>On to my actual question: Storm Tribe lists three Lhankor Mhy
>scripts, "cat scratching", "dog scratching" and "stone scratching".
>Anyone have any guidelines on assigning difficulties for these as far
>as Reading and Writing? Would you require separate skills for each of
>them? Subskills like the Combat skills have? The same skill but
>increasing difficulty?
IMO the original script is Stone Scratching and that any Lhankor Mhy Sage is trained in. When Paper was invented (or papyrus or what-have-you), demotic versions of Stone Scratching sprang up and these are what are known as Cat and Dog scratchings.
So any Lhankor Mhy sage can read Cat Scratchings or Dog Scratchings depending on where they grew up. Reading the other type of scratching is like trying to read Cyrillic (strange and full of false friends, like PEAKTOP) and I would handle this with a -3 unless they spend some time learning it.
As for the Elasa secrets, Elasa is Lhankor Mhy's girl, the Mistress of the Light of Knowledge. The passage in the box is a bit confusing as to the relationship between the second vocabulary and the code system - if the meaning changes depending on the Elasa secrets then why must the latter be learned separately? My best guess is that the Elasa secrets is the equivalent of Caesar's Cypher used with the second vocabulary, and that this unnamed vocabulary is the older more primal way of spelling things.
--Peter Metcalfe
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