Runes historical fonts

Runes is the first of Wintertree's historical font sets. It contains both authentic runes, derived from the Elder Futhark, and rune-style characters for the modern alphabet, as seen in the title. In addition to regular, bold, weathered, and outline versions of both of those, there are also versonis called Stones which you can use in text or to make your own paper runestones.

The font called Futhark is based on the Elder Futhark, one of the oldest of the many adaptations of the runes to numerous languages. It has five styles. Regular and Bold look very much as one would expect. Italic is a weathered version, and Bold Italic is an outline. The uppercase characters are the primary alphabet, while the lowercase has characters for signs such as TH that don't match any Roman letter.

Futhark Stones puts the font on a background of stone outlines

The other font in the Runes package, called Runik, is the modern alphabet depicted in rune-styled characters. The styles match those of Futhark, in that there are the expected Regular and Bold, a weathered Italic, and an outline Bold Italic. In the case of some

Runik Stones, like its counterpart, puts the font on a background of stone outlines.

The game-related uses of this font are numerous. Runestones, ancient inscriptions, and the like are of course obvious. What better way to give a clue to an ancient warrior's barrow than via a runestone set in some desolate place to commemorate his bravery on a long-forgotten battlefield? The Futhark would also be suitable for an everyday alphabet for a Norse culture, or one based on Scandinavian or Germanic roots. Runes are also commonly used for Dwarvish writing. Their historical use for inscriptions on weapons again lends itself to fantasy usage. Futhark could be used in conjunction with Runik, where players whose characters can read it would be given a handout showing the inscription in Runik while those who cannot would have it in Futhark. In addition, either font makes an excellent decorative border for a character sheet, a page of rules, or anything else that you want to give a Viking, old Anglo-Saxon, or possibly Dwarvish feel.

FONT LICENSE INFORMATION: Wintertree fonts are licensed as ordinary commerical fonts. This means you can install the font on your computer to use with programs such as word processors, design tools and similar applications, and use it for creation of print or PDF documents, images (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, etc.) and logos. In other words, you can use the Wintertree fonts to make things with and sell the things you make, but you can't sell the font itself in any way, or use it as a web font (@font-face). Credit is gratefully appreciated but not required.