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| Old books always look so cool |
Just a quick post while the idea sits in my mind.
As you might know from previous posts, I have rather a lot of books. A lot of my professional and academic career has been very much involved in sorting through, organizing, storing, and trading in very old books. They also have a great deal of weight in fantasy spaces (inception of books within books), from the Library at Hurtfew, to the Enchiridion, to the Necronomicon, to the wizard’s spellbook, and on and on and on.
They are repositories of wisdom and knowledge, great windows for lore dumps and exposition, and generally hold a sort of reverence in a way that other props of the genre do not. They are great pieces of treasure and set dressing, and many other people have written on the benefit of books as a resource before so I am certainly not breaking new ground.
The main difficulty with books as a resource is that you either have to write them out in entire (far too much work for anyone less obsessed with worldbuilding than JRR Tolkien), or figure out how they can act as information resources without making them all seeing oracles.
A book can be complex and dense, but filled with information, or it can be straightforward and simple, but much shorter and limited in scope. For example, you can glean a lot about the society and culture of Elizabethan England from a close reading of the works of Shakespeare from a historical perspective but it takes a lot of time and learning to work out, on the other hand the Usborne book of the Tudors might get you much simpler information much faster.
To model this I am proposing a dice chain mechanic: 1d2 for the simplest pamphlets, 1d4 for simple books, 1d6 for academic texts, 1d10 for dense and arcane works, etc.
Each book obviously has a subject (as can be seen from the table here), and can be questioned upon the subject (obviously assuming enough time and safety to sit down and concentrate on the book, reading is not a free action) and when a question is posed the appropriate die size is rolled. As with most depletable resources, if a 1 is rolled the die size decreases, however you only get an answer to your question if the die roll is below or equal to your intelligence modifier. So larger die size books are less likely to degrade, but also less likely to yield an answer. Degrading books represent the mastery over the subject and discovery of all ideas contained within.
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| A small selection of books |
