but so many books
Dec. 6th, 2022 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethMy ability to be normal about fictional libraries is not increasing.
Today I have been wondering how I could tweak the story I already wrote to get back more books.
... or how to tweak the Drama about books up a notch, possibly to 'Indy leaving the grail behind' levels...
It's not just that there's a lot of books. It's that there are a lot of books when production and distribution are so much more difficult on Golarion. Some of them are probably still handwritten manuscripts. There are printing presses available in the rules for Downtime use, but there are also scriptoria, for a bunch of low level NPCs to copy books for you. The scale of library in the Acadamae adventure module isn't impressive compared to a modern University library, and is probably around as many as we had in high school, which makes it seem modest. But some of the volumes therein were logically written by some dude sitting down with a quill.
And even the printing press created editions would have small print runs mostly limited to their city state of origin, because Pathfinder's default setting of Golarion only really works if you accept that each nation is so isolated from their neighbours that they're very much living at different tech levels. You've got a country where you can play in ancient Egypt and a country where a crashed spaceship has really upped the tech level on salvaged items and a country where they are just about inventing guns, mostly because magic isn't reliable around there. But the only way guns can be known in one place but unknown in others is a degree of isolation that's difficult to believe if travel spells are likely but actually pretty easy to believe if you look at the challenge rating on travel beyond the local area. The Pathfinder Society is as powerful as it is because they connect these far flung places, and their knowledge, through publishing reports. But even Pathfinder Chronicles aren't universally available. So I have to figure any given library is going to include books that never got very far away from where they were created. Isolated pockets of knowledge.
A ten thousand book library is a bit impressive, compared to the local tech level, and it's just sitting there in a module that expects the whole place to get destroyed at the end.
I mean the Bodleian started with two and a half thousand books, and that's at a comparable tech level to parts of Golarion. Sure it grew later, "by 1849, there were estimated to be 220,000 books and some 21,000 manuscripts in the library’s collection." it says on the Bod's history page, a one room collection isn't up to that. But ten thousand or so is a decent comparison to the listed numbers for the 1600s library.
Library stuck in a collapsing hell dimension is a mini adventure.
Nothing stopping me focusing on it more of course, just, a lot else is going on
due to the being in hell
which could be considered the important bit.
Ah well.
Today I have been wondering how I could tweak the story I already wrote to get back more books.
... or how to tweak the Drama about books up a notch, possibly to 'Indy leaving the grail behind' levels...
It's not just that there's a lot of books. It's that there are a lot of books when production and distribution are so much more difficult on Golarion. Some of them are probably still handwritten manuscripts. There are printing presses available in the rules for Downtime use, but there are also scriptoria, for a bunch of low level NPCs to copy books for you. The scale of library in the Acadamae adventure module isn't impressive compared to a modern University library, and is probably around as many as we had in high school, which makes it seem modest. But some of the volumes therein were logically written by some dude sitting down with a quill.
And even the printing press created editions would have small print runs mostly limited to their city state of origin, because Pathfinder's default setting of Golarion only really works if you accept that each nation is so isolated from their neighbours that they're very much living at different tech levels. You've got a country where you can play in ancient Egypt and a country where a crashed spaceship has really upped the tech level on salvaged items and a country where they are just about inventing guns, mostly because magic isn't reliable around there. But the only way guns can be known in one place but unknown in others is a degree of isolation that's difficult to believe if travel spells are likely but actually pretty easy to believe if you look at the challenge rating on travel beyond the local area. The Pathfinder Society is as powerful as it is because they connect these far flung places, and their knowledge, through publishing reports. But even Pathfinder Chronicles aren't universally available. So I have to figure any given library is going to include books that never got very far away from where they were created. Isolated pockets of knowledge.
A ten thousand book library is a bit impressive, compared to the local tech level, and it's just sitting there in a module that expects the whole place to get destroyed at the end.
I mean the Bodleian started with two and a half thousand books, and that's at a comparable tech level to parts of Golarion. Sure it grew later, "by 1849, there were estimated to be 220,000 books and some 21,000 manuscripts in the library’s collection." it says on the Bod's history page, a one room collection isn't up to that. But ten thousand or so is a decent comparison to the listed numbers for the 1600s library.
Library stuck in a collapsing hell dimension is a mini adventure.
Nothing stopping me focusing on it more of course, just, a lot else is going on
due to the being in hell
which could be considered the important bit.
Ah well.