Why I Like Running Campaigns

One of my players has a neuroscience degree and used to work in emergency medicine. Naturally, last night when another character tried to read the mind of an NPC who was suffering from aphasia, I had to turn to him. “If you’re suffering from aphasia, is it correct in your mind?”
Of course, it turns out what kind of aphasia you actually have, and what part of your mind has been damaged, whether it’s the motor nerves that control your speaking, or the actual language processing center of your brain. But something I’d never thought about that’s actually an interesting topic to learn more about.

Or another example from this campaign: how do you learn, from just reading text, what a language actually sounds like? One of the background traits for the Iron Gods campaign I’m running lets a player start with the ability to read Androffan - the alien language used in the adventure. By default, it’s just reading the language - no one has heard Androffan spoken in thousands of years. but how hard would it be to learn that? I actually picked up a book about the Rosetta Stone and deciphering hieroglyphs to learn more about it. I knew the basics of the story - breaking the code starting with Greek-derived names of Pharaohs, but not some of the specifics. And in that case, the key to learning how it was spoken was realizing another, currently spoken language - Coptic - was actually a modern form. So it didn’t really answer my question of whether it would be possible to learn. There’s another book I have on my list about deciphering the Mayan language. that might do that.