Uncle Lloyd's Tips and Tricks:

Ancient Languages in the CG

- by Sam Gxailey, Sam Sxherry, and Jeff Yxaus

Quest's Continuing Game has a convention used for the "old tongues" of the various races. You can find the details on this in the rulebook, under "Optional Conventions".

Sturian

Sturian uses the Windows font "Symbol", which is the Greek alphabet. This font comes with all Windows machines.

There are two ways to render text into Sturian:

The Easy, Lame Way

Just convert the whole thing into the Symbol (Greek-letter) font, and be done with it.

The Cooler Way

Change the text so that the Greek letters evaluate to the Latin equivalents. For instance, the Greek letter theta is "th", so change your document so that the "th" pairs all show up as thetas.

Follow these steps:

1. Change all "C" to either "K" or "S" as appropriate. (For longer documents, converting C to K or S can be a real pain in the tuckus. In these cases, Uncle Lloyd leaves all the C's as is, so that they show as the "C" character, and leaves it at that.)
2. Change all "PH" to "F".
3. Change all "J" to "I".
4. Change all "Q" to "K".
5. Change all "V" to "U".
6. Change all "W" to "U".
7. Change all "X" to "KS".
8. Change all "Y" to "I".
9. Change all "CH" to "C".
10. Change all "PS" to "Y".
11. Change all "TH" to "Q".v
12. Now change the whole document to the Symbol font.
13. Lastly, change all the numbers into Roman numerals. Remember to use the "C" key for the X (10) character.

Translation guide for the Cooler method:

Sturian:

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

K

L

M

N

O

P

Y

R

S

T

Q

U

KS

Z

Modern:

A

B

CH

D

E

F, PH

G

H

I, J, Y

C, K, Q

L

M

N

O

P

PS

R

S

T

TH

U, V, W

X

Z

If you use the Cooler Way, there's a handy Word document from CG 78 and 80 that provides a translation key, Sturian numerals, and lots of words and phrases in Sturian. You can use this to design your game, and then hand it out to players.

Mahiri

Mahiri uses one of the various Futhark runic fonts. We can't provide you with a link to any specific font (font sites come and go rapidly), but you should be able to dig one up from a Google search.

Use caution when mixing upper and lowercase with any of these fonts, since few of them support both cases. You'll probably need to switch your document into one case or the other. (For the font "Elder Futhark", switch the document to lowercase. The uppercase characters are the lowercase ones, but upside-down. You don't want this.)

Few of these fonts use numbers. Either spell out the numbers ("three", not "3"), or switch the numbers back to a regular font.

The Futhark alphabet does not have all the letters in the Roman alphabet, so there may be slight variations from font to font. This is okay, as we've already said there are "regional variations" for the mahiri tongue. For the Elder Futhark font, use these substitutions:

Roman letters	Character in the font
K	the letters for K and C look the same
Q	none, use C
V	none, use F
Z	this character is also sometimes used for X

Middle Dwarven

Quest hasn't settled on a decent font for the dwarves. Jeff Yxaus really likes Celtic ogham, as he feels it looks like the kind of font you'd use for carving into rock (it's all straight lines.) Sam Sxherry vehemently dislikes ogham. So make of this what you will.

If you feel you've got a good idea for an alphabet (or a freeware font) to use, please contact us.