Carded Libraries

A carded library is a special in-game resource, a trove of books and scrolls containing useful knowledge on one or more subjects that can be accessed using the Scholar skill. Like all in-game resources, a library must be represented by a suitable phys rep, and must carry an attached item card.

Every library includes one or more subjects, individually rated in quality by rigor and accuracy.

Subjects

There are three types of subject, depending on the scope:

• Broad: e.g. Algaia History and Arts
• Narrow: e.g. History of House Sforza
• Specific: e.g. The history of House Sforza during the civil war

Broader categories require more resources to create and maintain (see Creating and Expanding Carded Libraries below).

Rigor and Accuracy

Subject quality is rated by rigor (i.e. how complete is the subject?) and accuracy (i.e. how reliable is the information?), which determine how much information a scholar receives from using the library. These ratings are as follows (from worst to best):

Rigor	Accuracy
Scant	Hearsay
Detailed	Sourced
Comprehensive	Verified

The same library may have multiple subjects at different scopes and various levels of quality.

Example

The necromancer Ernst Von Totenkopf’s library includes the following two subjects:

• The Plane of Undeath (Broad, Comprehensive/Sourced)
• The Church of Mortis (Narrow, Detailed/Verified)

Faction and Player Carded Libraries

Every faction has a faction carded library in camp, covering the faction’s history and arts, along with one or more other subjects suitable to that faction’s interests and activities. A faction library is supplied from one of the off-screen libraries on their homelands, and the subjects available in camp can vary from time to time.

Like other faction resources (such as artefacts), faction carded libraries don’t need maintenance and cannot ordinarily be expanded, but they may occasionally trigger plot (e.g. a thief steals a valuable tome that needs to be recovered, players uncover some lost history that needs to be properly recorded and entered into the library), which may affect the contents.

Players may create their own player carded libraries (see Creating and Expanding Carded Libraries) on any subject they know or can investigate. These require maintenance as below.

Off-Screen Libraries Most factions and some other organisations have huge libraries in their homelands, which players can normally only access by writing letters to the librarians (or in some cases contacting them by magical means) and asking questions. Accessing these libraries does not require the Scholar skill, as the player is not using the library directly; but the librarians decide whether to answer, and what information to share.

Phys Repping Carded Libraries

As a minimum, a carded library requires some vessel (e.g. a box or a shelf), to which the item card must be attached, and phys reps of three texts – whether books or individual scrolls. Players are encouraged to exceed this minimum if possible, especially to represent extensive libraries.

Moving a carded library (including to steal it) requires physically carrying the vessel and at least three texts.

Evaluating Carded Libraries

Anyone with the Scholar skill can evaluate a carded library with about 30 seconds’ roleplay, examining spines and flipping through the books. This will reveal which subjects are included, and their rigor. With an additional few minutes’ roleplay, the scholar can assess the subjects’ accuracy.

Using a Carded Library

Players use carded libraries via the Scholar skill. The player must tell a referee when they’re investigating a subject, including:

• Which carded library they are using
• What question they are asking

Ideally the player should do this before starting the roleplay, to give staff time to determine the answer to the questions.

The referee will then radio Ref HQ to relay the question. Ref HQ will confirm the carded library’s suitability, then determine what information the player should receive.

General advice for the player:

• Try to find the right carded library for the question. A library in the Fir Cruthen camp may not say much about vampires, for instance (except how to fight them!).
• Libraries aren’t for current events. If something is happening right now, it’s not had time to make it into even the newest book.
• Libraries only know what the authors know. If it’s not public knowledge, then it’s probably not in a public library (a secret library is another matter, of course).

Guidelines

Guidelines for answering questions follow. These are guidelines only; the plot owner and Ref HQ may use their discretion deciding what answer is appropriate given the question, the player’s choice of library and the nature of the plot.

Relevance to the Carded Library’s Subjects

The Scholar skill can be used to ask any question at any carded library, but not every library is suitable. Looking up a demon-summoning rite in a library with the subject “Demonology” is perfect, for example, while looking it up in a “Teutonian Magics” library is chancy and looking it up in a library of “Estragalean Wines and Cookery” is pointless.

Unrelated	No information, but the player may get something, e.g. a passing reference to a more suitable library or resource, such as an NPC.
Adjacent	Information per tables below, but vague at best. The player is likely to get a clear reference to a more suitable library, NPC or resource, if one exists.
Directly Related	Information per tables below.

If, in the referee’s opinion, the player has chosen the very best possible library (e.g. asking a question about the life of the very person who founded the library!), they may gain some extra details.

Subject Rigor

The pains the authors have gone to in their work affect the detail the scholar can find: a basic primer is less likely to answer specific or technical questions than an exhaustive academic reference.

Scant	Although vague, the library covers some of the subject matter raised by the question, provided it would reasonably be found there.
Detailed	The library covers some areas of the specific subject raised by the question, provided it would reasonably be found there.
Comprehensive	The library has good coverage of the subject raised by the question, provided it would reasonably be found there. May grant some additional detail.

Subject Accuracy

In practice, less accurate subjects give less detail than their rigor suggests – the detail is there, but much of it is from a questionable or unreliable source, and the scholar has to sift through it to get to answers they trust.

Hearsay	Regardless of coverage, the library has a lot of ‘noise’ and nonsense in it, which the scholar must spend their time sifting through to get to a scant few useful and true facts.
Sourced	Regardless of coverage, the library still has unreliable sources and biased opinions that the scholar must pick through, leaving gaps in their information but the information they get, though limited, will be accurate.
Verified	Regardless of coverage, everything in the library is true except in the case of deliberate interference.

Chance Discoveries

“Look at this – I was just reading Aloysius of Oxford’s excellent History of the Kings of Albion, looking up something about King Tristan, and found this note in the margins about the ‘Beast of Cornwall.’ It rang a bell, so I checked some of my notes and I think this may be a description of that hell hound you were looking into. Any use?”

A chance discovery is a Scholar result unrelated to what the player is actually investigating. It may come from a mis-shelved book, a loose leaf tucked into a book, a scribble in a margin, or just a throwaway reference in the book that the author thought noteworthy although it isn’t relevant to the book itself.

Chance discoveries always come in addition to the response to the scholar’s query as above.

Interference

Libraries can of course be manipulated, affecting what can be learned from them. Scholars can maliciously destroy texts, write false texts or censor the existing texts in a library. Players seeking to manipulate their own, or other people’s, carded libraries will have to investigate how to do so in play.

Players may detect interference by actively examining the library with a relevant skill:

• Artisan can reveal if pages have been removed or reglued.
• Evaluate can confirm if the handwriting or printing technique varies in a book, or gauge a book’s age and origin.
• Scholar itself can detect inconsistencies in language, etc.

Creating and Expanding Carded Libraries

Carded Libraries are created or expanded by subject. A new carded library must start with a specific or narrow subject. Once a carded library exists, players can invest in it to build the scope to broad subjects, although they are more expensive to build and maintain.

Any proposal for a new subject must be submitted to a research referee(s), who will (if the subject doesn’t already exist in the system) submit it for discussion on the appropriate forum to approve it and assign it a scope (i.e. broad, narrow or specific).

If it is determined that the intended subject is too broad or narrow, or that the player cannot reasonably create a resource for it (e.g. because it is secret knowledge), they will feed that back to the player and suggest something more practical.

Creating or expanding a carded library has three requirements: crafting, scholarship and scribing.

Crafting

Crafting libraries is by a unit called a volume. A single volume consists of one superior or mastercrafted book or six paper or vellum scrolls.

A subject requires the following number of volumes, depending on the scope and rigor of the subject.

	Scant	Detailed	Comprehensive
Specific	2 scrolls	4 scrolls	1 volume
Narrow	1 volume	2 volumes	3 volumes
Broad	3 volumes	6 volumes	9 volumes

Note that the number of volumes in the library doesn’t have to relate to the number of phys rep books present! It’s an abstraction for setting work and resource costs. Likewise, the vessel for the carded library is a phys rep requirement for the whole library, but does not have to be separately crafted itself.

Creating Individual Volumes A scholar can write an individual volume to give, trade or sell, if wished, without having a specific library in mind for it. Once scribed (see below), this volume will be issued an item card, and can be later added to an existing carded library to meet the above requirements.

Scholarship

When first creating a volume, and again every time the scholar wishes to improve a subject’s accuracy, they must go to a research referee, who will set them a scholarly task. This could include:

• To answer three questions about the subject
• To learn something new about the subject
• To investigate a particular person, place or thing

The player may investigate themselves, ask other players or NPCs for answers or otherwise – it’s absolutely appropriate to copy the answers out of books!

The player should return when they feel prepared and deliver their response, which may be in the form of a written essay, short presentation or spoken interview (as the player feels most comfortable).

This response is not “marked” for accuracy or completeness of information, or for the confidence or polish of their performance. The intention is only to satisfy the referee that the player went out and investigated the subject.

If the scholar is copying an existing volume, they can skip the scholarship step.

Scribing

Once crafted, every volume needs to be scribed by the scholar. Scribing 1 volume costs 6 ink and 5 study units (this includes scribing one volume consisting of six scrolls). Scribing 1 scroll individually costs 1 ink and 1 study unit.

As with other uses of study units, scribing requires about half an hour of roleplaying on a given day, whether scribing a whole volume or one or more scrolls.

Copying A librarian can copy an existing volume if desired (they require access to the original text for the full half hour required to scribe it, above). They can skip the roleplay/investigation requirement listed under Scholarship, above, but must confirm to a research referee that they had access to the text. Copying has an additional benefit that the volume will have the same accuracy as the copied text. Note that if the copied text is Verified (and thus illuminated), the scholar will need to illuminate the copy as well, see below.

Improving Accuracy

Improving the accuracy of a carded library doesn’t carry any additional crafting requirements, but requires additional scholarship, as the scholar investigates, cross-references and corrects the content of the carded library, and then updates and revises the text.

Improving the accuracy by one step (e.g. from Hearsay to Sourced) requires meeting the roleplay/investigation requirements detailed under Scholarship, above, and spending an additional 5 study units and 1 ink per volume (or 1 study unit and 1 ink per scroll) editing the texts.

Illumination Improving one subject from Sourced to Verified has an additional requirement: in order to convey the meaning clearly and without error, the scribe must embellish the text to imbue it with their will. This entails illuminating all volumes in the subject. Illuminating an already scribed manuscript costs 4 ink, 3 powdered dye and 1 copper, gold or silver metal (for foil) per volume.

Maintaining Carded Libraries

Like all crafted things, carded libraries need to be maintained, at a cost of 60% of the WU and materials required to create them (at superior quality) or 40% (at mastercrafted quality) every three years.

For simplicity, the total creation costs of all volumes in a library will be added together before calculating maintenance costs. Costs can be spread out over the three years.

The cost of scribing (including illumination) isn’t factored into the maintenance cost of a library.

Example

Ernst von Totenkopf’s library consists of 11 superior quality books, initially crafted for 1 leather (O), 5 paper (O), 1 oil and 10 WU each. Maintaining superior items costs 60% of creation costs every three years.

The crafting costs are added together to a total of 11 leather (O), 55 paper (O), 11 oil and 110 WU, before calculating maintenance costs of 7 leather (O), 33 paper (O), 7 oil and 66 WU per three years.

Ernst can spread that maintenance cost out to 2 to 3 leather (O), 11 paper (O), 2 to 3 oil and 22 WU per year.