AstralNotix

In-game languages are live, in session chat and in dispatches.

If your character speaks Elvish, you can say something in Elvish. Anyone at the table who doesn't speak it doesn't see your words. They see the script. Real letterforms in a real alphabet, sitting there being completely unreadable.

No italics. No "[speaking Elvish]" in brackets. No honor system.

THE SEVEN
Celestial, Deep Speech, Draconic, Dwarvish, Elvish, Infernal, and Thieves' Cant.

Every one has its own alphabet and its own typeface, served by us so it looks identical on every machine at the table. None of them is the same letters in a different color.

Elvish flows, with small marks riding above the letters. Dwarvish is all straight cuts and hard angles, closer to chiseled than written. Draconic fuses letter into letter and comes out as long unbroken bands. Celestial runs along one continuous stem line, so a whole sentence reads as a single stroke. Infernal and Thieves' Cant are both read right to left.

Common isn't on the list, and that's on purpose. Plain speech is the default. Everyone always understands it, no setup required.

HOW A CHARACTER LEARNS ONE
You don't pick them. Your race and your class do.

Build a dragonborn rogue and the builder hands you Draconic and Thieves' Cant, listed right on the sheet, no checkboxes anywhere.

Elvish belongs to elves of every kind, drow and eladrin included, and to half-elves, satyrs, dryads and anything else with fae blood in it. Dwarvish covers far more ground than its name suggests: dwarves and duergar, but also gnomes, orcs and half-orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, goliaths and every flavor of giant. Draconic goes to dragonborn, kobolds and lizardfolk. Tieflings and cambions read Infernal. Aasimar read Celestial. Githyanki, githzerai and anything that crawled out of the Underdark read Deep Speech.

Common never goes anywhere. Everyone speaks it, always, whatever you rolled up. It's the floor, not a reward.

That means nobody shows up fluent in all seven. You get what your character would actually know, and the list changes the moment you change your race or class in the builder.

Four of them arrive later, because they come from your subclass rather than your class. A warlock sworn to a fiend picks up Infernal. One listening to something much older picks up Deep Speech. A divine soul sorcerer picks up Celestial, and a draconic bloodline picks up Draconic. Those land when your subclass does, so a level one sheet won't show them yet.

Rogues get Thieves' Cant from the very first session. So do assassins and thieves, which will surprise nobody.

Your GM still reviews the whole character before approval, and approval is what makes a language real.

GMs speak and read everything, always. That one isn't up for debate.

HOW TO SPEAK ONE
There's a language dropdown sitting next to the whisper picker in session chat. Pick one, type, send. It stays where you left it, so a long argument in Dwarvish doesn't mean re-selecting Dwarvish every single line. Your own message keeps a small "in Dwarvish" tag so you can always see what you said and in what.

Dice are always Common. A /roll while Draconic is selected still goes out as plain, readable dice.

Your languages also sit on your character sheet with a chat button beside them, the same one your attacks and spells have, so you can tell the table what you speak without typing it out.

WHAT EVERYONE ELSE SEES
Speak the language, you read plain text. Don't speak it, you get a run of glyphs with a quiet "in Draconic" label above it. You know who spoke. You know what language it was. You have no idea what they said.

Two things worth knowing about how the scrambling works.

Repeated words repeat. Say "gold" three times in one message and the same glyph run shows up three times, because a fake language with no vocabulary just reads as static. This way it reads like speech.

And it's not a code. The glyphs are never built from your letters, so there's nothing to decode, no substitution to reverse, no player cracking it with a frequency chart at two in the morning. Word patterns don't carry between messages either, so nobody assembles a dictionary over the course of a campaign.

The scrambling also happens on our servers, once per reader. The real text never reaches a browser that isn't allowed to have it. No dev tools trick, no "view page source" cheat, no extension that quietly ruins your reveal.

DISPATCHES, TOO
GMs can write a dispatch in any of the seven. All of them are on the list, not just the ones your party happens to speak, because a warning carved in Infernal that nobody present can read is half the reason to carve it. Players who know the tongue read it clean. Everybody else gets a gorgeous page of nothing and a very good reason to go find a translator.

ONE QUIRK TO KNOW
If your GM approves your character in the middle of a session, the new languages won't appear in your dropdown right away. Refresh the session tab and they'll be there.

ACCESSIBILITY
Glyph runs are hidden from screen readers and replaced with a short line saying it's speech you don't understand, because hearing an alphabet recited letter by letter helps nobody. The language name still gets announced, so the information is the same: you heard Draconic, you didn't follow it.

That's the whole mechanic. Go say something you shouldn't.