#drow language

Most followers of this blog will be familiar with the fan script “Drow Rounded” and its variants. It’s definitely become a popular alphabet, since it comes with a downloadable font and is distinct from other forms of elvish. I myself have used this alphabet in the past (you can even see it in the blog header). I don’t mean to dissuade anyone from using it, and I doubt this post will have any impact on its prevalence, but I do want to talk about it and it’s origins, and why I want to rehash the Drowic alphabet, rather than using the widely accepted fan alphabet.

The origins of the alphabet itself are a bit more murky than I would like, but I’ve done a fair amount of digging. The original “Drow Rounded” font was created in 2002 by Daniel U. Thibault for use with a Elven Kingdom of Arèthane roleplaying group.

If you are unfamiliar, as I was, Arèthane and its various related realms are a homebrew world derived from the Palladium Fantasy RPG System, borrowing various lore from sources, including AD&D, which is how we get drow in the mix.

Not that I am personally a lore purist, but from my initial research, I fail to find any discernible link between the alphabet created for the EKA and any canonical language published as part of any D&D lore, regardless of setting. So while I will humbly acknowledge the “Drow Rounded” alphabet for its prominence (if not provenance) and won’t discourage anyone from using it, I won’t be using it as one of my references with regards to developing a Drowic alphabet for the purposes of this project.

So where does that put us?

Dungeons and Dragons, as far as I am able to discern, has never created an official Drowic alphabet distinct from other Elvish alphabets. Drow are, much to their own chagrin, still elves, and are descended from cultures which shared language and writing systems with surface elves. I want to start there and see if I can’t work my way towards something which feels distinct enough from the various Elvish alphabets while still sharing a common root. To do that… we need to talk about Espruar…

The various creators who have worked on Dungeons and Dragons over the years have not always reached a consensus on lore prior to publishing (understatement of the year?). There are, from what I can tell, three distinct “Elvish” alphabets. Two of them are explicitly referred to as Espruar, which is recognized as the name of the Elvish alphabet in the Forgotten Realms setting. The third is one which was published in the 2014 5E PHB which is labeled “Elvish Script: Sample Alphabet.” There are other Elvish scripts employed throughout various art and other materials, but these are the three I want to look at the most.

As it has seniority, let’s first look at the example we have from the AD&D (1E) Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Box Set (page 8), which I will refer to as “Runic Espruar.” I find this alphabet to be… busy. It doesn’t come across to me as an efficient alphabet (perhaps if it was a more logographic writing system?) and it seems like it would take anyone an annoyingly long time to write letters like A, Q, and S. It also lacks that… je ne sais quoi – that elegance we expect from an Elvish script (thanks largely to a certain John Ronald Reuel). I think this might be an alphabet that was developed in very early elven history – the Cuneiform of Elvish. I don’t tend to think that this is the alphabet used by any modern elvish society, but could still possibly be something found in ancient lost ruins forgotten by time.

Next, we’ll look at the example we have from the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting manual from 3.5E (page 86), which I will refer to as “Angular Espruar.” Take anything I have to say about this variant with a grain of salt because I’ll admit… I don’t like it. I find it to be very sharp with long, hard lines which gives it a similar feel to languages like Dovah and Daedric from The Elder Scrolls, or Draconic and Dwarven (see also 1E Dethek) from other D&D sources. It does function much better as a written alphabet than Runic Espruar, and comes a little closer to the elegance we would expect, but misses the mark in my opinion. It also does not seem to resemble Runic Espruar in any discernible way… it really does look like it takes greater influence from 1E Dethek. This could reasonably be a writing system developed in the early days of elven contact with other racial groups. The need to communicate quickly and concisely would be emphasized when dealing with shorter-lived races, so a more efficient writing system may have been developed to facilitate such communication. It could also have been influenced by alphabets used by other races (though I’m already far afield enough as it is, I won’t go spelunking quite that deep).

(Click here for a more in-depth fan guide on 3.5E Espruar)

Finally that leads us to the 2014 5E Players Handbook (page 123) “Elvish Script: Sample Alphabet” (ESSA) which is decidedly not Espruar, as the SRD & PHB for 5E are largely campaign setting agnostic. It does, however, contain many of the aspects of an Elvish script I’ve personally come to expect and appreciate, the elegance, shapeliness, and flow of the letters. I want my Drowic alphabet to be something somewhat akin to this in feel.

So where does that bring us? I think the best place to start with a Drowic script is likely something with common characters or shapes to Angular Espruar, but with an even more concise, efficient script which has diverged from old Espruar (possibly a common ancestral alphabet we don’t have examples from) after the drow descended into the Underdark. There were a few goals I wanted to accomplish while working on this alphabet. First, I wanted the characters to seem unique enough from one another that they’re not frustrating to try and distinguish (a personal problem I have with “Drow Rounded”). Second, I wanted to try and recapture the elegance of a more Tolkienesque Elvish script without actually taking more than vibes-based inspiration from Tengwar. Third, I wanted to make a script that was a script, as in words could be written in a single stroke without lifting one’s pen (something none of my extant references do, which provided a unique challenge for me). Lastly, I wanted to make a usable font which could be shared and downloaded for anyone to use (this last piece, I’m still working on, but keep your eyes open for that in the future). There may still be some tweaks to the script in the future as I work on getting a font made, but I hope you find it interesting in the meantime.

As a proof of concept, but also for fun, I wrote the name of one of my drow characters in the Drowic script.