"magical symbols" associated with unnatural forces) and role-playing games, such as the Ultima series which use a runic font for in-game signs and printed maps and booklets, and Metagaming's The Fantasy Trip, which used rune-based cipher for clues and jokes throughout its publications. Unicode Runic alphabets were added to the Unicode Standard in September, 1999 with the release of version 3.0. The Unicode block for Runic alphabets is U+16A0–U+16FF. It is intended to encode the letters of the Elder Futhark, the Anglo-Frisian runes, and the Younger Futhark long-branch and short-twig (but not the staveless) variants, in cases where cognate letters have the same shape resorting to "unification". The block as of Unicode 3.0 contained 81 symbols: 75 runic letters (U+16A0–U+16EA), 3 punctuation marks (Runic Single Punctuation U+16EB , Runic Multiple Punctuation U+16EC and Runic Cross Punctuation U+16ED ), and three runic symbols that are used in early modern runic calendar staves ("Golden number Runes", Runic Arlaug Symbol U+16EE , Runic Tvimadur Symbol U+16EF , Runic Belgthor Symbol U+16F0 ). As of Unicode 7.0 (2014), eight characters were added, three attributed to J. R. R. Tolkien's mode of writing Modern English in Anglo-Saxon runes, and five for the "cryptogrammic" vowel symbols used in an inscription on the Franks Casket. See also Bautil Gothic runic inscriptions List of runestones Runiform (disambiguation), various scripts having a "rune-like" appearance Runic magic Notes References Sources Birkett, Thomas. 2010. "The alysendlecan rune: Runic abbreviations in their immediate literary context ". Preprints to The 7th International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions, Oslo 2010 . Last accessed 29 August, 2021. University of Oslo. Düwel, Klaus. 2004. "Runic" in Malcolm Read and Brian Murdoch (editors). Early Germanic Literature and Culture, p. 121–147. Boydell & Brewer. . . . . . . . . . . External links . . . . Old Norse Online by Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum, free online lessons at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, contains a lesson on runic inscriptions Alphabets Language and mysticism Obsolete writing systems Germanic culture Magic symbols