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CINDERFALL FIELD MANUAL  ·  LANGUAGES

What Gets Said

Two hundred years scrambled every old tongue into something new. Every character knows the Common Cant plus a number of languages equal to their Intelligence modifier (minimum one, their ancestry's language if it has one) — the rest are learned, not inherited.

How to read this: Ancestry Languages are known automatically by a member of that ancestry (and learnable by anyone with enough exposure). Rare & Regional Languages are never automatic — they're learned through background, training, or downtime study, usually gated by the GM to characters with a real reason to have picked them up.

§1The Common Cant


Common Cant
Every surviving language on the continent bled into every other one in the chaos of the Long Fall, and what came out the other side is Common Cant — a blunt, practical pidgin built for trade, warnings, and giving orders fast. Spoken everywhere, spoken badly by almost everyone, understood by nearly all of them anyway. Every character knows it.

§2Ancestry Languages

One per ancestry. Human and Emberforged deliberately have none of their own — see the notes below.


— (Human)
None
Humans have no language of their own by design — they speak whatever Common Cant plus whatever they picked up growing up. That's the point of Adaptable.
Vault-Tongue
Vaultborn
Old intercom code and shelter-protocol jargon, still used ceremonially and for anything meant to stay inside vault walls.
Ashwalker Cant
Ashwalkers
Fast trade-slang mixed with hand-signs, built for haggling over salvage without tipping off a rival crew listening in.
Glass-Sign
Glassblood
Not spoken at all — a signaling language read off the rhythm and intensity of Ambient Glow. Only other Glassblood (or anyone who's learned to watch for it) can follow a full conversation.
Echo-Tongue
Residuals
Not one language but whichever the borrowed fragment originally spoke — surfaces involuntarily, same as Bleed-Through. GM's choice which tongue a given Residual occasionally lapses into.
Ashen Liturgy
Cinderborn
The Choir of Ash's ritual tongue. Most Cinderborn know at least the responses, whether or not they've ever set foot near the cult itself.
Threnody
Hymnkin
Half language, half the Hymn Underneath given shape — less a vocabulary than a shared way of grieving out loud that other Hymnkin instinctively recognize.
Node-Speak
Wire-wards
A structured data-cant built for talking to machine intelligences directly — technically speakable by a human mouth, but it sounds wrong when they try.
— (Emberforged)
None
Communicates through Common Cant via crackle and shifting ember-light — functional, if unsettling to listen to for long.
Pre-Turning Standard
Old-World Construct
The clipped, formal administrative dialect of the world before the Turning. Sounds stiff and dated to everyone else — and increasingly to other Constructs too.

§3Rare & Regional Languages

Not tied to any ancestry. Learned through background, faction exposure, or dedicated study — never known automatically.


Machine-Cant
Soul-Economy
The working language ghost-machines and bound spirits actually use among themselves — distinct from Node-Speak's raw data-structure, this is closer to a trade dialect. Common among Hollowbound and Scrapwright circles.
Corporate Legal-Cant
Megacorporations
Dense, deliberately opaque contract-speak. Dense enough that most megacorps consider fluency in it its own specialized skill, not just a language.
Deep Vault Sign
Vaultborn Enclaves
A hand-signal language for shelters where noise discipline matters. Distinct from Vault-Tongue — this one's silent by design.
Drill-Cant
The Yankee Combine
Clipped command-and-response speech drilled into Yankee cadets; barely a full language, more a shared set of reflexes with vocabulary attached.
Warband Tongue
Dixie Territories
An oral, storytelling-heavy dialect that carries genealogy and reputation as much as information — how a Dixie warband tracks who owes who what.