaign quality I came up with:

Illiterate Heroes (Permanent) Reading and writing are not the province of everyman.  Characters start off knowing how to speak their native language but not how to read it.  It costs another interest to know how to read.  Furthermore, all additional languags costs two interests, one for the spoken language and another for the written.

I thought this would be good for a more gritty historical game.

Hehe, that's pretty much how we handled literacy in Epoch (in the Adventure Companion) - Language interests only provide speech; it costs an additional interest to learn to read that language.

[Blankbeard]

Not to sound stupid, but how do you end up using illiteracy in game?  It seems that the more common illiteracy is, the less it matters.

[Catodon]

Not to sound stupid, but how do you end up using illiteracy in game?  It seems that the more common illiteracy is, the less it matters.

Totally right. If few people can read then needing to read is rare. However, in Bronze Age societies all records are held by religoeus authroities. If you need to go further back than living memory you are going to have to get into a temple and read the records. This is the kind of thing that'll come up a few of times in a campaign, about the right power level for an interest

[princekelwyn]

Hehe, that's pretty much how we handled literacy in Epoch (in the Adventure Companion) - Language interests only provide speech; it costs an additional interest to learn to read that language.

Guess I got to buy the AC now!