Hey.

I have a question regarding this. Until now I have always played it that if you don't have access to education as a skill you are unable to read.

THis has worked fine up until now as most of my players have been human and it kinda fits that the commoner is unable to read.

However, how would this work for Dwarves? A dwarven soldier without education I would say can't read: but some dwarven abilities require them to "read" off their book of grudges?

As I'm about to run a whole bunch of dwarven adventures, I thought it'd be a good time to have it cleared up.

The rules are indeed that unless you have opened the Advanced Education skill you cannot read.

If a Dwarf, might allow Folklore or similar to identify common runes like a woodsman trail signs.

Don't have it in front of me but if the Grudgekeeper (or whatever name for that is) doesn't have Education that is an "oopsy" and some houseruling in order.

I wasn't sure if it was an official rule; but it's how I've always played it. The folklore seems like a smooth workaround for some issues - but not strictly for reading a book of grudges. (Dwarves are very meticulous with their grudges).

The primary reason being,that

[spoiler Alert]

in Harrower of Thanes- the party is required to do some investigation involving reading some khalid (I don't have the book to hand.. spell is almost guaranteed to be wrong) or pass a 3d education check. The only party member with education is a High elf and I strongly doubt one of his kind would be allowed near the hall of records..
This leaves the dwarf, without education to read through the records and find the plot.

We play it so that Dwarves and Elves can read their own languages without education (since there are no real commoners among those races) but since they are not from the empire they will still need education to read Reikspiel. I think that makes the most sense.

My house rule is anyone who begins Affluent starts with Education acquired.

I figure the Forger should have it too.

jh

We play it so that Dwarves and Elves can read their own languages without education (since there are no real commoners among those races) but since they are not from the empire they will still need education to read Reikspiel. I think that makes the most sense.

All my players started off as poor/broke.

I may allow them to each read their own language (but badly!). That seems a fair compromise.

I had some ideas on house rules for this, but all my players have at least acquired education, so I did not come up with a full houserule.

But here are my thoughts:

• Read using the Folk Lore skill. My thought was that it requires you to be trained at least once in the skill and have the specialization "Basic Literacy" for Folk Lore. Then the player rolls Folk Lore to see how well he/she understands the text.
• Creating a Focus talent called "Basic Literacy" which grants the ability to read using Folk Lore.
• Allowing all player characters to start out with basic literacy, if they want to, and how well they can read/write would be depending slightly on starting wealth level.

Obviously, basic literacy would mean really basic linguistic understanding. As in you read very slowly, probably mouthing the words, cannot read or understand advanced texts, can barely write (if at all) and can only read your native language.

One thing to bear in mind in the time period that WFRP is set, people tended more to be illiterate because they were too busy just trying to get food to survive

This is something that the elder races don't really suffer from due to their longer lifespans. I agree they would not know Reik, but their own language would not be too much of a stretch for them to be literate in.

Some good points made.
I do generally like the idea of basic literacy though: I'll run the options by my players this week and see how they feel.

We normally play every sunday foor about 6 hours ; but some sporting event got in the way this week...

The way my GM handled it was as a group the person with the highest int would read it out loud and the rest of us would try and decipher what word they might be trying to say.