If there were ever a game that seems to be tailor-made specifically for me, it's Dialect: an RPG about linguistics with a really gorgeous art-style that's right up my aesthetic alley. I'd skimmed the PDF a few years ago, but I really started wanting to play it this spring when I bought the physical book (and deck of cards) in one of my late-night "I want to buy an RPG" moods. It sat on my shelf from the time it arrived until yesterday, when my usual RPG group (read: very patient friends) indulged me in a session. Originally, we were planning another game of The Quiet Year (we played for the first time a few weeks ago and quite liked it), but I suggested this as a different take on the diceless story-game genre. I want to talk about Dialect, and also in particular about our session.
Dialect is, as the subtitle has it, "a game about language and how it dies." Players take control of a community living in some kind of isolation from the outside world, and map over time how their language develops and diverges because of that isolation. I would like to say off the top that Dialect is often pitched as a "language-building game," but that's not really what it is: Dialect is about building a language in the same way that The Quiet Year is about drawing a map. It's a tool and jumping-off point for telling the story of a community. The language-innovation aspect of gameplay comes pretty much exclusively in the form of coining new lexical items (words) based on existing words and inspired by prompts that come about during play. While this may disappoint the nerds like me who want to Roll for Genitive, it's kind of a blessing when it comes to convincing your non-linguists friends to play the game. With that being said, there are certain prompts which ask you to build a word from scratch instead of re-tooling an old one, and the rules for this system do dip into real linguistics (never thought I'd live to see the day that IPA guides or the phrase "fricative-heavy inventory" made it into an RPG), but these aren't really core to the game. Also, the chapter on building words from scratch is written by David J. Peterson, whose work (particularly The Art of Language Invention) was hugely influential in my decision to study linguistics, so that was nice to see.
Let's talk about how Dialect plays. At the start of the game, the players select one of the book's 16 "backdrops," each of which provides both a setting and a general narrative arc for your isolated community. There's a decent variety in here: one of them has you as a quarantined community on in island outside of Boston, one as a pack of wolves contending with encroaching human civilization, some as real-life (or closely real-life-inspired) peoples and communities dealing with language loss. Also, one of them is just Toy Story. I will say that, despite the number of options, our group felt like there weren't many we wanted to play, either because backdrops dealt with issues that we didn't feel informed enough to deal with or because they took place in settings that we'd done to death (sci-fi is well-represented). That said, we did settle on one we liked, which I'll talk about later. From there, you answer some prompts to define three important Aspects of your isolation, as well as some discussion questions to help you flesh things out more. Each player also chooses one of the three archetype cards they've been dealt (e.g. Zealot, Ruler, Sage, Explorer) to create a character that lives in this isolation. Character creation essentially just consists of a name, a role in the community, and their relationship to the three aspects.
From there, play proceeds in turns: on their turn, each player gets to play a card from their hand which has a concept (e.g. Filler Word, Vice, Money, Faction) which the player then ties to one of the aspects and imagines a new word for. Then, two or more of the players have an in-character conversation to elucidate how this word is used and viewed. Once every players gets one of these turns, the game continues to the next Age: a passage that foreshadows or hastens the ending of the Isolation is read (these passages come from the backdrop), and one of the aspects is evolved for the new era that the community is in. Then, more turns, more words, another age change, another round, and then the game is over and each player gets to narrate an epilogue for their character (once again inspired by prompts on cards).
For our game, we chose the Worcester School backdrop, which is presented as a very old-fashioned boy's boarding school in the English countryside. Almost immediately, we decided to make some edits: it was still an elite boarding school, but it was now the Archer Academy for Gifted Girls, a world-renowned elementary/middle/high school where every student was among the best in the world in some specialty (whether it be a sport, an art form, or an academic subject). Our starting aspects were "Pushed to Our Limits" (representing the incredible level of academic and personal pressure each girl lived under), "Covert Fun" (representing a thriving underground party scene that escaped the administration's notice), and "They Don't Have Our Best Interests at Heart" (representing the fact that the teachers and school officials were often not only poor caregivers, but in fact actively seeking to make the girls fail). Our characters were:
- Margaret, an 18-year-old chess prodigy who has been at the school from a young age. She's jaded and burnt-out from competition, and simply wishes to coast in her last few years. Luckily, chess prodigies are rare enough at Archer that few are looking to challenge her primacy. She's also the student body's main hookup for "erasers", a catch-all term for party drugs, coined by us.
- Zofia, an early-teenage genius in the field of nuclear physics and the social "queen bee". Zofia has been the #1 ranked student at the school for more than a year, and lives in constant fear of ever losing that title.
- Sarah (a.k.a. Monty), a 15-year-old rugby goalie and general jester. Her uncle works at the school, so she has more sympathy (or perhaps naïveté) to the administration and its methods than most of her peers.
To me, the game really clicked in the conversation phases that occurred after the addition of each new word. The game ended up more character-focused than I think any of us were expecting (and significantly moreso than, say, Quiet Year), and the prompts to create new words were more jumping-off points than anything else. The conversations had beautiful character beats, fascinating additions to the story, and some legitimately goose-bump-inducing improvised dialogue. To me, those moments of zooming in to specific characters will be a requirement for any story-game going forward. I will say that we allowed those scenes to incorporate characters other than Margaret, Zofia, and Sarah, and I'm not actually sure whether that's sanctioned by the rules. Regardless of whether or not it's RAW, I liked doing it and I think it made particular sense because we were playing with the lowest recommended amount of players (the book says it's for three to five people). It also let us zoom in on certain characters even harder, in my opinion: in a scene between Zofia and one of her teachers, she gets to be the main character and focus in a way she can't be when it's Zofia and Margaret.
Also worth noting that because our setting and themes were so different than the ones in the backdrop, the age-transition prompts that it provided weren't all that relevant to us and the dramatic arc that we ended up with. We still had a great game, of course, but it was a shame that the only backdrop that held significant appeal still needed to be chopped and screwed to make for a story we felt like telling.
So, would I recommend Dialect? Fuck yes. So long as you know what it is going in (a character-centered story game about a community, not a game about dialectology), it's a really gorgeous experience and one that I hope to have again. I'd have another Dialect session in a heartbeat, so long as I could find (or even write) another backdrop that sounded interesting. After telling the stories of Archer Academy, I'm also now hankering for an RPG set in a high school. I'm probably going to buy Monsterhearts 2 soon, so maybe that'll scratch the itch.
Comments
Post a Comment