Caveman Speak

Buying that Dungeons and Dragons manual got me thinking about some of my olden days of role-playing, and for some reason, the game that popped into my head was one my group only played very briefly: "Og, the Caveman Game."

The genius and downfall of Og was its merciless restriction on language. The character sheet included a section with eighteen words listed, and you got to roll to see how many of those words your character knew and could speak. The range was 2 to 5 if I remember, and if you picked "eloquent" as your caveman's special ability you got a bonus two words. The list was: you, stick, small, shiny, me, hairy, big, go, rock, bang, cave, water, sleep, food, fire, smelly, thing, and (presumably just to be funny) verisimilitude. You could also petition the game master for the right to choose a word that wasn't on the list.

I picked you, me, and go, and in what I considered a stroke of genius, convinced the GM to let me add "fuck."

In case you've never thought about it, there are sooooo many ways to use the word fuck. With that one pick, I not only gave myself an edge for romancing the cave-ladies ("you, me, go fuck?"), I could also tell someone they'd disappointed me ("you fuck me."), threaten them if they were thinking about betraying me ("you fuck me, I fuck you!"), tell someone off ("go fuck you"), express dismay ("fuuuuck me!"), and of course, swear in a satisfying way whenever something went bad, as any role-player knows always happens sooner or later. The next best swear word was "smelly," and only one guy picked that. Everyone else was stuck just growling frustratedly at our misfortunes, while the one guy got to lamely say "smelly," and I got to shout "fuck!" By smacking my fist into my palm, I could also use it as a synonym for "hit," "fight," or "attack."

Eventually, after a lot of laughs, we gave up on Og because it didn't have an experience system to let you learn new words, which meant that we ran through most of the clever combinations of our vocabularies pretty quickly (even "fuck") , whereafter an adventure of even minimal complexity quickly became more a game of charades than a role-playing session.

But, fuck, was it ever a lot of fun at the start!