LoCoWriMo is a not-especially-widely known spinoff of the ever-popular NaNoWriMo that is near and dear to the niche subgroup of nerds who go hard for conlanging. Not all of our labors are as successful or popular as Tolkein’s Quenya and Sindarin, or David Peterson’s creations for Game of Thrones, Defiance, Thor: The Dark World (and a pile of other media), but I and many others do it anyway because we delight in the craft.
So, LoCoWriMo. The goal is to compose a “challenging but attainable” work of fiction over the month of July. I’ve seen 5000 words floating around as a goal, a total my silly little project coincidentally ended around. Said project is an epic retelling of the (mis)adventures of a raid on a dragon’s lair undertaken by players in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I ran 3ish years ago. Some minor changes have been made for the sake of flow (and getting the thing done in time; really the only thing you’re missing is an encounter with a spellcaster half-dragon and an insane priestess whom the party roflstomped), but all other major victories and missteps as ordained by the dice have been faithfully included.
The language is Riichna, a conlang that I started kind of began creating in the Times Before the Before Times, which is to say 1999, when I was especially ignorant of just about everything. Its first iteration was absolute garbage. The second and third weren’t much better. I began V 4.0 seriously a couple of years ago when I found that wonderful website, the Conlang Workshop, linked above in this paragraph. In the decade-plus between V 3.0 and 4.0 I’ve seriously studied more handfuls of languages and have spent time autodidacting the grimy nuts-n-bolts underbelly of grammar and linguistics. So my creation, while surely still rich with amateurish errors a trained linguist would pick out and deride in a heartbeat, is more coherent and cohesive than not at all.
Eventually I’ll get around to writing up a formal grammar of the dang thing.
Anyway, you can find the Riichna version here.
If you’re a fellow conlanger (in which case kez nal!) and want to follow along with a vague inkling of comprehension, or if you don’t care about what I wrote in any of the above paragraphs and just want to read an after-action report fantasy short story about five D&D adventurers up to the usual, good news! I also wrote a version in English!
F H Stevens 