Café de Nuit

I thought this would somewhat fit here.

When your players are outsiders what is, in your experience, the best solution regarding the language barriers?

My opinion:
I believe my players that usually pick a claster class wouldn't love the idea of being reduced to some sort of "Comprehend language" bot. The use of a Common language seems appropriate but I still can't get myself to like this idea.

What DeepShadow has done in Reckonings seems to be working pretty well. Many of the languages are descended from the languages of the outsiders.

My character, for example, speaks Damaran, which is similar enough to Vassii that he can communicate with some people verbally. (I'm not sure I'm getting the names right, but you get the picture.) It still leaves many language barriers, but at least it's a place to start.

I do this as well. I usually start the charcters in a land that they can understand bits of the language and can commmunicate a little as well. The main stay is to make sure that the players are off guard and know that they are no longer home.

The one time that I ran an outlander campaign, I had them meet up with another outlander who could serve as a translator. (Well, she wasn't really an outlander. She'd lived in Darkon all her life. The fact that she spoke their language with no accent was pure coincidence, I tell you.) They put their skill points into learning Darkonese as soon as they leveled up, but for that first level, they were practically helpless on their own, completely dependent on their Darkonese translator if they were going to have any interaction with the outside world. It made for a nice immediate sense of fear and isolation, and it gave them a strong bond with an NPC that I could pull out throughout the campaign.