Organization Within The Library Of All Worlds

Sunday was my Father's Birthday. He loved books, so to honor him,this week, I am doing a series of posts about books, bookstores, and libraries in Everway.


The Library of All Worlds is "a collection of large building filled with scrolls holding knowledge and wisdom collected from a thousand spheres. Chamber Platinum is a group of people sponsored by the library who explore new realms and spheres. The Crookstaff and Scratch families have their head estates in this center" (Playing Guide, p.21). 

Another description states that: it is: "a vast library in the city of EVERWAY. It hosts the CHAMBER PLATINUM, a scholarly organization dedicated to exploring the SPHERES" (Spherewalker Sourcebook, p.64).

Images of the Bayt al-Hikma
http://totalwar.honga.net/building.php?v=dlv6&f=papal_states&b=bayt_al_hikma&encode=en

Organization: The Library of All Worlds has countless books, scrolls, and maps. It has three primary organizational divisions, in addition to the Chamber Platinum. And there are numerous factions within these organizations. The primary organizations that make up the Library are Acquisitions, Collections, the House of Wisdom, and of course, the Chamber Platinum.* The role of these four organizations is as follows:

• Acquisitions: is responsible for acquiring new texts and scrolls for the Library. Means of acquisition include purchase of texts, donations, copying, Reshelving (a statute that allows the Library to commandeer, for a period of up to one year, any privately held text within the walls of the City of Everway), as well as more aggressive and covert methods that are usually referred to as Field Work. Not all donations are accepted. Texts that are not needed are usually sold to the Book House, or to private dealers and bookhounds who approach Acquisitions seeking rejected texts. Acquisitions is also responsible for disposing of texts that Collections no longer wants or needs. 
• Acquisitions is typically staffed by a mix of Scratch, Crookstaff, Crow, and Keeper family members. 
• Acquisitions is led by Light Scratch, also known as the Red Scribe for her advocacy of aggressive Field Work in realms and spheres that are known or suspected to be at risk of implosion.
• Collections is responsible for all day-to-day operations of the Library, including helping patrons search the Collections catalog, finding texts in the Vasty Stacks (and it should be noted that the  Vasty Stacks are a species of Tidal Pool), shelving of texts and scrolls, security of the Collections (including secret/closed collections and archives), arrangements for private study rooms, classrooms, and meeting rooms, overnight accommodations for visiting scholars, and more.  
• The majority of staff in this department are members of the Scratch family. Security roles are led by members of the Crow and Keeper family. 
• The Plume family guards The Stepwise, a room-sized artifact deep within the bowels of the Library. 
• Collections is led by Heather Scratch, who has embarked on an ambitious new numerical reorganization of the collections. 
• The reorganization is about 15% complete. A a traditionalist cataloging faction within Collections called the Elementalists is doing everything they can to sabotage the process, arguing that numerical cataloging is "unnatural".
• The House of Wisdom has three components:
• An academy for Everwayan youth, employing the best scholars and teachers in the city of Everway
• A research faculty comprised of scholars in residence (mostly Everwayans) and visiting scholars from the million spheres
• The Gem School, a relatively new association devoted to research and play of the  Jeweled Bead Game. This game uses polyhedral gems and stones with strange markings and symbols. The game can be played reflectively (to model the world, the spheres, politics, economies, etc.) or competitively, often with a gambling component. The Outsider Broken Wing introduced the Jeweled Bead Game to Everway. While the game has a small street following in Strangerside, almost all serious practitioners of the game spend their time playing in the Library precincts.
• The House of Wisdom is led by Thousand Owls Crookstaff.
• The Chamber Platinum, as described above, is a society of Spherewalkers who are scholars and adventurers. The Chamber is devoted to exploring the millions spheres, and commissions both exploratory expeditions and at times urgent problem-solving missions to other spheres. The Chamber has its own extensive collection of books, scrolls, and maps, including spherepaths. The Chamber Platinum also has an armory and relic vaults that are located within the Library, in the Chamber Tower levels directly below the Chamber Platinum's meeting rooms and dormitories.  
• In the past, the Chamber has often partnered with Acquisitions. The current policies of the Red Scribe have made that collaboration more problematic.
• The Chamber Platinum currently lacks a leader. In the interim, Hermes Branch Crookstaff of the Council is responsible for the Chamber.

The Librarian of All Worlds is responsible for leadership of the Library as a whole, and each of the organizations has a leader on the Library Committee that serves the Librarian of All Worlds. The Librarian position is traditionally elected by the Council and ratified by the King. 

• The current Librarian is Thunder Perfect Mind Crookstaff.

*I am indebted to Sam Chupp for this organizational framework. It is very influenced by a Vampire LARP he GM'd at Simcon in the 1990s in Rochester, NY. The LARP was set in a Tremere library in the wilderness of Canada. My Tremere scholar challenged a demon to Certamen - and lost, gloriously.

Table 4: Encounters Around The Library of All Worlds

Sunday was my Father's Birthday. He loved books, so to honor him,this week, I am doing a series of posts about books, bookstores, and libraries in Everway.

Books are sacred; they preserve thoughts, minds, and souls through the ages.

Books are profane; they are commodities to be bought, sold, and stolen. 

Books are always of great value. They are written and bound by hand, on paper made by hand. Some women and men search their whole lives for just one special text. Others spend their lives accumulating more and more of them. Still others are agents, finding books for wealthy or desperate patrons.  

Bookhounds like these women and men are willing to die for the right book; still other bookhounds are willing to kill for them.

Many of these Encounters Around The Library of All Worlds were inspired by a card draw from the RPG Inspiration Cards.

 

Usually, I used a combination of the image, Title, and Archetype. I often used the Event, Character Trait, and Character Quirk descriptions as well.

Table 4: Encounters Around The Library of All Worlds 

(Roll a d12)

1. A bidding contest has broken out in a book stall selling rare texts. This particular fight is over The Book of Feathered and Jeweled Masks, by Paradise Host. The text is an illustrated volume on the erotic arts.
2. A fortune teller has set up a table and is reading fortunes by randomly selecting pages to read from The Book of Lost Dreams. Each page of this book has complex, swirling images of people, plants, animals, stars, and planets. 
3. There is a constant flow of locals in and out of a one story structure called The Book House. This book and scroll shop goes down three stories underground. Most of the patrons are youth of the Scratch and Crookstaff families. Strangers and Outsiders will be treated rudely if they enter the store without a local escort.
4. A group of six or seven men and women are having a friendly argument pouring over a scroll. The document purports to be the provenance for a bundle of books from The Library Realm. This discussion is happening in a tent in one of the many booths selling books and scrolls.
5. Several boys and girls of the Scratch family are reading and/or writing letters to paying customers. One of the boys is clearly not transcribing faithfully what the patron is saying. He scratches one note for every 5-6 words the patron says. The patron seems not to notice this.
6. A table is overturned. "Heresy! Outrage! How dare you sell our Holy Book!?!" an outraged Outsider priest screams at a bookseller. The priest summons an iron mace with a gesture and advances on the bookseller.
7. As you approach one booth, glancing at the books for sale, a Troll-like bookseller aggressively approaches you. "You're not going to leave here without buying something, now are you?" she growls at you.
8. A bookseller suddenly hides several titles when an obvious bookhound approaches his booth.
9. You spot a finely bound book with a green cover of glistening iridescent scales. The cover is embossed with the image of a dragon. The book's title is The Life of Alurax The Illustrious Dragon As Told to Lord Answer of Wingspan. You feel a sudden urge to possess this book at all costs. Just at that moment, a wealthy browser places a gloved hand upon its cover, and taps twice with his index finger. "I want this one" he says.
10. You find an out-of-the-way booth with two chairs, a table, inksets, and large pieces of parchment. Parchments with elaborate multi-colored ink patterns drawn on them are hanging on strings overhead, drying. A sign over the booth says "Spherepaths Drawn Here." The proprietor is facing you, and has not noticed that someone at the back of the booth is taking one of the drying parchments off the string.
11. A sudden breeze blows scrolls everywhere. The must have come from several nearby booths. Scrollmen and browsers alike leap into action to grab up scrolls. A few girls run away with a couple each.
12. A spontaneous poetry reading has broken out under some trees. About 30 people have gathered to listen to a contest of poetic skill between three poets. Winesellers move among the crowd. There are books everywhere around the seated audience. One book gets up and begins to skitter away.

The Guide to Spherewalking: Spherepaths

This is the first entry in The Guide to Spherewalking, one of the most frequently read texts in the Library of All Worlds. Entries in The Guide describe matters pertaining to spherewalking, gates, and travel between the spheres and realms.

Spherepaths: A spherepath, also known as a gatepath, is a particular sequence of realms or spheres traversed in order to arrive at a desired destination realm. Spherepaths trace the route from a realm of embarkation to a destination realm that is more than one gate distant from the place of departure. Spherepaths take many forms.

Many Spherewalkers commit 'paths to memory by brute force. Others use songs or poems for that purpose. (You never know if the drunken doggerel you hear in a Strangerside pub has such references in it.) Of course, for a price, members of the Keeper family in Everway can teach the most commonly used paths to frequently visited realms. Caveat emptor: some of the gatepaths the Keepers peddle are longer and more complex than necessary - with many expensive inns and wayhouses along the way.

The Snakering, Crookstaff, and Scratch families of Everway have proprietary spherepaths. More than one rogue has met their end trying to steal what they know. Fortunately, many other 'paths are recorded in scrolls and books. Inquire at the Cartographic Department in the Library of All Worlds to examine these, and compare their 'paths to the ones you know.

Walk the city of Everway, and you will find other 'paths hiding in plain sight. Carpets and tapestries, and even fine pottery and porcelain may display coded representations of spherepaths. Examine the geometric patterns of the temples in Everway, and you will find many more. Even the landscaping of the sacred grove outside the Library of All Worlds hints at such revelations.

Finally, a word about the use of codes and symbols in spherepaths is definitely in order. Cyphers, codes, and symbols offer information security, but at a price. Meaning can be lost; even worse, deception or misinformation can occur. For example, the Snakerings often encode gatepaths with logic bombs that confound Spherewalkers while they are in-transit between gates. Spherewalkers have been lost forever due to the conceptual slippage caused by their traps.