Monday, January 4, 2010

Levitated Runes Font

If you're anything like me, or most "Call of Cthulhu" or RPG fans for that matter, you've seen almost every runic and occult font out there. One of the problems with creating props for an audience like that is that they immediately recognize the various flavors of Tengwar or Futhark. You're constantly looking for new typefaces for scrolls and maps to keep things fresh.

"Levitated Rune" could be just the thing. It's the work of Jared Tarbell, who was kind enough to make it publicly available at his website.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

very nice, a girlfriend of mine is now investigating each of their meanings, meanwhile me and a big load of your followers are thinking "it's the new year... how soon till he comes up with more stuff to sell?"
Sorry Oak, but you do realise you have become something of an obsession here don't you?

drjon said...

Personally, I'm very fond of using Ethiopian script: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%27ez_script
I used it for a Cthulhuesque/Squid character in a webcomic I used to create.

Anonymous said...

Ethiopic script is truly lovely, and though it is used by living languages like Amharic (which may make it not quite obscure enough), it is derived from the archaic South Arabian inscription lettering "musnad" which along with its minuscule cursive "zabur" form was displaced by Arabic script due to the Islamic conquest in the 6th century -- these having the dual lure of antique mystery and of being from the right place, time, and culture for writings of lost Irem of the Pillars, and even Abd al-Azrad the old Yemeni himself. No need to invent ancient scripts that actually exist!

See:
http://www.ancientscripts.com/s_arabian.html
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/southarabian.htm
http://csai.humnet.unipi.it/csai/html/index.html

Jeanne said...

::brain melts!::
Aha! I thought this was so cool when I came across this. A friend linked me to your blog a few days ago and I've been going through all the back pages when I saw this. Sometime later last year, I had made a prop inside Second Life for a necromancer that had very similarly styled runes on it that I drew myself. XD Must be having the same strange dreams as the man who made this font. http://necrochildk.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3115uu

Hybrid3rdGen said...

Thank You!!!
I needed an 'High Infernal' script to create some props for our campaign and this worked better than I could ever imagine.

The players are going to be thoroughly confused when they open up the journal and discover that they cannot read it. Too awesome!

I'll be able to use this time and again -- too cool!