The world not only has its own language but its own alphabet as well. Completely alien characters that do not always match up exactly to corresponding English equivalents. For one thing, it’s entirely phonetic. There is no long and short version of the same vowel, but a different letter for each. Different sound means different letter, and there is no additional sound created by the joining of two letters. For instance, a ‘T’ and an ‘H’ side by side will be pronounced separately; the sound for a ‘TH’ in English is given by an entirely different letter.

As you can imagine, the Maldene alphabet has many more letters than the normal English alphabet does. So, how where did I get the design for so many different characters. Well, long ago me and a friend sat down and began drawing up random symbols. After a while I began to get a sense of what the general sort of “feel” for my alphabet should be. Individually some letters may resemble other unrelated characters of symbols; there’s one that looks very much like the capacitor symbol in electronics, and another that looks sort of like a mutant ‘K’ (which I purposefully assigned to a sound that was anything BUT a ‘K’).

So I started out with random drawings, is there anything wrong with that? No. Think about it. Any given alphabet in History began the same way, with a bunch of people scribbling down random stuff then after a while developing an overall pattern for how other letters should look like. I just did it over a few hours instead of a few centuries, then a bit of tinkering here and there, dropping some that didn’t work, moving a couple around, and you have the current Maldene alphabet… available under downloads on maldene.com for registered users only.