A D&D Dungeon Master has gone viral after asking the fanbase to help them translate a note they wrote, as they had forgotten that it was written in a language from The Elder Scrolls series.
It’s a time-honored Dungeons & Dragons tradition for DMs to make their own maps and notes for players to use. These are often used with tea & coffee to age the paper, along with some artful tearing around the edges.
It’s also common for DMs to write messages using code or a made-up language, sometimes cribbing existing ones, like Tolkien’s Sindarin or the Klingon language from Star Trek. These are often used as part of puzzles, with players needing to decipher the writing to proceed.
It’s always important for the DMs to have the solutions to their puzzles written down, as it can be easy to forget them in the time between preparing an adventure and actually running it.
D&D DM needs fanbase’s help to translate note they wrote
A user of the DnD Reddit created a thread asking for the fanbase’s help, as they had created a handout in a fictional language but had forgotten what the translation was. The post quickly blew up, hitting over 10k upvotes and 400 comments within the space of a day.
It was quickly determined that the text was written in Falmeris, the language used by the Falmer race from The Elder Scrolls series, which appeared in Skyrim.
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“This is the Falmer language from Skyrim, hard to fully decipher due to it being handwritten,” one user wrote, “However, i believe it says, “Find the one who made you forget me, hear no soul.”
“Let me guess, you know exactly what it says, you’re just testing it out on a group of guinea pigs to see how well others can decipher it to determine how much difficulty your party will have huh? haha,” one user joked, prompting the OP to respond with, “You give me far too much credit.”
Some people joked that the post had ulterior motives, “Imagine how funny it would be if it turns out this isn’t the DM. It’s one of the players trying to figure out what their DM gave them. Not saying it is what is happening here, but it would make sense and be hilarious.”
D&D puzzles involving ciphers and codes are fairly common in the official campaigns, including the pre-5e ones. Sometimes, it’s best just to take one of them and use it in your adventure rather than going through the effort of creating a puzzle yourself, especially if you’re unsure if you’ll remember the solution later.