I actually finished it! 31 plus new words in my various conlangs. Here’s the list:
Tynthna: dzashka /dzaʃ.ka/ – blue, light blue, sky blue
Tynthna: tsaatromii /tsao.tɾo.miː/ – dress, tunic, clothing, the basic piece of clothing. The traditional clothing which is wrapped around the body and tied with a belt. From tromiiv ‘to wear’ and tsaa ‘thing, item’
This is written for someone with a basic knowledge of Illustrator. You should also be able to adapt it for other software. This post won’t tell you how to design a script (basically, doodle a bunch of things until you get stuff you like. Make sure parts of the glyphs line up consistently). I’m using letter and glyph interchangeably here.
You have my permission to save, archive, alter, and remix this post, so long as you include credit (Silvercat) and the original URL.
To start with, create a new document in Illustrator with a nice large canvas. Turn on the grid. It doesn’t particularly matter what size the grid is, but 8 subdivisions work well for lining things up. I have the grid at 72px, which means each letter will be an inch tall if printed.
Draw your glyphs as lines, keeping a consistent grid system, glyph widths, ascender and descender height, etc. Your grid can be very complex! Multiple ascender and descender heights, sub-grids, etc are not unusual for a writing system. Just make sure you’ve got a system. Use guides and refer to your other letters often.
A wider stroke will make it look more like type – I was using 7 point. You’ll probably have to make adjustments later in any case, so don’t worry overly much about getting it perfect.
Re-use parts of letters where you can, like dots, curves, and angles. It doesn’t matter how many pieces a letter is made up of. I like drawing circles and cutting them to pieces as appropriate to get a good curve, but that probably won’t work for all conscripts.
That last letter probably needs some adjustment.
See how the curve of the first one and the last one line up? And the midline of the two middle ones? It’s the same dot in the first two. The three narrow letters are five boxes wide, while the larger one is eight. Depending on your glyphs that could vary a lot or not at all. Latin letters vary widely, from ‘i’ to ‘m’.
At this point, you could stop – it’ll be an acceptable set of characters, but letter nerds will notice some issues. You can fudge some of these with a round cap on the stroke.
The problem is that the strokes end in whatever direction they’re facing. Whether done as calligraphy or as a font, letters end in a deliberate way. Compare the leg on the first glyph and the curve on the second with similar Latin letters, like below. In both cases, they end horizontally. You’re not limited to horizontal or vertical, but make a decision about it.
How do you fix it? Easy.
Outline the stroke (Object > Path > Outline stroke) then cut away the offending bits with a rectangle and Minus Front in the Pathfinder palette. If you want to be super-accurate (and you should), turn on ‘snap to grid’ (Shift+CTRL+” or View>Snap to Grid) and reposition your shapes to perfectly align to the grid. You’ll likely have to use a combination of selecting shapes with the Selection tool and selecting segments with the Direct Selection Tool. A couple of bumps with the arrow keys and you’ll be spot on.
For angles, like the leg on the first letter, before you outline, you’ll want to reposition it so it stays in your grid (unless you deem that acceptable). And you’ll want to make sure there’s enough extra on any stroke that you can cut it cleanly. This can mean redoing your curves, so think ahead.
Two options for each
How about if you want something fancier? This is where it gets fun.
Go back to your letters that are made of just lines. Open a calligraphic brush library or make a new brush. For something similar to Latin letters, use the settings below.
Apply that to your lines, with a 1pt stroke. You’ll get something like below, with thick verticals and thin horizontals. (You can decide whether you want to apply it to dots or not, or to use a narrower stroker) But now you have a lot of adjusting to do to get it gridded.
You could actually just fix it and then leave it like that. Mess around with different calligraphic brushes to see different effects. You could also do like above to get sans-serif glyphs with variable line weight.
Or you can make a fancy serif version. Note: this is the quick and easy way. You can get fancier with curved serifs. Take a look at different font faces for ideas.
We’re making a slab serif font here.
The first step is to make nice clean angles for the serifs to hang off from. Extend your lines so that the round ends will get cut off, outline the stroke, then go to town with Minus Front. Get everything arranged on the grid nicely. It can be easier to outline each line at a time so you can make adjustments to angles and lengths as the other lines get set into place.
Nice and clean
Now make a little rectangle where you want a serif to be. The exact size is up to you. I did one square wide and half a square tall. You can use those just like that for serifs, but I want to get a little fancier. Select one corner and bump it up a point or two. Now copy, rotate, and reflect your way around the letter. (It’s easiest if you copy the serifs to a space below so you can just grab them without going back to a previous glyph).
For thinner strokes, you want thinner serifs – for the wide strokes I put the serif halfway into the stroke and for the thin, the back of the serif shape touches the opposite side of the stroke. It helps to turn on Smart Guides so you can get the exact middle on the exact line segment you want. You can use a serif font as a guide, but in the end where you put serifs and where you don’t is up to you.
Fancy
Now do all the rest of your letters and try not to curse past-you for deciding the writing system should have so many glyphs. Could be worse – you could be carving the whole thing into stone.
It’s been one of my most popular designs and now it’s better than ever!
It was inspired by a tweet by Ursula Vernon and now it’s got a cool background on many products and more stuff, including masks, aprons, and puzzles (and more) Get this design and many more here: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/40084254
I’ve got a new design up on Argent Whiskers, with more to come. It’s a cool design inspired by the carpets of free time spent in arcades, bowling alleys, theaters, and skating rinks. Get it on everything from masks to socks and be covered head to toe in 80s awesomeness.
I’ve already said that I was creating Maanxmusht to borrow words into Nyjichun, but I was actually making two conlangs. The other is Tsako, which is vaguely Finnish inspired, at least for the phonology.
Tsako and Maanxmusht are what’s called “naming languages” – conlangs with just enough vocabulary and grammar to create names. Tsako has less than 250 words – some of those created just to show how to use the couple of derivational prefixes that I’ve invented.
Tsako has paucal and plural, phonotactics that strictly limit what can appear where while still being CVC, and vowel harmony. I really like how the plurals turn out.
You can see all of it on my Neocities site. Here are some words I especially like:
nimerøl – to bake, which forms ɯtinimerø, a baker
iirikogyl – to barter
mørmøkottɑæd – ceramic, βottɑæd – clay (β changes to k medially), ætekottɑæd – potter
ʦøpɣø – blanket, paucal – ʦøpɣɑt, plural – ʦøpɔkkɔ, which changes to tsepe in early Nyji
to give – ɑɑreel, charity – ɑɑree
salt – øʣ
to shine – peippel
I could pick a dozen more, but how about I stop there.
I’m going to talk about how I use Calibre to organize all my files for tabletop rpgs. If you don’t know, Calibre is a program for organizing ebooks that’s available for PC, Mac, Linux, and even as a portable version. I’m not going to go through everything you can do in it, because it has good documentation and a helpful forum.
It’s great because you can have multiple libraries (I have books, comics, sewing & embroidery patterns, papercraft – those two could be another post – and games). And in each library you can have “virtual libraries” to divide them further, along with saved searches, tagging, and the expected metadata. For my games, I pretty much just use the tags and metadata.
Calibre main menu
I keep my ttrpgs on an external drive so I can work with them from both my laptop and desktop. This works perfectly with Calibre as long as the drive has the same drive letter on all computers. I currently have about 600 files in Calibre with a couple hundred more that I need to go through before putting in there. (There is so much free content out there, folks)
side menu in Calibre, showing Authors, series, formats, Publisher, tags, and saved searches)
My content is split into games (tagged ttrpg, physical game, or system for stuff like Fate or Dungeons and Dragons which has a ton of supplementary content), adventures (mostly dungeons because I love dungeon crawls), and resources (monsters and creatures, tables to randomly pick from, gm-ing tips, and other behind the scene stuff).
Everything gets tagged with where I got it (usually itch.io or drivethrurpg) and a genre if possible. For adventures and resources I just have to tag what it is (dungeon crawl, monsters, NPCs, fantasy, horror, etc) and what system or game it was made for. Games are the easiest to tag, but also get the most tags. Here’s an example:
Dragonhearts cover with the Author and tags.
For games I tag:
genre
Game Jam or similar – like the Bundle for Racial Justice & Equality (2020)
what the gm situation if it’s not the standard gming (gm-optional, gmless, rotating gm)
number of players if it tells me or I can guess (solo, 2 players, etc)
equipment needed (diceless, d6, tokens, index cards, card deck, loads of dice, etc)
themes (collaborative, storytelling, empathy, humor, communication). This is the hardest to tag
info like minimalist, one-page, two-page, supplement, hack, etc
stuff that’s in it like goblins, dragons, crows, rodents, etc. (A game where I can play as a rat is a must-buy)
I also tag stuff as played once I’ve played it, because I have so much that I want to get to.
I only put the main file in Calibre and note in the description that there are multiple files. Character sheets, alternate formats, handouts, gm helpers, and other miscellaneous stuff goes in a folder. Alternative playbooks for things like PbtA games or Troika! get added to Calibre.
I don’t have to have very many folders. Currently I have 40.
Example of some of the folders – side bar shows separate folders for solo games, adventures, and resources, and then folders for specific games. Main area shows the files for Fate Core, including different formats, tutorials, and character sheets.
Aside from that, I get the description from wherever I got the files, add the authors and publisher (often the same name), and a cover if it doesn’t have one. If I’m really good, I mark the date it was published so I know what version I have (sometimes I put the version number in the description too.) I get that from more information drop-down box on itch.io (you may have to hover over the updated section to get the date instead of the number of days ago) or on drivethrurpg, in the right hand side product menu bar.
Here’s a good example of one that’s done (also, an excellent game and I recommend joining its Discord for more resources)
Mausritter with the author, tags, format, publisher, published date, and description shown. This one I actually did make sure the date was correct.
You can see:
this was by Isaac Williams, aka Losing Games.
It takes 3 to 6 players.
It’s fantasy, with mice.
I got it in the Bundle for Racial Justice & Equality on itch.io (although I believe it’s also on drivethrurpg)
It’s an osr (old school renaissance) and SwordDream game.
I’ve played it.
Since it wasn’t tagged otherwise, it needs a gm.
… I didn’t mark the equipment – it basically needs a standard set of 7 rpg dice
It was update in Jun 2020
All in all, it’s pretty easy except for the loads of files I need to do. (I still have 65 folders of stuff to do just from the Bundle for Racial Justice.) Let me know if you have any questions or if you want to see more examples. Also, if you find this helpful, consider buying me a ko-fi
There are no written instructions and the photo instructions aren’t complete. I also made some alterations. I added the stone details in the top floor windows and in the tall turret I added the inside walls and roof (all of these were cut from pages that didn’t print correctly the first time). Also, the clear acetate and the crenelations on the roof were apparently supposed to just be glued on, but I added tabs and slits for them instead and they ended up needing no glue.
I disagree with some of the designer’s decisions, especially the grey buildings on the top which were an absolute bear to build. I may redesign it to make my own version, but if I do it won’t be anytime soon.
It’s simply printed on cardstock and is designed to be sturdy for the most part. I added reinforcement with scotch tape along the ramps and I expect it’ll last pretty well. I’m not going to use metal dice with it, but I don’t think I would put metal dice through any dice tower.
I’ve made a video of it in action and it sounds quite nice:
As I said in the first part, Inspiration Pad Pro was designed for RPGs, so it’s very flexible, but limited to keyboard characters (it’s possible to use the HTML entity equivalents, and I did that in the final form of the generator1). I hadn’t made this generator, so this will be more step by step. It should be possible to create generators for parts of speech with different endings, and possibly to derive words from an output (I haven’t done either of those tho.)
The IPA symbol HTML codes can be found here or by looking on each one’s wikipedia page which are linked from the IPA page.
Please note, I’m very much a beginner at this and there are likely to be better ways than I use. Our rules and phonotactics for Maanxmuʃt are:
In the previous post, I talked about how easy Gen is. In this post, I’ll show what a generator in Gen looks like and what the limitations are. I’m working on a language called Maanxmuʃt, which I had decided I wanted to be Germanic-like so that there would be a bunch of sound changes when words where borrowed, since Nyji words are basically CVC. (I actually stole the phonology and phonotactics from some Germanic language, I don’t remember which) So I wrote up some guidelines for the phonotactics.
Sometimes you just want a big list of words for your language. In my case, I’m creating a language (Maanxmuʃt) to be borrowed from for my main language (Nyji). There are two word generators I use:
This is an ad from McClure’s Magazine, from about 1900? I can’t find anything about Emerson bicycle shoes, but the Butler Boys were professional cyclists in 1890-1910. Only Nat has a reasonable sized Wikipedia article (Tom has a stub and Frank has nothing at all). While born in Halifax, Canada, they grew up in Cambridge Massachusetts and raced in America and Europe.
I’m guessing the ‘safety’ part of it meant that the laces weren’t long enough to get caught in the chain. Pratt Fasteners are a way to secure the laces without tying – it looks like they’re kind of like keychain rings? You seem to slide the lace between two metal rings. The best image I can find is at Getty Images (I had to turn off my ad-block to see the image) Pratt Fasteners were apparently popular for a while – a google image search finds a good number of ads mentioning them.
Transcription:
The Butler Boys prefer the Emerson Safety Bicycle Shoe
Elastic Gores.
Pratt Fasteners. No knots to tie or untie – Always Sure.
Fast Color Eyelets and Hooks. Never get brassy.
Best on Earth.
The safest, easiest and best bicycle shoe ever made. Strong, light, best of stock and workmanship. The very flexible shank, elastic gores and Pratt Fasteners are essential elements of ease, comfort and safety.
Sold only in our 27 Emerson Stores ore by mail. Send for “Mail” Catalogue. R.B. Grover & Co., Brockton, Mass.
$3.50 or $3.75 if sent by mail.
Please mention McClure’s when you write to advertisers.
I started the livetweet a long time ago (October 2017) and it took me way too long to finish (July 2019) and now I’m finally collating it here! And it’s very very long.
CW for blood, animal endangerment, rabies, bats, plane crash into the sea, period-typical racism
This is the back of the previous scan. I like the art on the other one better. It appears that every page had the same artwork on the front and back, if the two pages I have are an indication.
Her Hand
It is so very white and small
One cannot understand at all
How it could be so great a prize
As truly it is in my eyes,
Nor how, and with such cunning art,
Relentlessly it holds my heart.
I couldn’t find the author for this. It’s apparently out of a poetry book or magazine. I have a couple of pages from it. Every page has the same art on the front and back. There are the initials “E.L” in the bottom left corner – I’m assuming it’s the artist. My other page is framed and I don’t want to open it up to check.
I suspect this is a specific type of poem, but I’m not a poetry expert, so feel free to tell me what it is.
