Let's say I'm playing a character planning on pumping points into Linguistics regularly for the first few levels, with a high Int to start. What would be the most useful languages to know at 1st level? Which ones should be grabbed for the next few levels?
|
At first level, very first level, the most useful language is Taldane. The chapter assumes the PCs are all either from or passing through Taldor, and they've got to be able to communicate with each other linguistically unless your group is really into deep roleplay :P
Sorry, that was cheeky.
logic_poet's got the right of it, for the most part. If you want to be able to communicate with just about anything in the first chapter, Giant, Skald, Sylvan, and Taldane immediately suggest themselves. Daemons, Demons, and Dragons crop up fairly regularly, so Abyssal and Draconic should serve you well. Goblin is useful for precisely one encounter in the AP and after that is only useful for passing intra-party codes.
There are also, however, a number of regional languages common in the places the PCs visit that they really should not be able to predict in advance. In the fourth chapter, for example, they will be well-served by Draconic and may have had good reason to know it beforehand, but there's another very common language that people are going to use that they shouldn't have known about. Same for the fifth chapter and Abyssal...and the third chapter and Giant, come to think of it. There's no reason not to take a rank or two to learn them after having been exposed to the languages though, and as I've argued in other threads, there are ways to expose the PCs to those languages before they hear them spoken aloud if they really dig deep into what the Dancing Hut has to offer. At that point, however, you should have a good idea of what the languages are, and shouldn't need the Internet to tell you.
Where in the world am I going to find an instructor to teach me Taldan? ;-)
Thank you folks. That should be enough to get me going.
Yeah, the best thing for a party linguist is to be willing to put at least one or two points in linguistics per AP (or to take time to learn languages via the Ultimate Campaign method, but that takes at least a week, I think). Or put in a lot of points and try to do the method outlined in maiden, mother, crone for understanding unfamiliar speech via linguistics checks, and maybe eventually learning languages that way with time and GM permission.
Or purchase a scroll each of tongues and permanency :P
Which is a fine idea, but too pricey for a low level character.