There probably an Amber mage somewhere who miscasted and lived, and also has a good head for filing systems.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Finland
Well i, and others, want a big ass library to end all libraries.
University is kinda something that grew up out of it.
Like we don't need to actually start a university, if we create the greatest library in the world, a university will grow up around it, like mold, unless steps are taken to prevent that.
Ya, big ass library to end all library's, not super interested in anything else. At least not to the point I want to put time and AP into it.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Four, that I see.
First, not keeping all your eggs in one basket. Altdorf had a nasty record of getting burnt, sieged, or politically unfriendly to wizards and/or academics. Having a big, self-sustaining repository of knowledge in a fortress-city is a good way to not loose it all.
Second, because I believe strongly in the benefits of universities for areas around them. They support research, development, ability to educate the local populace, and prestige, local supply of scribes and accountants, etc. So it'll do good things long term for K8P.
Third, dwarven buy-in. Dwarves have history and lore way beyond what most scholars even dream of, but do not open it to other races who want to learn. Having a center like this would be a place where that can begin to be made available. This also takes advantage of Gotri's willingness to do tech transfer, which is very much a local thing.
Fourth, it creates another center of power under Belegar, preventing all authority over humans from accruing under the Thane of Karag Nar, which I think is going to be increasingly important as human population is likely to increase much faster than dwarven. Having groups that can be played off each other is a good tool to prevent an eventual human takeover of the Karak by superior numbers. (If there are 20 humans to every dwarf and the humans are unified, I bet you apples to rubies that the human leader is going to think they should be in charge at some point.)
I mean, that's your perogative? Feel free to chime in if you have any constructive thoughts for either a boon or a hypothetical uni though. Personally I'm going to vote for institutions or infrastructure, and will argue strongly against more bling or a fancy ride for either the blood or the deed.
Again, your opinion, your perogative. But the timeframe needed to really set something like this up does kinda prohibit much involvement from Mathilde, and the whole point would be do make something that doesn't die with her.
And I'd like to think that the thread will vote to spend these things and not keep them like potions still in inventory after you beat the game.
Id remind you that there is a strong contingent of players that *like* stewardship and city building. I don't think we need to be involved, but I'd like the option to be.
To be honest, I'm voting for mage sanctuary over library if it came down to that- it was the core of my original thought. But unless you have a reason to seperate things, there's no reason to. Why limit it to a library?
Other thoughts:
This is partially inevitable, with the Gunnery school branch plus Mathilde's ducklings and Francesco's own ambitions. Adding a big library to that, with its attendant needs for scribes, librarians, and custodians makes the development of something very likely. But wrapping up everything under our umbrella means we curtail the electoral count's ability to use the gunnery school for political pressure. If the empire wants to meddle, those folk having clear loyalties to an explicitly local institution is going to help.
And it gets the king a rationalized way to gather and direct efforts if needed.
I'd like to see three big projects initially for the Uni that can and should be done without Mathilde's involvment:
1) History. Copy over the dwarven historical records, use them to rationalize the fragmentary human records, and present an accurate history of the world for human consumption. Likely to take decades.
2) Steam tank redevelopment. Basically Engineering guild plus gunnery school plus a place to do R&D rather than a focus on just teaching students to use existing cannon.
3) Education. Teaching the kids of Ulrikadrin and Karag Nar is going to support merchants and trade to a huge degree, as a local source of clerks and scribes makes it feasible to use K8P as a base rather than a way station. Plus an educated populace does good things for a place.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Concept focus. A library is a big place where you gather books; little intrigue, little management, little scholarly politics. Are the books coming here and not leaving? Are they being maintained? The library is doing well. A university is some gigantic megaschool where you have to manage an army of teachers and middle managers and deal with their academic disputes and political stunts; that person who wrote a paper about the Amber's assessment of the spiders being wrong, except it was them who was wrong, except an army of them, forever.
Not to mention scheduling, and crowds, and the place being filled with university students by necessity.
The core of your idea was a sanctuary for mages, I guess, but the core of my idea was just to acquire a library, and I've not really appreciated the proposition of merging the two; a library where wizards can stay was fine, but it's gotten rather out of hand.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Hmmm. I think, then, that our disagreement is on scale and timing. I'd expect the first decade or two of a university to track pretty exactly to how you describe the library- but one has a cap on growth and the other does not.
NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
I like the library idea, but going beyond that before we've even voted to use the boon or not (let alone decided what to use it on) seems somewhat premature. Hell, 'just' a grand library by itself would probably take decades or even more to complete up to the standards suggested by the scale of the boon (we are talking dwarves here, after all).
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Fair, but the same most definitely applies to the usual topics of conversation here (snekjuice, tongs, sorcery spring immediately to mind) and having a vision of what the boon might develop into is a fun thought exercise. So I'm not seeing much in your post besides a damper on thread discussion.
Sidenote: I've been kinda assuming Boney is Aussie from the post timing, does anyone know if they are surviving the fires alright?
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
He is from Australia, and he's said he's fine. Just busy looking for a place to live, I think?
He'll be back when he's back.
- Location
- Finland
I don't agree with the idea that a library won't have politics or intrigue.
Knowledge is power, the biggest library ever is going to have lot of it inside it, and there will be politics, who gets access to books, how much money spent on copying, what to copy, what books to acquire, in which order, how much to budget to acquisition, how legal do we insist on those acquisitions...
There will be a shit ton of politics and intrigue if we go for the size people have been talking about.
And that's before we start even talking about defending those books, because not everyone will want other people having access to all that knowledge, and some will not be above theft, arson or murder in order to keep knowledge from spreading, or even existing.
Knowledge is power, the biggest library ever is going to have lot of it inside it, and there will be politics, who gets access to books, how much money spent on copying, what to copy, what books to acquire, in which order, how much to budget to acquisition, how legal do we insist on those acquisitions...
There will be a shit ton of politics and intrigue if we go for the size people have been talking about.
And that's before we start even talking about defending those books, because not everyone will want other people having access to all that knowledge, and some will not be above theft, arson or murder in order to keep knowledge from spreading, or even existing.
- Location
- Norway
Who does?
chocolote12 above was saying "little intrigue, little management, little scholarly politics."
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
So is there a difference between a library and a university, at the same scale? This seems to be saying we can expect about the same behaviors from both so the relevant question would be the number of people involved.
- Location
- Finland
Ok, fine.
I don't agree with the idea that a library will have little politics or intrigue.
Happy?
If we're doing the biggest library in the world, it will be politics and backstab (sometimes literally) central.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
A lot of what you're describing isn't politics, it's basic management. You can't leverage book copying budgets and agendas to change the opinions of, say, the Cult of Morr (I would use the Cult of Verana as an example, but they're book obsessed and you probably could).
And who gets let in and defense are pretty much the same question, when you think about it; people the dwarves believe won't burn down the place, and the dwarves who believe that they won't burn down the place. The filtering mechanism (Dwarves) and the defense mechanism (Dwarves) can be neatly wrapped up in a single organization of dwarven librarians who'd be honor-bound to hunt troublemakers to the death. Plus, they'd have a meticulous eye for detail, so they'd always know which books are missing from the shelves and who was authorized to take them, and they'd be able to tell if a book was taken without permission.
Yes, I feel this misrepresents the issues involved with actually managing a library. The two are not the same, and we should not expect the same behaviors from both at the same scale. 'Do we let in the Veranans, when they don't let people into their library' is the sort of politics that might come up, but there aren't going to be three professors with four viewpoints on a subject causing trouble for everybody who disagrees with them. Libraries don't have large populations of permanent residents.
Who will be backstabbing who? The Dwarven librarians, upon a disagreement over the best way to keep leather preserved?
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To clarify, he also isn't looking for a new place to live because of the fires.
- Location
- Finland
And you don't think management is not politics?
Like you need to give me an actual working definition of politics then, because clearly we are not using the word the same way.
Morrites have goals, and controlling the spread of knowledge will affect those goals.
Doing major changes to a major cult is something nations can fail at. But thinking the biggest library in the world will not have some effect with all the cults does not hold water.
People who do not want information to spread, backstabbing those who do, and vice versa.
Also people who want to spread this information instead of that information.
Library of Alexandria was more than just a storehouse of knowledge, it was tool to exert power, because knowledge is power, and control of knowledge is even more so.
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I know you are being sarcastic, but yes, that is a very canon way for Warhammer Dwarves to murder each other.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
How will they be involved with our library? Please, lay that out. What position will they be in to make this an issue of ours? Will they be attempting to be librarians? Scribes? Random visitors? People from polities that don't live in Karak Eight Peaks?
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Ultimately my problem with spending the boon on just a giant library is that it doesn't do enough. A trascendental boon should be used in one of two ways, to either empower ourselves enormously (Belegar Marry me :3 ) or to enact change upon the world in a positive fashion. Simply making a giant library wont really do the latter it will give Mathilde access to a lot of bonuses to her rolls, but that's sort of boring. The reason a centre of learning (Which includes a huge library) would be amazing is because it allows us to fundamentally change how the dwarves in K8P pass on learning at least within K8P. Master- Apprentice is still fundamentally viable with a centre of learning but you'd expand the scope to include potentially unaffiliated people that have proven themselves worthy in some way and allow for more side ways transfer of knowledge.
The fundamental idea would be to use the scope of the boon to jam a prybar into the fixed way of imparting information that dwarven clans have and widen the scope to allow the information to be passed on a bit more loosely. This goes against tradition but the things that the traditions are trying to protect against have already happened, the Skaven have basically stolen all the dwarven knowledge outside of runic lore already and in many places surpassed them.
The fundamental idea would be to use the scope of the boon to jam a prybar into the fixed way of imparting information that dwarven clans have and widen the scope to allow the information to be passed on a bit more loosely. This goes against tradition but the things that the traditions are trying to protect against have already happened, the Skaven have basically stolen all the dwarven knowledge outside of runic lore already and in many places surpassed them.
- Location
- Finland
All of the above?
Like, unless we want to spend ton of AP doing background checks on everyone, then every polity will be wanting an agent working in the library.
In some ways this can be more revolutionary than the doomtower, possibly as big as skaven dictionary.
- Location
- Finland
The point is to ask something huge we could not get otherwise, but that does not break K8P or Belegar in the process.
Trying to get Belegar to directly change how Dwarfs hoard information could end up breaking him, or K8P, and not really within his power anyway.
But hopefully the library will do that in round about way.
And while not everyone is in favor of a university, having the biggest library in the world will create a university as a side effect eventually.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
How are they going to do that if all the employees are dwarves? Just stab people they don't like when they walk out the doors?
You can't just say they're going to do something and then not elaborate on the hows. Otherwise it's the same as 'bad things are going to happen'.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
If all the employees and visitors are dwarves, what is the point of the library as a boon? Bragging rights? I'd like to use the boon to change the world, not just make a copy of the K-a-K archives.