12/05/2025

Happy Friday, and welcome back to Tabletop Thoughts!

This week, I’ve been tinkering with something small-but-mighty for Shadowdark tables: a simple, player-friendly method for learning new languages during downtime. If your campaign world is full of ancient vaults, forgotten scripts, and NPCs who love speaking in tongues the party definitely doesn’t know, this one might be a fun upgrade for your table.

I’ve been wanting a clean way for players to earn new languages without needing a whole subsystem or a pile of bookkeeping, and after some experimenting, this approach really clicked.

So let’s get into it!

Learning New Languages in Shadowdark

Not every hero strolls into the dungeon knowing Elvish, Deep Speech, or whatever mysterious runes loop across that dusty old slab they maybe… probably… shouldn’t touch. But with some downtime and the right guidance, any adventurer can put in the work to learn another language.

Here’s the method I’m using:

Downtime Requirement
The character must spend one full week of downtime studying the language.

A Teacher or Source Is Required
Learning needs a guide of some kind:

• Another PC or NPC who already speaks the language (for common tongues like Elvish, Dwarvish, Goblin, etc.)
• A Rosetta Stone–style artifact for dead, extinct, or forgotten languages.
  This must contain the ancient language paired with a language the character already knows.
  

The INT Check
After the week of study, the player makes an INT check, DC 20.

• Success: They now know the language.
• Failure: They must spend another week of downtime before trying again — but gain a +1 cumulative bonus on all future attempts.
  (They’re still learning, just not fluently… yet.)

There’s no maximum number of attempts. Persistence pays off!

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Why This Works at the Table

It’s fast, flavorful, and doesn’t bog anything down. Players feel like they’re earning something useful. And best of all, it encourages them to hunt for ancient tablets, haggle with scholars, and actually talk to NPCs instead of skipping past them.

It’s a tiny rule, but it opens up a lot of fun narrative space.

How I’ll Be Using It

I plan to drop this right into any campaign that leans even a little into exploration, ancient lore, or dungeon archaeology. It’s simple to run, easy to remember, and gives players one more meaningful thing to do between their dungeon crawls.

If you end up trying it out, let me know what new languages your party chases first — and whether it gets them out of trouble… or straight into it.

Keep on gaming!