Community

I have much admired the new elven and dwarven alphabets (rellanic and davek) that were commissioned for the new 4e Players Handbook. I thought I had seen it mentioned somewhere that they had commissioned a draconic script as well, but have not heard hide nor hair of it mentioned in a good long while. This name of the alphabet in the players guide is "lokharic." My web searches have turned up practically no mention of the draconic script.

However, in perusing the new Geek Monthly magazine, issue 20 with Greg Kinnear on the cover, I came across an ad for the new Driz'zt novel by R.A.Salvatore The Pirate King on page 3. The ad is a humorous pamphlet in the style of an airline safety card titled "Pirate Safety & Emergency Procedures" which warns what to do in case of a Driz'zt attack on your pirate ship. At the top of the page in the right corner, I noticed the caption "Safety On Board" written in 4 different fonts, including English, rellanic, davek and a 4th, unknown font, which I am assuming is a sample of the yet unrevealed draconic font.

It looks pretty cool, kind of a cross between Tibetan and Arabic scripts. The characters appear to be (mostly) connected by a horizontal bar that has hash-like descenders, some straight, some curvy. It also has a few little curly queues and diagonal accent slashes that rise above the horizontal bar. A very attractive font, from what I can discern from the 11 sample letters that I have seen.

I am eager to see the whole alphabet. My guess is that it will be revealed in the forthcoming Draconomicon sourcebook. Hopefully they will have a little bit about the draconic language as well.

That would be very handy for RPG purposes.

What I did for my current campaign is to copy the letters from the pdf file into word.

As soon as you have each letter copied, it's very quick to write a couple things in "dwarven" or "elven" by copy-paste.

Would still be nice to be able to use these fonts though.

Dunamin wrote:

Just thought I'd note that the script is Iokharic, not Lokharic. As in Io, the creator god of dragons (see MM p74).

So it is! Good catch!

The font creator is Daniel Reeve who did a lot of work for the Lord of the Rings movies. I think he did an excellent job in designing the new D&D scripts. He certainly captured a look and feel for each of the iconic races.

Iokharic in particular looks like it could have been easily scratched in stone or on wood with a claw. Very fitting for a race that would more likely use their talons in lieu of a quill pen to inscribe warnings and mark their names around their lairs and such.