Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
[X] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr: The Ten Kingdoms of Ulthuan, the Kingdom of Nehekhara, Naval Warfare

*comical indeterminate accent* the Back-fill, it does nothing. :V

Seriously though, more books by weight will most likely impact nothing of what we the players see in the quest, we are unlikely to interact with random social science subjects. It is a numbers go up kind of deal with no narrative impact. In the other side of things in character, large collections of varied books are best acquired by exchanges with partner libraries as we did last turn.
 
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[X] [COLLEGE] A specific but common animal suitable for being a familiar (Eike's choice, 5CF)
[X] [PURCHASE] No purchase

We spoil the heck out of her and I do not mind at all.
 
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[X] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr: The Ten Kingdoms of Ulthuan, the Kingdom of Nehekhara, Naval Warfare
[X] [DWARF] No purchase.
[X] [COLLEGE] No purchase.
[X] [PURCHASE] Ulric (Imperial Esoteric, 100 gc)
 
In the other side of things in character, large collections of varied books are best acquired by exchanges with partner libraries as we did last turn.
I don't think there's been any plans put forward that would get us large numbers of Dwarf books from partner libraries. Or at least I've not seen anyone agitating for us to partner with the Karaz-a-Karak archives. They're honestly pretty low down my personal list of places to branch to, given we can already get Dwarf stuff through Barak Varr.

If we were to scout out new libraries to partner with after sucking everything out of Nuln, my choices would be the Verenans, the Sigmarites, or the Great Library of Marienburg.
 
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[X] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr: The Ten Kingdoms of Ulthuan, the Kingdom of Nehekhara, Naval Warfare

On the topic of Eike's familiar, wouldn't one of the Coughs in our Ranald Shrine be a better choice than some random animal the colleges had lying around?
 
[X] [LIBRARY] Back-fill: Social science
[X] [DWARF] No purchase.
[X] [COLLEGE] No purchase.
[X] [PURCHASE] Ulric (Imperial Esoteric, 100 gc)
 
I don't think there's been any plans put forward that would get us large numbers of Dwarf books from partner libraries. Or at least I've not seen anyone agitating for us to partner with the Karaz-a-Karak archives. They're honestly pretty low down my personal list of places to branch to, given we can already get Dwarf stuff through Barak Varr.

If we were to scout out new libraries to partner with after sucking everything out of Nuln, my choices would be the Verenans, the Sigmarites, or the Great Library of Marienburg.

The Vlag library, people talk about it mostly in terms of leftover Fire Spire books, but the ancient dwarf hold has dwarf books
 
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Unrelated to current discussion

I'm re-reading the quest and I'm currently at the reclamation of Eight Peaks and I've noticed something.
Each of the squares of leather, when enchanted, is magically useless; it's only in combination with the 15 other leather squares and the 15 other fragments of the enchantment that they combine to form a working piece of magic. Or so the theory goes, and you've no way to check whether it works until all sixteen pieces are enchanted, and each square is a full day's work in itself. A week passes, then another, and finally you've got the end result ready for testing. You impatiently sew each of the squares into place in the lining of your robes and then wear them, feeling the unfamiliar weight they add to your usually so familiar robes. Then you press down on the square of leather on your left hip, and the familiar grey sinks into inky black as shadow rises from the weave of the fabric and spreads over your exposed skin. An experimental knife-cut on a sleeve fails to penetrate it, and then another on your palm similarly fails to cut, and you smile.

From the assault on the East Gate to Mathilde scouting Karag Lhune part 5, there are several instances of casting Aethyric Armour, even one that resulted in mastering the spell. Did Boney forget that we have this enchantment?
 
We could combine a lesson on intrigue/scouting with getting a familiar for Eike/talking about it. For example bringing Eike along into the badlands to do some scouting for orc warband movements, while also talking about having a familiar and being on the lookout for an animal.

The badlands might be a bad fit though on account of being desolate, it was my first suggestion because it is the enviorment I figure Mathilde is most used to, but we could for example take her for a trip camping in one of the less cursed woods of the empire.

Another contender in AP hell though.
 
Unrelated to current discussion

I'm re-reading the quest and I'm currently at the reclamation of Eight Peaks and I've noticed something.


From the assault on the East Gate to Mathilde scouting Karag Lhune part 5, there are several instances of casting Aethyric Armour, even one that resulted in mastering the spell. Did Boney forget that we have this enchantment?

That's the spell on our robes. There is no sense in casting it if you already have it.
 
From the assault on the East Gate to Mathilde scouting Karag Lhune part 5, there are several instances of casting Aethyric Armour, even one that resulted in mastering the spell. Did Boney forget that we have this enchantment?

If activated, it can't be used again for an hour, so Mathilde casts the spell manually to save the enchantment activation for when she Really Needs It.
 
X] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr: The Ten Kingdoms of Ulthuan, the Kingdom of Nehekhara, Naval Warfare
[X] [DWARF] No purchase.
[X] [COLLEGE] No purchase.
[X] [PURCHASE] Ulric (Imperial Esoteric, 100 gc)
 
A thought about libraries - how close are we to hitting Laurelorn's goals for the Project? I'm not sure that we'll retain the same level of access to the Library of Mourning after they get what they want from it, and if so it would make sense to front load copying sections of that in case we can't do so as freely in future.
 
A thought about libraries - how close are we to hitting Laurelorn's goals for the Project? I'm not sure that we'll retain the same level of access to the Library of Mourning after they get what they want from it, and if so it would make sense to front load copying sections of that in case we can't do so as freely in future.
Laurelorn is likely to be happy to host the Project for as long as we're willing to keep it going. New Waystones infrastructure is the least of what they were hoping to get out of it; what they want are the political benefits of hosting an international institution with Lord Magisters and Runelords acknowledging them as equals, and their Queen being brought in to sign treaties alongside Emperors, Tzars and High Kings.

They've already locked off the sensitive materials like military secrets or anything magical that's not immediately germane to the Project, and we can't copy any of those. Anything else, why would they care if we access it? The library doesn't see itself in competition with KAU, because it hasn't had to deal with institutional rivalry since the Sundering.
 
Laurelorn is likely to be happy to host the Project for as long as we're willing to keep it going. New Waystones infrastructure is the least of what they were hoping to get out of it; what they want are the political benefits of hosting an international institution with Lord Magisters and Runelords acknowledging them as equals, and their Queen being brought in to sign treaties alongside Emperors, Tzars and High Kings.

They've already locked off the sensitive materials like military secrets or anything magical that's not immediately germane to the Project, and we can't copy any of those. Anything else, why would they care if we access it? The library doesn't see itself in competition with KAU, because it hasn't had to deal with institutional rivalry since the Sundering.

They'd likely start to care as now they have increased international contacts they'd realise that the default approach taken by libraries and the states that control them is to treat their knowledge as valuable resources that can be used for trade and political leverage.

They're currently giving away for free what they can extract value for, and at some point they're going to realise that. Once they've hit their immediate goals and are able to reactivate Waystone dependent infrastructure their incentive to change the terms of access to block large scale copying will increase.

They can keep hosting the Project without letting us copy entire sections of the Library to be added to our own.

We know that the various Houses are looming for their own ways to gain value from international contact, and the Hoethian Houses are likely to see the Library as their way of doing so.
 
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They can keep hosting the Project without letting us copy entire sections of the Library to be added to our own.
I'd note that we're not sending in our own scribes to pirate copies for free. What we're doing is paying Forestborn to make copies, and buying them. If the library wants to prevent that, they'd have to ban the Forestborn from replicating their material when they borrow it, which is kinda counter to their institutional goals. And banning Forestborn from selling trade goods to us is counter to the political goals of the current government, which is ecstatic that more trade is going on.
 
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I'd note that we're not sending in our own scribes to pirate copies for free. What we're doing is paying Forestborn to make copies, and buying them. If the library wants to prevent that, they'd have to ban the Forestborn from replicating their material when they borrow it, which is kinda counter to their institutional goals. And banning Forestborn from selling trade goods to us is counter to the political goals of the current government, which is ecstatic that more trade is going on.
Any trade, any at all. Before this there was no trade for the eonir aside from with itself. This is a whole new thing for a lot of elfs born after they isolated themselves.
 
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