Guild of Writers

More and more people are turning to The Art. But the question arises, just how are they doing it?

The path towards explorer written Ages has been years in the making, thanks to the great tools and work done by those at Cobbs/H’uru/GoW. And during MOUL the story turned toward the future inclusion of explorer Ages, with Dr. Watson of the DRC stating that.

Yeesha has already been to hundreds of Ages, looking for something, anything, that might help to end the Bahro conflict, or, at the very least, help to protect us from it in case there comes a time when the “good” Bahro are no longer able to. As time passes, it grows increasingly unlikely that anything is going to be found in an Age the D’ni have or had access to. And so, we are going to need new Ages at some point. There are those among the Explorers who may eventually be able to assist in that regard. That is the direction I believe we must take. The Guilds (and even the Explorers who are not interested in joining a Guild) will have to work together: writing, maintaining, mapping, and exploring those new Ages. It is a grand undertaking. And much of it depends on you Explorers, and how well you choose to work together. Will we be up to the challenge? That definitely remains to be seen. I hope we are.

– Dr. Watson

Season 2 of MOUL would have continued with the notion of Guilds had a season 2 taken place. However it didn’t and we were left without any kind of “official” story how explorers learned the Art.

Admittedly not all Age Builders require a story as to how they learned the Art, not all of them build Ages Written by them, some build D’ni Ages, some build Ages without having an IC counterpart to them.
But for those who do, what would be the precedent here?

So, any explorer who suddenly turns up with new Ages is perforce going to have “learned the Art from a secret book I found and didn’t tell anyone about,” which is exactly the kind of back-door fudging thing I don’t want to happen. I know it’s going to, because nobody much except me cares about this, and when everybody in the Cavern has “learned the Art from a secret book they found and didn’t tell anyone about,” I shall probably–if I do succeed in making Ages OOC–let it be assumed I’ve done the same, because by then it would be pointless to insist otherwise.

– Zander

Currently most operate the “secret book not shared with anyone else” method, which basically does exactly what it says on the cover.

I myself delve into this method myself, whilst I don’t assume for one second that you can learn the Art from just one book, my IC explanation was that I studied Linking Books and how they related to the Ages they Linked too, studied Rehevkor or any other documentation I could find (purposely leaving it vague).

But if everyone is doing this does this not have a “Watcher Sanctuary” effect? Does it not cheapen the idea if it becomes overused?

So what is the solution to this?

That’s why I say I want the learning of Writing to take place fully IC, from scratch. I want resources found, classes set up, people bringing in their beginners’ Ages for marking. I know I won’t get it, but that’s what I want.

– Zander

Well I believe I touched upon it with Tochoortahv. An Age where people can come to learn the Art. The problem I found with Tochoortahv as I mentioned in the development entry was that we don’t know what the Garohevtee and what not look like, which is why books were never included in the release version.

However upon thinking about it, and reading Zanders words “I want the learning of Writing to take place fully IC” it came to me.
IC we don’t need to actually see the Garohevtee, we don’t actually need to see inside the Rehevkor, it just needs to there in the Age to be enough.

Tahgayrahn is my Tochoortahv Mark 2. An IC place where people will be able to come to to learn, with a library and books and a podium for speeches and classes. The books we don’t know about can be there but not clickable, the books we do know about can be read, and from an IC perspective the materials will be there for people to learn from, to share.

Hopefully that will allow for new stories for Age writing origins to flourish, and address some concerns from Zander, unfortunately the following:

We came to a Cavern that had been systematically stripped of any means of learning it, our only source of information was the DRC and they made it clear that they did not have that information to give us, and since they have been gone nothing new has emerged. No-one has even seen one Descriptive Book, let alone a Rehevkor, or a bottle of whizzy ink or a sheet of magic paper.

But it’s a matter of personal preference. My way seems to me to be playing fair, not imagining myself an advantage other players don’t have.

Leaves me feeling that perhaps this won’t be a good enough solution either, but I guess we shall see, cannot please everyone that is for sure.

Do you think Cyan needs to come out and tell us how it is? Or do you think the solutions presented in this article and other fan’s stories will suffice?