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Apr. 4th, 2024 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsA few months ago scribe requested to gather a few friends for a birthday game of Dialect, which was very exciting for me personally because I had been wanting to play it for a long time; after some COVID-related postponements, we finally got the chance in the past month, and it really truly extremely didn’t disappoint.
Dialect is pitched as a role-playing game about language and how it dies: you are playing as members of a community that is in some way isolated or set apart, and use card-based prompts explore how the language of that community changes as a result of changing circumstances until it eventually and inevitably is no longer spoken.
The game provides you a number of settings as starting options for your isolation, which you then further define as a group by providing Three Defining Traits. Despite coming in determined to play something very fantastical, we instead made a hard left turn and picked the Worcester School: “They were sent to a remote English boarding school to become men. Instead, in their isolation, they found identity, community, and resistance.” This was irresistible for several reasons: a.) it provided us the opportunity to develop a lot of really fun schoolboy slang as our language; b.) it gave us a lot of chances to make jokes about Worcester, Massachusetts; c.) it meant that we had no option but to call our Isolate Community of Resistant Children ‘The Wusses’.
But we still wanted some fantastical elements, so we decided to set the three defining aspects of our boarding school were competition (imposed by the teachers), illicit shapeshifting (how do you resist Becoming Men? well,), and ghosts (BECAUSE WHY NOT) and developed ourselves a cast of youths:
a pair of stressed but charming first-years:
for the ‘Healer’ archetype, one who used his gifts at bird-shapeshifting to fly around to wherever first aid was needed
and for the ‘Oracle’ archetype, one who’d mysteriously inherited a family talent for hearing the dead and had been getting ominous warnings about the future from all the local ghosts
one second-year:
for the ‘Zealot’ archetype, a kid who was really invested in trying to make a water cult around shapeshifting into fish and learning from the river ghosts happen; his chosen name was Water-Speaker, the rest of us mostly called him Damp Stephens
& a pair of third years:
for the ‘Leader’ archetype, one golden jock (me) who’d been diverted from his natural destiny as Generic Team Captain by acquiring a Secret Ghost Boyfriend who taught him about shapeshifting and sticking it to the man
and for the ‘Protector’ archetype, the golden jock’s second-in-command, who was deeply dubious about the illicit shapeshifting because his great-uncle had died in a mysterious and tragic shapeshifting and sticking it to the man accident
Now, to be clear: I do not think we played this game as it was, necessarily, intended. I think in its natural form this game is meant to be an exploratory elegaic worldbuilding exercise in which the plot is secondary to the exploration of the setting and culture. We, on the other hand, almost immediately developed scads and scads of plot. We had plot coming out our ears. We decided almost right away that the school was very sinister and that kids who failed in the competitions often did not survive until the end; our first scene was trying to convince a reluctant Damp Stephens to put down his cult books long enough to get a good score in competitions and Avoid a Dreadful Fate! We found and befriended but unfortunately failed to save a sea monster from the evil teachers! The first-years who were excellent at shapeshifting and seeing ghosts and also each had an enormous crush on a third-year accidentally found out about my character’s secret ghost boyfriend, and then accidentally outed him to his best friend, WHICH THEN triggered the awkward unwanted revelation that the secret ghost boyfriend was in fact the best friend’s great-uncle, WHO IN FACT had been murdered by the school for his rebellious tendencies! All of this was just Act 1!
‘But hey,’ you may ask at this point, ‘is not this game supposed to be about words?’
So the way the gameplay actually works is that during each act, every player gets a turn to play a word creation card with a prompt on it; once the word is created, you then roleplay out a scene in which you use it. In our case, we were more reappropriating words to use as specific slang than creating whole words from scratch; for example, in Act 1, we generated the following words:
“sssss,” hissing-as-filler-word
“packmate,” how the kids referred to other kids that they had gone shapeshifting with
“spec,” a way to talk about the Ominous Future that came from convergent evolution of specter (hauntings!) and inspections (exams :((()
“dammed/up,” a way to describe inexpressible sadness, evolving obviously from the river cult
& “S.O.B.”, short for ‘silver or bronze,’ which we decided was a fun way for the kids to secretly wish each other well in competitions while sounding to the teachers like they were cursing each other out, and which did in fact turn out to be really fun to bang on the table and shout at the end of every scene
At the end of Act 1, you get an age transition – “an event to foreshadow the end of the isolation” – and an option to pick between two pathways, one of which eventually leads to separation-by-graduation, and the other of which leads to the school shutting down.
However at this point we were all so invested in the school being evil that we decided to go rogue and lead ourselves down a third pathway, ‘destroy the fucking school.’
Over the course of Act II, we evolved the following words:
“gold” – an expletive! the natural inverse of s.o.b
“flow” – a word for happiness! the natural inverse of dammed/up
“taxunus” – the ghost of a child killed by the school and trapped by a special kind of metal used in the school buildings to use as a power source!
“The Tower” - for the prompt ‘an environmental feature’; the secret tower we broke into to learn about this terrible secret, where shapeshifting doesn’t work as usual and thus kids who shapeshift are likely to accidentally start fighting or perhaps eat each other JUST LIKE IN MY GHOST BOYFRIEND’S MYSTERIOUS AND TRAGIC SHAPESHIFTING AND STICKING IT TO THE MAN ACCIDENT
“metaling” – a pun on ‘meddling’; a method to secretly free the ghosts by starting a trend among the kids to shapechange one finger into a claw and destroy bits of metal around the school!
And Subsequently, in Act III, after the third-years got caught in the act of sabotage and locked in the school’s secret dungeons, leaving it up to the untried first-years and the water cult to rally the rest of the school and save the day:
“potoo” – for the prompt ‘a symbol of hope’, after the Oracle managed to find the secret to freeing one of the trapped ghosts and saw it shift into a potoo and fly away!
“taxunomy” – the compiled secret knowledge around trapped ghosts!
“packmetaler” – a person within the Inner Ring of Resistance! (you will note that a lot of the Act III prompts involve evolving a word that you have already created)
“run-off” – a unity saying about the whole school coming together! (once again we thank the water cult)
and, finally, “go for gold” – an evolution of the classic s.o.b./gold dichotomy, now geared towards Fucking Things Up!
So you see what I mean about an overabundance of plot. However, we had an absolutely incredible time and I do not think any of us regretted accidentally writing an epic YA novel for a single second. scribe did generously lend me the game afterwards, so I’m going to attempt to run it with a different group of friends this upcoming weekend; please stay tuned for further adventures in playing with language, & I’m excited to see how it goes!
(We think in the inevitable trilogy about the Wusses Revolution, Damp Stephens probably has a heel turn and becomes the Book Three boss.)
scribe requested to gather a few friends for a birthday game of Dialect, which was very exciting for me personally because I had been wanting to play it for a long time; after some COVID-related postponements, we finally got the chance in the past month, and it really truly extremely didn’t disappoint. Dialect is pitched as a role-playing game about language and how it dies: you are playing as members of a community that is in some way isolated or set apart, and use card-based prompts explore how the language of that community changes as a result of changing circumstances until it eventually and inevitably is no longer spoken.
The game provides you a number of settings as starting options for your isolation, which you then further define as a group by providing Three Defining Traits. Despite coming in determined to play something very fantastical, we instead made a hard left turn and picked the Worcester School: “They were sent to a remote English boarding school to become men. Instead, in their isolation, they found identity, community, and resistance.” This was irresistible for several reasons: a.) it provided us the opportunity to develop a lot of really fun schoolboy slang as our language; b.) it gave us a lot of chances to make jokes about Worcester, Massachusetts; c.) it meant that we had no option but to call our Isolate Community of Resistant Children ‘The Wusses’.
But we still wanted some fantastical elements, so we decided to set the three defining aspects of our boarding school were competition (imposed by the teachers), illicit shapeshifting (how do you resist Becoming Men? well,), and ghosts (BECAUSE WHY NOT) and developed ourselves a cast of youths:
a pair of stressed but charming first-years:
for the ‘Healer’ archetype, one who used his gifts at bird-shapeshifting to fly around to wherever first aid was needed
and for the ‘Oracle’ archetype, one who’d mysteriously inherited a family talent for hearing the dead and had been getting ominous warnings about the future from all the local ghosts
one second-year:
for the ‘Zealot’ archetype, a kid who was really invested in trying to make a water cult around shapeshifting into fish and learning from the river ghosts happen; his chosen name was Water-Speaker, the rest of us mostly called him Damp Stephens
& a pair of third years:
for the ‘Leader’ archetype, one golden jock (me) who’d been diverted from his natural destiny as Generic Team Captain by acquiring a Secret Ghost Boyfriend who taught him about shapeshifting and sticking it to the man
and for the ‘Protector’ archetype, the golden jock’s second-in-command, who was deeply dubious about the illicit shapeshifting because his great-uncle had died in a mysterious and tragic shapeshifting and sticking it to the man accident
Now, to be clear: I do not think we played this game as it was, necessarily, intended. I think in its natural form this game is meant to be an exploratory elegaic worldbuilding exercise in which the plot is secondary to the exploration of the setting and culture. We, on the other hand, almost immediately developed scads and scads of plot. We had plot coming out our ears. We decided almost right away that the school was very sinister and that kids who failed in the competitions often did not survive until the end; our first scene was trying to convince a reluctant Damp Stephens to put down his cult books long enough to get a good score in competitions and Avoid a Dreadful Fate! We found and befriended but unfortunately failed to save a sea monster from the evil teachers! The first-years who were excellent at shapeshifting and seeing ghosts and also each had an enormous crush on a third-year accidentally found out about my character’s secret ghost boyfriend, and then accidentally outed him to his best friend, WHICH THEN triggered the awkward unwanted revelation that the secret ghost boyfriend was in fact the best friend’s great-uncle, WHO IN FACT had been murdered by the school for his rebellious tendencies! All of this was just Act 1!
‘But hey,’ you may ask at this point, ‘is not this game supposed to be about words?’
So the way the gameplay actually works is that during each act, every player gets a turn to play a word creation card with a prompt on it; once the word is created, you then roleplay out a scene in which you use it. In our case, we were more reappropriating words to use as specific slang than creating whole words from scratch; for example, in Act 1, we generated the following words:
“sssss,” hissing-as-filler-word
“packmate,” how the kids referred to other kids that they had gone shapeshifting with
“spec,” a way to talk about the Ominous Future that came from convergent evolution of specter (hauntings!) and inspections (exams :((()
“dammed/up,” a way to describe inexpressible sadness, evolving obviously from the river cult
& “S.O.B.”, short for ‘silver or bronze,’ which we decided was a fun way for the kids to secretly wish each other well in competitions while sounding to the teachers like they were cursing each other out, and which did in fact turn out to be really fun to bang on the table and shout at the end of every scene
At the end of Act 1, you get an age transition – “an event to foreshadow the end of the isolation” – and an option to pick between two pathways, one of which eventually leads to separation-by-graduation, and the other of which leads to the school shutting down.
However at this point we were all so invested in the school being evil that we decided to go rogue and lead ourselves down a third pathway, ‘destroy the fucking school.’
Over the course of Act II, we evolved the following words:
“gold” – an expletive! the natural inverse of s.o.b
“flow” – a word for happiness! the natural inverse of dammed/up
“taxunus” – the ghost of a child killed by the school and trapped by a special kind of metal used in the school buildings to use as a power source!
“The Tower” - for the prompt ‘an environmental feature’; the secret tower we broke into to learn about this terrible secret, where shapeshifting doesn’t work as usual and thus kids who shapeshift are likely to accidentally start fighting or perhaps eat each other JUST LIKE IN MY GHOST BOYFRIEND’S MYSTERIOUS AND TRAGIC SHAPESHIFTING AND STICKING IT TO THE MAN ACCIDENT
“metaling” – a pun on ‘meddling’; a method to secretly free the ghosts by starting a trend among the kids to shapechange one finger into a claw and destroy bits of metal around the school!
And Subsequently, in Act III, after the third-years got caught in the act of sabotage and locked in the school’s secret dungeons, leaving it up to the untried first-years and the water cult to rally the rest of the school and save the day:
“potoo” – for the prompt ‘a symbol of hope’, after the Oracle managed to find the secret to freeing one of the trapped ghosts and saw it shift into a potoo and fly away!
“taxunomy” – the compiled secret knowledge around trapped ghosts!
“packmetaler” – a person within the Inner Ring of Resistance! (you will note that a lot of the Act III prompts involve evolving a word that you have already created)
“run-off” – a unity saying about the whole school coming together! (once again we thank the water cult)
and, finally, “go for gold” – an evolution of the classic s.o.b./gold dichotomy, now geared towards Fucking Things Up!
So you see what I mean about an overabundance of plot. However, we had an absolutely incredible time and I do not think any of us regretted accidentally writing an epic YA novel for a single second. scribe did generously lend me the game afterwards, so I’m going to attempt to run it with a different group of friends this upcoming weekend; please stay tuned for further adventures in playing with language, & I’m excited to see how it goes!
(We think in the inevitable trilogy about the Wusses Revolution, Damp Stephens probably has a heel turn and becomes the Book Three boss.)
no subject
Date: 2024-04-04 06:00 am (UTC)'died in a mysterious and tragic shapeshifting and sticking it to the man accident' is my favourite phrase I've seen in a while. Also, I initially misread 'murdered by the school for his rebellious tendencies' as 'murdered by the school for his rebellious tentacles' and just accepted it on account of the shapeshifting.
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Date: 2024-04-06 11:59 pm (UTC)(if the river-beast had survived we might have had some rebellious tentacles! alas ....)
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Date: 2024-04-04 08:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-06 11:59 pm (UTC)(& I shall! :D)
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Date: 2024-04-04 10:38 am (UTC)This is great, I love it, so glad you got to play Dialect and write it up for us! :D
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Date: 2024-04-07 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-04 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-07 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-04 11:30 am (UTC)I've been wanting to try Dialect -- this is a fascinating report on how freely it can be played.
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Date: 2024-04-07 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-07 12:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-04 05:51 pm (UTC)Enthusiasm thoroughly rekindled, though, I want to go again immediately! Excited to hear how your game this weekend goes. :D
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Date: 2024-04-07 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-10 08:17 pm (UTC)Weird prophets of the deep for alllll!
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Date: 2024-04-05 01:29 am (UTC)Also, I don't ever really want to play these tabletop games but I LOVE reading your writeups of them. They're so lively, fun, and funny!
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Date: 2024-04-07 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-04-06 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-07 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-07 04:36 am (UTC)Anyway, the two boy ghosts can both turn tangible (at least to some extent) and fake being alive fairly convincingly when necessary. (This turns out to be helpful when they have to interact with still-living human witnesses and suspects.) Once they've met and realized that this is their chance to both avoid being packed off to the afterlife and to escape the school where they'd apparently been more or less stuck since their deaths, they decide to seize the opportunity to relocate and set up their own detective agency, initially in a treehouse. (The boy who was murdered in the early 20th century is a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, while his friend who died thirty or forty years later is a fan of film noir-type Sam Spade-esque detectives.)
Initially they just move around to different parts of England, but in the most recent series I've seen (which I believe has now been collected into a graphic novel), they've traveled all the way to California. Here they become embroiled in trying to resolve various issues related to the sinister backstories of a group of young Thai-American ghosts, whose culture-specific powers and forms of manifestation bear more resemblance to those of the supernatural-monster type of Japanese yokai than they do to the back-from-the-dead-but-still-more-or-less-recognizably-human beings ghosts are usually portrayed as in Western lore. For their part, the young Thai ghosts find it quite odd that the dead British schoolboys are able to become intangible or disappear and then pop up elsewhere at will. Apparently neither of these traits are part of the standard Thai revenant skill set.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-01 02:56 pm (UTC)