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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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pucflek said:
Ultimately its like, a very Epilogue kind of improvement. It won't have much impact on what is going on in quest right now, except perhaps for being a Verenan's wet dream. But i personally view it as the most important one, because while the library might not have as many visitors if its not that comfy, or will be hard to look through if its not as ordered, the ultimate goal was to make a library that won't be easy to actually ruin, like what happens in the empire pretty much every other century. The tomes will actually be around for... pretty much ever, at least until the very Mallus cracks in its final conflagrations when the final Everchosen does get the best of the Order Factions.
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I appreciate the sentiment, but I am putting my Preservation chips on the honor of K8P and the Ironhammer line rather than physical measures. Because I'm betting on victory, not defeat.
 
Boney said:
Approval voting when you can change your vote in response to how the tally is going gives the voters who want it just as much control as ranked voting, without requiring too much effort from those who just want to vote for what they want and call it done, and while being a lot easier to parse the results. And I'm generally not sure about ranked voting, as a binary yes/no is a lot clearer on both sides than ranked. Being ranked 2 can mean "I like this almost as much as I do what I ranked 1" or it could mean "I only like rank 1 but I guess this is the least objectionable of the other options".
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There's also a teaching period where voters have to learn how this thing even works, and introducing that after a good few books of content is fraught.
 
[X] Preservation

A big problem of the Warhammer world (ans ours too) is that there's regularly big, wide-reaching catastrophes that cause a lot of knowledge to be lost. I think many on the thread choose the library explicitly to ensure that knowledge isn't lost.
 
Briefvoice said:
I appreciate the sentiment, but I am putting my Preservation chips on the honor of K8P and the Ironhammer line rather than physical measures. Because I'm betting on victory, not defeat.
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The honor of Karaz Ankor is unquestionable, but so is the fact that of the powerful empire, only ten truly powerful settlements remain, and two of those have been reconquered recently.

Dwarf Honor also doesn't happen to protect against things such as rampaging dragons, tectonic shifts, volcanic activity and various other assortment of catastrophes.

Even if you disregard violent causes for possible book loss, however, you end up with the fact that unless exceptional planning goes into how to preserve them, you end up with parchment crumbling to dust in a few hundred years anyway, and what good is that to anyone. I doubt any amount of honor of K8P can stop the passage of time. Or any of the other things mentioned in the preservation option, like moisture and such.
 
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Fayhem said:
Can I interest you in A Practical Guide to Evil? The setting is one where story tropes are as real as the laws of physics, and potentially have equally lethal consequences for those who fall afoul of them.
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Seconded! That book serie is awesome:) And to continue on that line, many people are perfectly aware that their world runs on story rules and exploit the hell out of it.

pucflek said:
We want the records to last for untold ages. All else is secondary.
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Yes, exactly that. Future scholars won't really care about comfort if there's hundreds of years worth of intact books.

Zero Gravitas said:
Preservation seems to help if Karak Eight Peaks falls - which considering it is a major dwarf Karak will take a lot of doing.
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Yes, but we know it can fall. We took it not long ago after all.

Also, what about cave-ins, humidity damaging the parchment, fires, all things like that?
 
K von Carstein said:
Also, what about cave-ins, humidity damaging the parchment, fires, all things like that?
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I'm pretty sure all of those are covered by conventional dwarven construction standards. In fact, implying a cave-in is even possible with anything less than the Slaan shaking the tectonic plates is probably a Grudging from the relevant guild right there.

While I definitely think preservation is important it is fundamentally something that will only become relevant when the truly catastrophic happens.
 
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[X] Order

As the size of a library increases, so too does the accessibility of any bit of information within it decrease in proportion.
Structure it well from the get go - a disorganized collection might as well not exist for many scholars, even if they made the journey to Karak Eight Peaks to visit the library, it could take a year long expedition to search for a given resource, and never truly know if it was not present, in use, or in a different section by the end of it.

If we want a library to last the ages, organization has to take forefront.
Plus its easier to roll a dice for inspiration if you want to blind navigate the stacks if its all nicely sorted.
 
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Ultrackius said:
We can deal with ordering it later, but preservation is the most important thing to get done
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Uh...with regards to ANY kind of organizing, the difficulty becomes exponentially harder the more material it contains. A mature library cannot really be re-organized without shutting it down entirely first.

Its fine to value it as a knowledge vault foremost, but theres no do it later. Pick what you really want.
 
Briefvoice said:
I think we can count on the dwarves for ordinary preservation methods against cave-ins and humidity. The "Preservation" option is that the Library could go unattended and have books survive, which is a different matter.
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Citation needed on that mate.

The vote specifically says
Boney said:
and a great deal of care paid to air shafts and ambient humidity will create separate sections of the library tailored for the different needs of paper
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Straight up, Preservation is what you pick if you actually want the books to last, because otherwise they will fall apart, because thats what books do unless they are in extremely regulated environment. And no amount of physical manual care by a librarian can actually replace that.

Like, i get that people want to vote for something else, but you don't get to have your cake and eat it. If Preservation is not picked now, then thats just how it will be. Not that it matters in lifetime of the quest. As i said, this is very Epilogue oriented option, but still.
 
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veekie said:
Uh...with regards to ANY kind of organizing, the difficulty becomes exponentially harder the more material it contains. A mature library cannot really be re-organized without shutting it down entirely first.

Its fine to value it as a knowledge vault foremost, but theres no do it later. Pick what you really want.
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I am picking what I really want, I will not have this place going the way of Alexandria or Baghdad

And we can always get some magic thing that knows where everything is later on, there's no reason we can't make the other things better after the fact
 
Ultrackius said:
I am picking what I really want, I will not have this place going the way of Alexandria or Baghdad

And we can always get some magic thing that knows where everything is later on, there's no reason we can't make the other things better after the fact
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...you know the only thing that does what you describe is the one of a kind Tower of Hoeth right?
 
pucflek said:
Straight up, Preservation is what you pick if you actually want the books to last, because otherwise they will fall apart, because thats what books do unless they are in extremely regulated environment. And no amount of physical manual care by a librarian can actually replace that.
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Sure, but that's what getting new copies made is for. In practice even the best preservation systems won't help the fact that the original books become increasingly fragile over time, so we'll need new copies that can actually be handled no matter what.

Either that or we look into whatever has preserved the original Liber Mortis for over one thousand years and use that. Though I suspect that may be impractical for most books, most books can easily be copied anyway.
 
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pucflek said:
Straight up, Preservation is what you pick if you actually want the books to last, because otherwise they will fall apart, because thats what books do unless they are in extremely regulated environment. And no amount of physical manual care by a librarian can actually replace that.
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Let's not overstate things.

Boney said:
While you will, of course, seek to make a library that is reasonably ... enduring... , your involvement here lets you decide what you will focus on to a truly unreasonable extent.
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The library will be reasonably enduring by Dwarf standards regardless of what we choose.

Enduring is the option to take if you want the library to survive a direct meteor strike followed by hostile occupation of the Karak for a thousand years, not the option necessary for the dwarves to do basic due diligence.
 
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