Dwarves, HammerTalk, and Morse Code in Your Game
One of the things I really like about the Dragonlance setting is the wealth of detail the various developers put into the setting from it's earliest 1e days, all the way through it's 3.5 days (and for all you 4e players, your PHB3 Minotaur character owes more than a nod to the Dragonlance version going all the back to the 1e Adventures book Weis and Hickman co-authored). Case in point, when TSR created the War of the Lance sourcebox, the definitive 2e document for the Dragonlance setting, they added a lot of seemingly 'fluffy' details that had almost no game value. One thing along that line was a dwarven language called Hammertalk. The idea of Hammertalk is that dwarves, in their mountain cities, can communicate by using their hammers to bang out messages that can be heard over great distances. For me (and I'm sure I'm not alone), the first analogy I thought of was Morse Code . More recently, for my own campaign, I've been thinking of building a treasure map...