Putting It All Together

Let’s apply this system to Varia, the elven berserker from Chapter 1 of the Freelinking: Node title Adventurer’s Guide does not exist . We need one language from Varia’s culture to be her native language, so we’ll chose Orc. She could also become fluent in Common, but we’ve spoken to our Narrator and the other players about Varia not being as comfortable in Common and obtained their approval, so instead we’ll roll 4d4 for language points. We get 14, and we’ll invest 6 into Common to bring Varia to the Advanced rank. That leaves us with 8 points, which we’ll hold on to for now.

Varia also gets a language of her choice from the Soldier background, so we’ll roll 4d4 again, getting 9 new points for a total of 17. We want Varia to be fluent in Sylvan, which is an unfamiliar language in her setting, so it will cost 15 points. However, if we have her learn Elvish first for 10 points, we can treat Sylvan as familiar instead, and it will then only cost us 6 points to achieve the fluent rank. We will therefore spend 16 points to learn both Elvish and Sylvan.

This leaves us with 1 point. Looking through the list, we note that Goblin and Gnoll are familiar languages for Varia. If we invest 1 point into Gnoll, we can bring it to an intermediate rank, making our final list of languages as follows:

Beginner: Goblin (0 points, +0 bonus)

Intermediate: Gnoll (1 point, +5 bonus)

Advanced: Common (6 points, +15 bonus)

Fluent: Elvish, Orc, Sylvan

Later in her travels, Varia enters a tavern where another patron attempts to speak with her in Gnoll. Varia is of intermediate rank in Gnoll, and mostly holds her own in the conversation, often leaning on Orc to fill in the gaps. Once the patron asks Varia for directions to the next town however, the Narrator decides that there’s an interesting chance for failure in this interaction and calls for a Survival check using Gnoll. We would like to use Varia’s Survival proficiency on this check, but we can’t do so reliably with intermediate rank, so we choose to make a language check first. Gnoll is a familiar language for us, so we only need to meet a DC of 15 to be able to use our proficiency bonus while speaking it.

We roll and the d20 shows an 8. We add Varia’s –1 Intelligence modifier and her +5 language bonus for Gnoll for a total of 12—below what we hoped for. Not only can we not use our proficiency bonus for the upcoming check, but we can’t even use our +1 Wisdom modifier! Bracing ourselves, we roll the Survival check. We breathe a sigh of relief when we see a 19. Although Varia would have gotten a 22 if she’d been fluent in Gnoll, the 19 is sufficient. Varia knows the route well, and so even though she realizes she doesn’t know the Gnoll words she would want to use in this situation, she gets the main points across to the traveler.