Highly educated historians in search of more knowledge and artifacts related to the lost civilization that built the Ruins of Corinth, The Pyramid of Yagmur and the Locks on the River Smalls.
Aspects
We've Studied This Before
We Have an Artifact that Will Do That
He Knows Too Much
Skills
Good (+3): Lore (Ancients)
Fair (+2): Mysteries, Ancient Technology
Average (+1): Technology, Secrecy, Assassination
Holdings
Not Named - Hidden, Secure
Scope: 6
Scale: 3
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The Librarians and the Mosaic
ReplyDeleteThe Librarians are the inner cabal of the Archivists. As Archivists study and deduce the fundamental truths of science and natural law, they earn their beads to show their mastery of a new course of study. The more beads they gather, the closer they are to grasping the full truth of the world they live in…. that mortals have little or no control over their own destiny.
The Librarians have come to learn that the ancients, those that built the Yagmur pyramid, the Locks along the Queensway river, the ruins of Corinth, these ancient peoples had a grasp of magics, technology, and prophecy that dwarfs our current knowledge. The ancients transcribed the bulk of knowledge on the Mosaic… a tiled wall made of hundreds of hexagonal metal discs. The ancients foresaw a sundering of their world in a cataclysm of fire, earth, air and water, and rather than risk the destruction of the Mosaic in its entirety, they chose to scatter its pieces to the corners of the earth, hiding individual discs in ceramic idols, caverns, nooks, crannies, and even in plain sight. Their reasoning; by the time the knowledge of the Mosaic’s existence resurfaced, civilization would once again be poised to benefit from its learnings.
The Librarians have learned of the existence of tiles, but have not grasped their true meaning. They gather and assemble tiles, futilely trying to understand the grand truth behind the disparate nodes of knowledge they’ve managed to extract from them.
Each tile is a single hexagon of an alien metal, most inscribed on both sides. One side comprises a single node of knowledge… as spell, a prophecy, an equation describing a physical law. These can be deduced and absorbed by the Librarians, adding to their understanding of their world. The other side is a piece of the Mosaic, and single piece of a much larger puzzle, meaningless on its own but synergistic to the accumulated whole.
A few tiles (the guess is 36, knowing the ancient’s fondness for hexagonal regularity) are not like the others. Rather than being shaped from the flat gray metal, these are carved from precious gems. Seven have been accumulated so far, each the same size as the tiles, but each of a different stone. They are rumored to have vast untapped power, if only the Archivists can discover the key to unlocking them.
The Librarians seek out these tiles, these Mosaic puzzle pieces, in hopes of learning from them the truth to the questions of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The current hypothesis is that 720 such tiles exist… creating a scroll 6 tiles wide by 120 long, but this is speculation. At any rate, the Librarians have managed to gather 212 of these metal hexagons, though they still struggle piecing the Mosaic together. While they are often able to decipher the first side of the tile, unraveling a new spell or new mystery, their knowledge of the Mosaic is woefully incomplete, and rife with errors.
ReplyDeleteThe Librarians are currently in turmoil, trying to reconcile both the heretical prophet riling the impoverished, chaotic masses in the Kesh wastes, as well as a new auspex, a seer who claims to have emerged from the labyrinthine tunnels of the Pyramid imbued with knowledge straight from Yagmur. Both urge their followers to action against the worshippers of the Cult of Twelve, and both have triggered key words found in the Mosaic. The Librarians struggle to keep such uprisings local, to keep knowledge of prophetic affairs limited, and to keep their own balance of power among those who seek and employ the arcane mysteries of the ancients.