just realized you could probably do some tower of babel exclusion. that would be kinda neat
That would be cool! Do you think you’d want to emphasise the universal primordial language like the speaking in tongues from Snow Crash, or the tower that reaches the heavens like that Ted Chiang short story?
not sure. it was a random brainwave, and im not yet sure where i would take it
the big hurdle with fauxclusions is you shouldnt just slap a magic effect inside a zone. ideally there should be some interesting nuance or knock-on effect to it
AW’s done this pretty well with the exclusions we’ve seen. so we’d have to figure out what the straw that brought the exclusion was, and ideally avoid the obvious ones
so, let’s brainstorm the Tower of Babel Exclusion Zone (TBEZ). obviously, the core idea is a language that everyone speaks.
so there’s three ways to handle this, either:
it’s completely mundane, just an Ur-language that was extremely widespread, and the exclusion zone made it (temporarily, or continually?) antimemetic; or
it’s a universal translation effect, and the exclusion broke/contained it; or
it was a magically created language
now, there’s a few things you’d have to decided about the way the exclusion works. if it’s 1 or 3, is it possible to go into the zone, learn the language, and come back out knowing it? can you speak to other people who know it outside of the zone? and for all three, why was it excluded? it would have to have been A) just the fact of the universal language itself caused it (boring), or B) some interaction of the language with another effect (probably memetics)
#1 is pretty interesting on its own — i find the idea of a completely mundane language like english getting excluded funny. “latin didn’t die, it was MURDERED”. there are a few ways you could pull this off. maybe someone managed to enchant the language, or connect it some magical effect.
maybe, saphir-worf style, there’s a mental hazard concept only articulate in this language, or most ably articulable. ooh, or maybe someone went to war with the empire that spoke this language, and caused the exclusion as a way to undermine it!
#2 is perhaps the most boring. (it’s also sort of (WtC spoilers) without any other fun stuff). you could still pull an interesting exclusion out of it.
maybe there was a R&D center pushing the boundaries of the translation magic, and found a way to translate the wind, or earthquakes, or the screaming of stars. maybe they translated the equations of reality into some mind-warping insight, or maybe an mental hazard was found and the translation effect allowed it to spread too readily.
there’s also some free variables here. was it just a spell people cast from time to time, in specific locations, or was there a universal translation engulfing all of babel? or was the universal translation extending over the whole world, excluded to babel to contain something?
#3 i also like. there’s a few things you can do with a magical language. did the language augment speaker’s mental faculties? did it allow access to some powerful magic? was someone using the language as a vector for controlling people? (this might be more (1) territory, but maybe it was a kind of fantasy newspeak which restricted thought?)
or here’s a wacky way to handle the idea, maybe people had different ideas about how to use the language. maybe some people wanted to make the language easier to speak for themselves, maybe some wanted the language more adapted for certain kinds of spells. the language underwent natural drift and bifurcation, and babel is just the last place people still speak the ancient form.
and one shouldn’t neglect the knock-on effects.
are there still ancient ruins with knowledge sealed away in the ancient language? are there classicists who travel to the TBEZ to learn the language and decrypt the crypts? or are speakers of the language persecuted by those who originally destroyed the empire?
is the TBEZ a neutral site of diplomancy where wildly different cultures go to speak to each other? or do the current denizens make this perilous? will the party brave those dangers, bringing their mysterious dead language scroll to where they can read it?
does whatever effect which caused the TBEZ still run rampant? are there beings given form by this magical language? does anyone try to access to the zone in hopes of mastering whatever power was wielded by speakers of the language?
as for TBEZ specifically as a big-ass tower, there are less possibilities there. you’d probably want some big risk incurred by building a tower that big.
although, i do have something in my setting that could be a twist on the idea. my world has so-called “tetratowers”, created by engineering around a similar effect which had allowed Total Banishment. the tetratowers extend extradimensionally fourthward, but if you built one “tall” enough, you might catch the eye of whatever it was the pulled on the Endless Perpendicular, or its conspecifics
altho i worry that would just be a rehash of the endless perpendicular