Night of the Raven is the add-on that made Gothic 2 famously hard. It shipped in Germany on 20 August 2003, reached English players in 2005 inside Gothic II Gold, and arrives on PlayStation and Xbox on 29 September 2026 as part of Gothic II Complete Classic.
The short answer first. No, the runes in Night of the Raven are not real runes. All 57 are invented spell-signs, and the full case against them is in the Gothic 2 article.
But this add-on deserves its own page, because it does something no other Gothic game does. Night of the Raven contains a real writing system, and it is not the runes. It is the stone tablets of the Builders of Jharkendar, a dead script with three tiers of difficulty that you have to spend 30 learning points to read. That mechanic is the most accurate thing the series has ever done with writing, and almost nobody talks about it.
Two sign systems, one game
Open your inventory in Jharkendar and you are carrying two kinds of inscribed stone, and they work in opposite directions.
| Runes | Stone tablets | |
|---|---|---|
| What the sign does | Casts a spell | Says something |
| How many | 57 | Dozens, scattered across Khorinis |
| Can you read them? | There is nothing to read | Yes, once you learn the language |
| How you get the value | Mana | Comprehension |
| What learning costs | 39 separate crafting skills | Three language skills, 30 points |
A rune is a battery. The mark on it identifies the spell inside the way a label identifies a jar, and the label is usually a picture of the contents: Summon Wolf carries a drawing of a wolf.
A tablet is a text. Somebody wrote it, somebody else could not read it, and the whole point of the mechanic is closing that gap.
The Builders, and how they drowned
The valley of Jharkendar was a city. It was ruled by a Council of Five, drawn from five castes: warriors, healers, deathguards, priests and scholars. Its people worshipped Adanos, the god of balance, and they left behind five caste manor houses, a Temple of Adanos, a library, and a working network of teleporter stones.
They fell the way literate civilisations in fiction usually fall. The warlord Quarhodron brought the Claw of Beliar home from a victorious campaign. His son Rhademes was corrupted by it and started a civil war. Quarhodron sealed his own son inside the temple, the killing continued anyway, and Adanos ended the argument with a flood.
That is a tidy piece of world-building, and it does exactly the job it needs to. It puts a scholar caste and a library in the ground, and then it drowns them, which is the only way to produce the thing this article is about: a script that outlives everybody who could read it.
Three tongues, thirty learning points
Here is the mechanic, and it is better than it gets credit for. Under Ancient Languages you will find three skills, and you must take them in order:
| Skill | Cost | Requires |
|---|---|---|
| Language of the Farmers | 5 LP | - |
| Language of the Warriors | 10 LP | Farmers |
| Language of the Priests | 15 LP | Warriors |
Thirty learning points in total, all of it from Chapter 2 onwards, taught by Myxir, the Water Mage you meet at the excavation site and later in Jharkendar, or by the Hermit in the valley near the teleporter, who wants clothing before he will talk. Vatras, in the Lower Quarter of Khorinis, runs the collection quest and will take up to 28 tablets off your hands.
Read three things out of that table.
One: the tiers are named after castes, not difficulty levels. The game does not say "beginner, intermediate, advanced". It says farmers, warriors, priests, because who wrote an inscription determines how hard it is to read. A field boundary marker is plain. A temple inscription is not. Real epigraphers sort their material exactly this way, by register and by hand, and it is a genuinely sophisticated thing for a 2003 action RPG to model.
Two: reading is a skill you buy, and it competes with everything else. Thirty learning points is real money in Night of the Raven. It is six Circles of Magic at 5 each. It is a stack of rune recipes. Choosing literacy means not choosing something else, and the game makes you feel it.
Three: reading pays. Work through the full set of tablets and you collect roughly +24 dexterity, +22 strength, +30 bow, +24 one-handed, +20 two-handed, +20 crossbow, +195 hit points and +32 mana. Reading makes you stronger. Hold that one; we come back to it.
The practical advice, since you are here: do not read them early. Collect them and hold. Training a stat costs more learning points the higher the stat already is, so a flat +2 from a tablet is worth far more at 90 strength than at 30.
What the real runes did with the same idea
Now put the Elder Futhark beside it, because the comparison is uncomfortably close.
The Elder Futhark is also a dead script that had to be relearned. It was in use from roughly 150 to 800 CE, and then it changed, shrank into the sixteen-character Younger Futhark, and the older system stopped being legible. Reading it again was scholarly work done centuries later: Wilhelm Grimm's Über deutsche Runen in 1821 put the study on a modern footing, and Ludvig Wimmer's work in the 1870s established where the alphabet came from. Real runology is people with training, arguing about stones nobody else can read. That is Myxir's job description.
And the Norse tradition itself insists that reading is a separate art from carving. The Hávamál, in the stanza sequence known as the Rúnatal, puts it as a series of questions:
Do you know how to carve? Do you know how to read? Do you know how to stain? Do you know how to test?
Carving, reading, staining, testing: four skills, listed separately, because knowing one did not give you the others. Night of the Raven sells you exactly that, in three tiers, priced at 5, 10 and 15.
Then there is the payoff. In the game, reading a tablet makes you stronger. That sounds like a videogame conceit and it is, but it is pointing at something true. In the Germanic world, runic literacy was a marked, valuable, uncommon skill, and inscriptions were carved to do work in the world: to claim, to protect, to curse, to commemorate. Magic and literacy were not two different things you could cleanly separate. A society where knowing how to read the stones genuinely made you a more consequential person is not a bad model of the one that produced the futhark.
Where the add-on gets it wrong
Two places, and both are worth naming.
The script has no published chart. Piranha Bytes never issued a character set with phonetic values, so nothing in the game can actually be transliterated. What you get is the experience of translation, handled by a skill check, rather than a puzzle you could solve with a pencil. That is a reasonable design decision and it is also the line between this and a real writing system.
The runes did not learn anything from the tablets. The add-on added several new spell runes, and the interesting thing is that most of them cannot be crafted at all: Beliar's Wrath, Drain Life, Root Tendrils, Insect Swarm, Create Zombie, Create Guardian, Cry of the Dead and Holy Missile have no rune table recipe. You find them or you are given them, which fits magic the Circles were never meant to teach. But they are still spell containers with pictures on them, sitting in the same pack as a script the game has just spent 30 of your learning points teaching you to read. The add-on built a real writing system and never let it touch the magic.
Night of the Raven vs. the Elder Futhark
| Feature | Builders' tablets | Gothic runes | Elder Futhark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is it writing? | Yes, in fiction | No | Yes |
| Signs | Never charted | 57 | 24 |
| How you learn it | Three tiers, 30 LP | 39 separate recipes | One alphabet |
| Who could read it | Trained specialists | Not applicable | Anyone who learned the script |
| Cut into | Stone slabs | Magic ore plates | Wood, bone, antler, iron, gold |
| Why it was lost | Adanos drowned the valley | Not applicable | Superseded, then relearned from 1821 |
| Reading it gives you | Permanent stat bonuses | Nothing to read | The contents of the inscription |
The real Gothic runes, briefly
There is a genuine twist in the word "Gothic", and it belongs to the first article in this series. The Goths were a real East Germanic people who carved real Elder Futhark, and some of their inscriptions survive: the Ring of Pietroassa, found in Romania and dated to about AD 400, reads gutani wi hailag, "sacred to the Goths". The Spearhead of Kovel reads tilarids. Then the bishop Wulfila built a Greek-derived alphabet in the mid-4th century to translate the Bible, and Gothic runic writing effectively stopped.
So there was a real Gothic script, it went dead, and scholars read it again later. The Builders of Jharkendar are a fiction. The thing that happened to them is not. The full account is in Are the runes in Gothic 1 real?, and the 2026 remake has its own answer.
Want a script you can actually read?
Night of the Raven charges you 30 learning points to read a language that was invented for it, and then does not print the alphabet. The Elder Futhark is 24 letters, the chart is free, and the inscriptions are real objects in real museums.
The easiest way in is to draw one. You can cast a free rune reading in your browser right now, using the genuine Elder Futhark and their traditional meanings, with a quick single draw for a fast question or a fuller spread for something weightier. If you would rather build the habit slowly, pull a rune of the day each morning and learn the futhark one sign at a time, or read how online rune readings work first. There is more on the runes as charms and bindrunes and on the Norse tradition behind them, and the rest of the series sits on the runes in games hub, including Valheim, the one game that uses the real futhark, and The Witcher 3.
Piranha Bytes buried the best writing in the Gothic series inside an add-on, gave it three tiers and a price, and made you pay for the privilege of reading. That is closer to the truth about runes than any of the 57 stones in your pack. , free on iOS, Android, and the web, in English and Russian.
Frequently asked questions
Are the runes in Gothic 2: Night of the Raven real runes?
No. All 57 runes in Night of the Raven are invented spell-signs cut into stone plates, not letters. Nothing on them spells anything in any language. But the add-on contains a second sign system that genuinely is writing: the stone tablets left by the Builders of Jharkendar, which you must learn a dead language to read.
What are the stone tablets in Night of the Raven?
Inscribed stone slabs left by the Builders, the drowned civilisation of Jharkendar. They are scattered across the whole island of Khorinis, not just the new region, and each one you can read grants a permanent bonus to an attribute or a combat skill. They are the only readable script in the Gothic series.
How do you learn to read stone tablets in Gothic 2?
You buy three separate skills, in order, under the Ancient Languages heading. Language of the Farmers costs 5 learning points, Language of the Warriors 10, and Language of the Priests 15, which is 30 in total. Each tier requires the one below it, and each unlocks a harder class of tablet.
Who teaches the ancient language in Night of the Raven?
Two people, both available from Chapter 2. Myxir, the Water Mage at the excavation site and later in Jharkendar, teaches all three tiers. The Hermit in the valley near the Jharkendar teleporter also teaches them, one at a time, if you give him clothing first. Vatras in the Lower Quarter of Khorinis starts the tablet quest.
Are the stone tablets worth 30 learning points?
The totals are large: across the full set the tablets grant roughly +24 dexterity, +22 strength, +30 bow, +24 one-handed, +20 two-handed, +20 crossbow, +195 hit points and +32 mana. Read them late, after your attributes are already high, because the cost of raising a stat by training rises as the stat rises.
Why are the tablet languages named after farmers, warriors and priests?
Because Jharkendar was ruled by a Council of Five drawn from five castes: warriors, healers, deathguards, priests and scholars. The tablets are written in the register of the caste that cut them, so a farmer's inscription is plain and a priest's is not. That is why the skill costs rise from 5 to 15 learning points.
Who were the Builders of Jharkendar?
A literate civilisation that worshipped Adanos and left behind a temple, five caste manor houses, a library and a network of teleporter stones. Their warlord Quarhodron brought back the Claw of Beliar from a campaign, his son Rhademes was corrupted by it, and the civil war that followed ended when Adanos drowned the valley in a flood.
Is the Builders' script based on the Elder Futhark?
No. It is an original invention with no published chart and no announced phonetic values, and it is not derived from any real alphabet. What makes it interesting is not the shapes but the mechanic around them: Night of the Raven treats reading as a separate skill you buy, which is exactly how literacy worked in the runic world.
How many stone tablets are in Night of the Raven?
Vatras will accept up to 28 for his collection quest, at 30 experience each, with rewards escalating from healing elixirs through fireball scrolls to permanent mana increases. Reading a tablet for its stat bonus is a separate action from handing it in, and both are worth doing.
Did Night of the Raven add new runes?
Yes, and most of the ones it added cannot be crafted. Beliar's Wrath, Drain Life, Root Tendrils, Insect Swarm, Create Zombie, Create Guardian, Cry of the Dead and Holy Missile have no rune table recipe at all. You find them, loot them or are given them, which suits magic the Circles were never meant to teach.
How many runes are in Night of the Raven in total?
Fifty-seven. Forty-seven spell runes and ten teleport runes fixed to destinations such as the Monastery, the Castle, the Harbour City, the Old Demon Tower and Xardas. The Elder Futhark, by comparison, has 24 letters and has needed no more since roughly 150 CE.
Did the real Goths use runes?
Yes. The Goths were an East Germanic people who carved genuine Elder Futhark before their conversion to Christianity, and objects such as the Ring of Pietroassa, dated to about AD 400 and reading gutani wi hailag, still survive. Real Gothic runes exist. They have nothing to do with the game.
When does Night of the Raven come to PlayStation and Xbox?
On 29 September 2026, inside Gothic II Complete Classic, priced at 29.99 euro and covering PlayStation 4 and 5 and Xbox One and Series. The add-on originally shipped in Germany on 20 August 2003 and reached English-speaking players in 2005 as part of Gothic II Gold.
Where can I try a real rune reading online?
You can cast a free rune reading in your browser with the Way of the Runes rune-reading tool. It uses the genuine 24 Elder Futhark runes and their traditional meanings, with quick single draws for a fast question and fuller spreads for something weightier, and a full description for every rune. It works on any device, in English and Russian.
Which rune are you?
Seven questions, about a minute, and you get one of the 24 Elder Futhark runes. The scoring is shown as you answer. Free, no signup.