“Held Action” rendered in Dscript.
Dscript is a form of writing designed for economy of pen strokes and combining all the letters of a word into one character. While it uses the same letters as the English language, it represents the letters differently than the Roman alphabet with which many people are familiar.
The immediate use for role-playing games is creating mysterious inscriptions and runes via the Dscript generator. A full prophecy can be rendered in Dscript and printed out, before applying aging techniques to create a page torn from a tome. A wizard’s personal rune of power can be ginned up from slapping random characters together; I experimented with “xkcd.” In an interstellar milieu, Dscript can become the script of a galactic society — Basic is often the Common of science fiction settings — helping create the sense of an extended, far-reaching culture, or coexisting written practices, such as the alien alphabets seen on Futurama.
Opening lines of Dante’s “A new life.”
Dscript’s designer points out that the generator isn’t perfect. Generated text “pales in comparison to the hand written form.” There’s a free manual available for download with samples of bodies of text, like the opening lines of Dante’s “A new life,” shown to the right. Using Dscript with ease sounds like a huge undertaking — think about how long it takes a child to achieve fluency writing in their native alphabet — but the manual can still provide inspiration in diagramming the characters and their use, as well some other examples of passages rendered in Dscript.
Dscript is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution. The designer notes attribution exceptions are freely provided on request. Thanks to Dragonlover for posting the link to Dscript on RPG.net.
Held Action 