Al Bhed Font

Easy desktop publishing is both a blessing and a curse for propmakers crafting fantasy tomes and documents. It's now absurdly easy to layout a scroll or page and print off a copy all ready for aging. The downside to that is how certain fantasy fonts get used over and over, destroying the immersiveness of said documents. I'm looking at you, Tengwar. There's nothing worse than someone saying "I love that font!" when you reveal your masterpiece. And I'm saying that as a geek that trekked off to Marquette University to ogle their Tolkien collection when I was a teenager.

The only way to combat that while still keeping things simple is to find relatively obscure fonts that have the right look. Japanese video RPGs are one source I've had success with. They're obscure enough that the fonts aren't too familiar, but their enthusiastic fans insure their alternate languages get fontified on a regular basis.

The Al Bhed font comes to us from the Final Fantasy series. It has a nice alien look, particularly the stretched upper case letters.  The blade-like strokes fit nicely with how I envision Deep One writing would look.