Isle of untangled Tongues

The **Isle of Untangled Tongues** is said to be created by the mischievous God of Communication. All those who enter the island, regardless of language, origin, age and experience, will be fully able to understand each other. While upon discovery of this phenomenon it was thought to be used as a place for diplomatic meetings between distant nations, it was not meant to be. The island power not only affected written and oral language, but also face and body language, making each part unable to lie or to hide information from the other.

## The Isle of Untangled Tongues

West of the shores of the Desert of the Weariest there lies a small island. Seeminlgly unremarkable to the naked eye, it follows a similar biome and geology than those of the Hogmen and even the Okhostian Archipelago. Dense jungles cover most of the island, though there are many areas, especially along the coast, free of the mass of trees and vines, covered instead by orange and green sand beaches, which can turn black if the wind brings some cinders from the volcanoes from Okhost. At first glance, one would assume that the island would house a thriving society of traders, merchants and fishermen, since the weather is much nicer than in the islands to the east. But those more learned know that the island is uninhabited. The few, scattered ruins of stone cities, ancient enough to escape any known records, can be seen at certain points on the island: a building here, a tower there, some remnant of a road or a dock… Whoever they were, they are gone now, and ever since the island has been avoided like the plague. To compound the fear of the island, from time to time one can see the remnants of later explorers, reaching the island to search for long lost treasure, only to end up dying at the shore. The remains always look like they died due to infighting, never really showing any signs or a local beast, monster or tribe.

The local sailors know the island as the “**Isle of Untangled Tongues**” or the “**Isle of Unwanted Truths**”. Both terms are correct. The few experts who have managed to study the island and its remains and come back to tell the tale have seen glyphs and effigies of the God of Communication. While many believe that the island is not a divine realm, at least not on the level of those found in the northern parts of the world, the divine influence in the region is palpable. All those who enter, no matter their language, origin, age and experience, will be able to understand each other without any issue, as if they had been living together since they were born. However, those within the island will be compelled to tell the truth and only the truth, becoming incapable of lying or hiding information from any other. This will affect every facet of communication, spoken or non-spoken. The effects go further and further the longer one stays in the island. One will begin to feel the urge to speak more and more, talking about more personal and hidden aspects of oneself. Eventually the urge to tell one’s darkest and most personal to whoever is closer. This can often end in extraordinarily bloody results, as not everyone is ready to handle raw, unadulterated honesty.

The nature of this island meant that has been used in the past to try to create foolproof diplomatic relations between nations, though the results have been less than stellar. A couple of wars have been known to happen after the diplomats arrived back to their lands and tell them the secrets their counterpart told them, or when the diplomats killed each other on the island. Nowadays, some couples use the island to declare their eternal love to each other, in the one place where any kind of envy or disloyalty cannot be hidden. Most nations have forbidden the use of the Isle of Untangled Tongues as a measure to find justice, since the problems it creates are not worth the effort.

Fortunately, there is a very easy loophole around the island’s powers: you cannot communicate if there is no one to talk to anywhere. Thus, every time some nation wants to explore the island and its secrets, it sends a singular explorer to it. The rest of the crew will wait at the sea, while the explorer marches through the island. This has allowed the experts to map out and find several temples dedicated to the God of Communication, strange architectural structures mostly covered by the jungle and the ground. The investigation and exploration of the island moves at a glacial pace, though, since a single individual having to do all the work is a monumental task. Isolation can also cause troubles for the explorers there, since the growing need to talk and communicate with someone will cause severe amounts of stress to the individual stranded, and some of the individuals sent to explore, once they came back, showed severe signs of isolophobia.