On a sticky Wetherspoon table, (the location of all good roleplay experiences, I find), my friend took Dialect out of her bag and introduced me to her latest indie roleplay investment.
Dialect is a game about language. The players find themselves in an isolated setting, and must develop new words to describe their life and environment. Over time, as the plot moves along, so too does the language, with words changing their meaning or form, or being removed from use entirely.
We chose to start with ‘The Outpost’ scenario; we were part of a colony on Mars. Why had we been chosen to come here? What had happened along the way? We decided we were the world’s best engineers, botonists, doctors – but our supply ship had malfunctioned on landing, and the majority of our resources for survival had been lost.
‘The End Day’ was upon us – the day our food would run out. Our communications had gone down on the rough descent, so we weren’t able to inform Earth that we were in crisis, but… they were coming, right? They would have an understanding of what had been damaged and would be sending help. They would be here by The End Day, we were sure of it.
Early on, we named our isolation ‘The Crap Heap’, used both as a term of endearment but also a fairly accurate description of the buildings we had pieced together with what little equipment had survived the trip. For the first half of the game we giggled everytime we said ‘The Crap Heap’, because it was absurd, and yet by the latter parts of the game, we started to take it a lot more seriously. The Crap Heap, for better or worse, was our home!
A ‘Language Deck’ pushed along the narrative by splitting the game into three Ages. It guided us to develop our language, and created moments of dialogue where the language could be used.
My first card from the Language Deck was ‘Resource’. I had to come up with a word for a resource we couldn’t live without, and I decided on Taktak (a derivative form of the Earth company who had sent us to Mars – Musktak). Taktak had the texture of a fruit pastille, was the size of a cube of jelly, and was packed with all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals that were essential for survival.
My character, Samantha the Mathematician (now the community’s food auditor), had a meticulous spreadsheet of how much Taktak there was, and her calculation served as the countdown towards The End Day. The dialogue moment I chose to stage was between myself and the community’s doctor. She had concerns that a member of the crew was unwell and would benefit from extra Taktak – we talked about whether we should compromise the food supply for the needs of the few.
After much conflict, due to the pressures of our isolation, we accepted that Earth weren’t sending help; if we didn’t make our own plans for Dettance (the possible future beyond The End Day), then we would all die when the Taktak ran out. This forced us to venture out into the dangerous landscape of Mars to a secondary base we knew existed, and began the struggle towards long-term survival.
And we succeeded, because we wanted a happy ending (haha).
Our playthrough took around three hours, which included learning the game. Like Fiasco, the game is what you make it – completely unique depending on who is playing, what world you build together, how the cards push your narrative in new directions, and how you decide to respond to those prompts.
By the end of the game we were able to speak fluently with the new words we had created. It added an additional layer of creativity that I hadn’t experienced in a roleplay game before, and created a deeper level of immersion into the story.
If we don’t agree to work together in wakam, we will all vatta. We must make a pookam so that dettance is within reach.
– A sentence that made perfect sense in The Crap Heap.
Purchase the game for yourself (the roleplay manual as well as the card deck) here: thornygames.com/pages/dialect
