Hebrew Question

[SheikhJahbooty]

Oh, I was supposed to start a thread for Jason about Dead and Back. I never played that game. There were these couple of really flakey groups of gamers in Atlanta that played like one session or just did all the prep work for a game and then never played. I have like a hundred campaigns like that, some commercial, some free ones, some of your games ended up like that. (plural you, you, meaning you, the monkeys that read these posts) I can't start that thread. I'm too busy or easily saddened or something.

So here's something cheerful.

There has to be someone here who knows Hebrew better than me.

I got myself a hanafuda deck, and then . And I thought, these are awesome. I'm going to totally make custom decks for weird card games.

Hebrew has 22 letters. I could make 2 suits, 44 cards, and then come up with some sort of mechanic that would use them to not only determine success but color the success, like, "You beat the Hittite warrior through sheer luck, because you drew the bright mim card." Or I could put Gematria number values on the cards or something. Or I could put a Hebrew word on the card that means something cool, like the cards that came with Everway.

There was a story in 1001 Nights about Bulikiya, a Hebrew king in ancient times, and it was Baron Münchhausen level insane. I could do that with the setting, fantasy with all sorts of strange creatures and people. Or wait, there's got to be some creepy East European Jewish ghost stories.

Oh I could do a trick taking game where you have to spell Hebrew words. Oh, maybe that would work better if I made a deck of Arabic letters. In Arabic the vast majority of the words are derived by conjugating a three letter root. For example:

k-t-b : write
kitab: book
maktub: office
maktaba: library
etc.

OK, I'll make an Arabic deck. 28 letters, 2 suits, 56 cards.

Wait maybe Hebrew does the same thing. I should ask someone.

Does Hebrew do the same thing? Are most of the words formed from three letter roots. My first thought is to say yes, it does. For example:

n-w-r: light
menorah: where you put light sources

But I can't say for certain. I'm hoping some enterprising game designer that knows more about Hebrew than me can say with certainty, either, "Yes Hebrew does that with almost all of our words." or "No that happens sometimes but it's just scraps of left over grammar from Aramaic." or whatever the case may be.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

As I recall, yes, Hebrew is mostly made of roots with suffixes. There is a little complication - such as there are two silent letters (Aleph and Ayen) and a few letters change their apprentice when placed at the end of words. Nor are all the roots just three letters, though I believe most are. Modern Hebrew of course takes some loan words from other languages - fries are of course chips, and robot is the same. (Fun trivia, robot is derived from a Czech/Slavic term for drudgery- roboata - and was coined in 1921 for the play "R.U.R." by Karel Čapek)

Arguably, if you need more cards, there is a writing style. There is also a numerology attached to the numbers, for example Eighteen is lucky because that is the sum of the letters Hey and Yud when spelling the word chai - "Life".

[SheikhJahbooty]

Right now I am just in the exploding with possibilities stage in designing these cards.

I have made some decisions.

I want them to be pretty. I've decided that the characters will look like the calligraphy on my copy of Shir-ha-Shirim. That means very mod, almost like the cursive style. I actually prefer the cursive style. You remember my original concept for card backs for my Cyberpunk Revival Entry.

I want the cards to be useful for a card game, hopefully the trick taking idea, also a solitaire game, hopefully something narrative, and also at least one role-playing game. These cards should be what you can get away with packing when your mum sends you off to Hebrew camp and insists that you not bring any of your heavy RPG books or crazy looking dice.

I'm not going to include any of the different final forms. If I include a disproportionate amount of any letter it will be because the trick taking game is good but not very fun with only two instances of waw in the deck, as a non-specific example.

I'd like to not include any letter disproportionately, because I think there might be some fun Kabbalah things I could do with a deck that is a multiple of 22, maybe something that has to do with the 22 connections between the sephiroth.

Kabbalah is one of the main reasons to do a Hebrew deck. Hebrew or Arabic or any other abjad really is useful for dealing out random words, like if you need to name an NPC really quick, just deal out 3 to 6 cards, and if you get N-R-L, you could name the NPC Nerrill, or Nerla, for a girl, or Nuriel for an angel or someone holy. But if I make a Hebrew deck and each cards contains a conflict, like something at stake, then we can deal out an event tree like a "tree of life" showing the PCs moving through a story and what's at stake in each scene.

"In this scene you finally confront the murderer." The GM deals mim, on one side it says "mitzvah" on the other it says, "mwt", so the GM decides what's at stake is the murderer's life. He's going to allude to the fact that the PCs could choose to help the murderer atone, and heal, and rejoin the town, but he's going to make it a lot easier for the PCs to just kill him and be done with it.

Right now I'm hoping 44 cards will be enough, a bright suit and a dark suit, especially if I include some Kabbalah data on the cards, for example the 22 letters are subdivided into three groups based on what kind of connections between the sephiroth each letter corresponds to, strait across, strait up, or diagonal.

If I decide to stay with one instance of each letter and I decide to go out to 66 or 88 cards, I'm not sure if I'll differentiate the suits with colors, or with symbols, like a star, an eye, a scroll, a dove, etc.

But if I keep the same amount of each letter I may have to assign point values for the different roots based on how difficult they are to form, but that might also provide some incentive to try to form 4 letter roots, like if you've seen the nuuns go out and you are holding the last, you might wait for a chance to use the last nuun to form a 4 letter root, since you know nobody is going to beat you to it, and it is worth a whole lot more points than a 3 letter root.

Conjugating Hebrew roots will not be an actual part of any of the games, because I agree with you that while semitic languages are very regular and reasonable for most of their grammar, there are certain letters waw, alef, etc., that when they appear in a root, they screw up the whole pattern, and it's horrible to try to remember how they work.

Gematria number values might be very useful on the cards, like for instance if the solitaire game we make up involves space trading or something, then it could be a handy way to deal out the percentage of the buying price that you are offered for goods in a new star system, Resh + Kaf + Mim = 260%, a good profit.

Obviously much tinkering and design needs to be done, and then playtesting, and then redesign. I'm not in any hurry, but it is one of my favorite projects right now.

[vulpinoid]

There are a lot of websites (and a decent number of books that I've collected over the years), which indicate a linkage between the 22 major arcana of the tarot and the 22 connections between the ten sephirot in the kabbalistic tree.

It is a fairly hotly contested topic though, with at least as many people arguing against it.

[Edited to put back in the "L"s that my dodgy keyboard keeps dropping out]