I’m glad you didn’t ask. When I originally started my Felin mod for Starbound, there was no associated conlang. I had some signage that I’d written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet from Commander Keen, but that’s about it. I did early on have the idea to make the felin very sexually open, with sex workers you could visit (even if not buy services from) that would be heavily implied to be self-employed and happy with their job and all that.
They had this sign at the door:
If you can read SGA, you can figure out what this says. Or just hover over it like a caveman. The sex workers themselves, even though the term would never appear on-screen, were defined in the prostitute.npctype file. All was good for a few weeks or so.
And then I got a private message from one of the forum moderators:
Someone has just reported the mod, claiming that there is a “prostitution NPC” included as an “undocumented and unreported ‘feature'”. Now, I thought I’d bring this up with you before anything else. Is there any truth to this? Maybe the NPC in question exists, but is not a prostitute. Or the person reporting it is just plain wrong. In any case, I’d like to hear from you about this.
I will never forget that moment.
So what I ended up doing to appease the mod (who agreed that the person reporting it was wrong) was to rename the NPC to something less explicit. A comforter, perhaps? And that’s what almost immediately evolved into the Four Paths that the felin follow, making prostitutes a kind of comforter, along with doctors and bartenders. But that’s another dumb story.
That just left the sign. The most explicit, visible thing about the prostitutes. It wouldn’t be that difficult to find out what that second line involves. So what I decided I’d do was, I’d rewrite the sign. But there’s only so much space on it…
If “intercourse” won’t fit, and another language is too readable, why not use your own?
Even if you can read SGA, you’ll find there are characters on this sign that you can’t recognize. And yet, this says basically the same thing as the other sign, including the full word for “intercourse”, in a completely functional language with 2,379 words and counting.
Those two words were quite literally the first I’d defined.
