8/1/2026 at 10:52:57 PM
This reminds me that as a child I taught myself Tolkien's runes from The Hobbit, which is mostly another substitution of the modern English alphabet:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirth#Runes_from_The_Hobbit
I got to the point I could read and write without a reference. Not as fast as English but not slow either.
Many years later I found a notebook with many pages of things I'd written but had since lost the ability to read again.
by suprjami
8/2/2026 at 3:27:54 AM
I have a very similar story, except I taught myself and a friend to write using "daedric" from Morrowind. I don't know if it was the actual daedric letters from the game, I think I just found a font that claimed to be daedric from a website and thought it was really cool. My friend and I would write notes to each other in this little secret chicken scratch-looking alphabet, it was fun.I sometimes try to remember how to write it or how to read it (I still have some notebooks from when I was a kid as well), but it's been 20+ years and I only recognize a few characters at this point. The rest is practically Greek to me now.
by nozzlegear
8/2/2026 at 7:38:04 AM
I learned the Daedric letters from the physical map that came with the game, which had the place names in both Daedric script and English.by dEnigma
8/2/2026 at 8:41:12 AM
I remember writing to friends using a Pigpen Cipher [0], which I probably first encountered in some sort of Super-Mario themed workbook or magazine page.by Terr_
8/2/2026 at 1:14:23 PM
I learned the pig pen cipher from a library book in maybe 4th grade. My friends had fun with if off and on through high school.by Cerium
8/2/2026 at 12:53:53 AM
I don't speak Korean, but I'm a language nerd. Sometimes for fun I write Finnish in the Hangul alphabet in my journal (requires some approximation/adaptation).by ronjakoi
8/2/2026 at 2:36:46 AM
I learned very similar runes for the Ultima games.by Carrok
8/2/2026 at 8:05:01 AM
Those are the ones that I learned, from the magic system in Ultima Underworld. I think that H and W are swapped, and that Tolkien's alphabet includes a few more letters. They're both similar to the Elder Futhark runes, if I'm remembering correctly.by khedoros1
8/2/2026 at 12:43:51 PM
Ultima Underworld runes also had a word associated with them, and the words had meaning, which was both amusing when you used them for spells, and iirc could result in experimentation to find new or undocumented spells.https://www.wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Runic_magic/Ultima_Und...
https://www.wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Rune_stones#Meanings
I remember an undocumented spell "Vas Kal Corp" which meant "Great Summon Death" and indeed it does. It ends the entire world and results in a game over.
by suprjami