H is for heiroglpyhs

: RPGs

It's fun to come up with the occasional prop handouts for your roleplaying games; maps, letters, scrolls, contracts, and so on. Here are some good places to get fonts that can be used to embellish your paperwork with exotic, infernal, or alien writings.

Blambot

Blambot has a number of free fonts that are useful for RPGs, primarily their strange languages fonts:

  • Dark Arts looks like arcane runes
  • Dwarf Spirits are Nordic-looking runes
  • Miskatonic could be the infernal writing on a demonic contract
  • Roswell Wreckage and Squiznor are excellent for temples dedicated to the Great Old Ones or creatures from the Far Realm

Dark Arts

Comicraft

Comicraft represents the high end of font design for comics and games. Among their dingbats and clip art fonts:

  • Ancient Astronaut is good for mystic runes
  • Gobbledygook could be used for more infernal or cthonic writings

Gobbledygook

dafont.com

They have a section titled Runes, Elvish that has unlicensed free fonts inspired by Lord of the Rings, Elder Scrolls, and D&D.

  • Alphabet of the Magi is a unique-looking glyph font.

Alphabet of the Magi

Wizards of the Coast

WotC has custom fonts that represent the Dwarvish, Elvish, and Draconic languages; you can see samples in the 4th edition Player's Handbook. The official fonts have never been sold or released by WotC, but some enterprising font makers have recreated them. As unofficial, unlicensed fonts they move around from place to place, but a web search might turn up some archived copies. They are:

  • DnDDraconic.otf
  • DnDDwarvish.otf
  • DnDElvish.otf