Elven Rothan
What is an Elven Ro’than? Think a cross between an Inca Quipu, an abacus, and Rosary beads. It sounds a little bit complicated, but bear with me here.
In most fantasy, Elves are just tall snarky dudes with pointy ears, good leaning alignment, and a superiority complex. Tolkien might be a notable exception here. My idea was to make elves quirky, and culturally different from us. The Rothan is just a simple gadget that could be used to highlight how odd and alien this race is from baseline humans in a fantasy settings. I’m not targeting any particular setting or universe here. I was mostly bouncing around ideas for an original fantasy setting that could be used for a RPG campaign (I was thinking generic GURPS fantasy rules or the simplified D20 rules of Basic Fantasy RPG.
My initial idea for Rothan or Ro’than beads was a small ring of polished ornamental beads that could be worn as a bracelet, or hanging from a belt buckle. Here is a rough sketch:
At the point when I dew this I figured that Elves would use a base-12 counting system. No particular reason why I picked that base - just a whim I guess. I definitely didn’t want Elves counting in base-10 like we do. Again, I want to highlight the differences between the races here. So assuming they developed different base system kinda made sense. Also everyone knows how to count in octal (base-8), and hex (base-16). 12 seemed like a nice number at the time.
The beads would be little cubes and their sides would be color coded, and inscribed with numeric runes. You could use the Rothan as a sort of abacus by counting beads around the circle, and flipping the beads around. I haven’t devised an exact system of how it would work. I simply imagined that it would be a cool image to have an Elf pull out one of these things to calculate how much money he owns for the night at the inn or whatever.
The name itself was somewhat random. I always figured that Elves would use some sort of glyph/symbol based language. The “Tha” glyph would signify the action of counting, while a “Ro” glyph would be a prefix applied to a verb to make it into a noun - especially to signify a physical object used to perform the action which is prefixed. So Ro’Than would essentially be a “counting tool”. The modifying “n” glyph would be affixed to the Tha to underline mystical and spiritual significance of this tool.
I figured that certain numbers would carry special significance for Elves. For example the number 12, when inverted upside down could be read as zero/nothing. It would be a sort of Yin-Yang concept - a single glyph symbolizing both life and death, as well as beginning and ending bead of Rothan ring. Some of the other symbols would have similar poignant meanings, making Rothan into more than just a abacus.
More superstitious elves could for example use it as lucky charms, or perhaps they could possibly try to get answers to burning questions by counting the beads in some way.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
