So after a couple of feverish hours designing and coding, I have coded a playable prototype of my latest upcoming game. I also called Cult Games Chief Illustrator Art I. Ficial to wake him up and get him down to our Monaco offices, and we have a provisional cover.
First off, for the background to this groundbreaking game, read the Ultimate Edition: Research rules, paying special attention to my follow-up post in that thread. Actually, I'll copy-paste it here for easy reference: https://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=40170#p40170
icycalm wrote:Ok, so I just had a genius idea. You’ll want to sit down for this.
These research mechanics give levels to libraries. We now have libraries from CR 1 to 20. So... what CR is the Library building you can build with the “Ultimate Campaign” rules?
Isn’t it obviously CR 1?
Thinking about this immediately brought me to the next question:
How do you level up your library lol?
There’s 20 levels worth of leveling to do! That’s an ENTIRE CAMPAIGN revolving around leveling a... library.
And that, dear Cult Games fans, is how Alex Kierkegaard's Master Sage (2025) was born.
More details and the cover illustration coming soon.
So really the central mechanic here is leveling libraries. How do you level them then?
Well, in the sample libraries provided in the rules (which I have removed from the player version I uploaded), the libraries get CR and XP values. I'll post the statblocks here for the "weakest" sample library and the "strongest" one provided by Paizo and you'll see how easy the answer to the issue is.
Btw, below these statblocks are the various research thresholds for unlocking knowledge in these libraries, but I won't be showing these here to avoid completely spoilering them. They are basically 3-7 stages of kp, at each one of which you gain a couple of sentences that summarize the knowledge you've learned.
So with the two data points of CR 2/XP 600 and CR 18/XP 153,600 we can interpolate and extrapolate XP values for all the CR levels, from 1 to 20. Just like a character has. So now that we know the library's XP values, all we need to figure out is how precisely a library is supposed to gain this XP.
I had a couple of early ideas that aren't worth going into in detail. Like for example spending money (or "Ultimate Campaign" capital) to level the library. But very quickly I hit on the genius idea that convinced me I should fully design, code and publish this game.
When heroes and characters explore the world in adventures and scenarios, they often find troves of scrolls, books and other kinds of records (like for example etchings on carvings or inscribed statues, etc.) For example in the War for the Crown campaign, after the Exaltation Massacre, the PCs were teleported to a senator's escape room, which contained a small library. The characters, being trapped, spent some time perusing this library, and actually learned some lore from it. Not much of course since they only spent some hours there. And then they managed to get out, and now they're in a "dungeon" of sorts, with the library's contents... left behind.
This then is our mechanic. Bring those books back to a library, and the library earns as much XP as the books are worth. How much are they worth? The GM will have to assign an XP value from now on to every pile of records discovered in the world, based on the handful of sample libraries and their XP and contents in Paizo's rules. What about inscriptions on statues or walls or whatever that can't be easily removed? Write down the inscriptions and bring them back. What about a "psychic memory palace"? Record as much as you can (not only in writing, but perhaps also by magical means), and the XP the library will receive will be proportional to how much you're able to record and bring back.
Perhaps even the TYPE of knowledge that the library will stockpile will depend on the type of records brought back, so that only THOSE types of knowledge can be researched in that particular library (and we will list those in the overworld when you click on the library). I was stunned to see that Paizo (really, the genius Jason Bulmahn who's in charge of their rules design) is treating libraries as MONSTERS. So that even if a library is CR 20, you can't learn everything in the world in it! You can only learn the type of info it has, and when you've learned everything it can teach you (i.e. reduced its knowledge points to zero) you have to move on to another library to continue your research. Absolutely genius game design, as my first instinct would have been to make the CR 20 library capable of answering pretty much anything. But that would have been a short and boring game. Rather make the players explore more of the world to find more and more niche libraries, and "fight" them with the research rules to unlock their secrets.
Same thing, in reverse, should be how building up a library works. In fact precisely because Paizo gives us the rules to 1) Build a CR 1 library as a BUILDING, and 2) Deconstruct a library of CR 1-20 as RESEARCHERS, it's very easy for us to add the third step, which is building up a library from CR 1 to 20 by ADDING information to it instead of essentially "REMOVING" it.
This mechanic makes the adventures and scenarios so much richer and more meaningful, since players now will be eyeing information troves with brand-new eyes and trying to figure out how to haul all that treasure away and carry it across the world. There was for example no way to take any significant amount of the senator's books out of his escape room in War for the Crown. Maybe an opportunity will present itself later. But if so, let me tell you, it's not in the campaign, which means the players would have to go out of their way to create the opportunity, which means they'll spend time and resources on it that could have been spent in the campaign, and which perhaps SHOULD be spent in the campaign so as to achieve a better outcome. Exactly as with my seduction mechanics (Alex Kierkegaard's Master Lover, btw, to be fully released in 2025 too) the players are reduced to bickering about hot and powerful and rich chicks and who will get them, all the while losing reputation in her eyes if they bungle it, not to mention time and resources etc. It all just leads to a game with an unheard-of level of depth, richness and interactivity.
Now of course not all players or characters will be interested in building and leveling libraries. However, even those who aren't interested might want the gold the libraries will pay for the records, so from now on ALL libraries on the overworld, when you click on them, will give you the prices they pay per XP of knowledge brought back! You'll be able to zoom into every library in the multiverse thanks to the InfiniZoom mechanics I have coded, and get this information! And players who OWN libraries will get to set their prices! And by setting them higher than other libraries, they'll compel adventurers from across Golarion to make the trip to their libraries, which is how you get your library to CR 20, and also to adding to it info from far-flung places. You must spend a LOT of money if you want someone to bother hauling records to you from Tian Xia, from Azlant, from Arcadia! (At which point btw you'll be competing with the Pathfinder Society lol.) But once you get the Tian Xia records, you can start learning Tian lore even if you're nowhere near the continent! So it's worth the expense, if you can afford it. A player who's mostly settled in Varisia for example could build a library specializing in the Thassilonian lore that seems to be so central to the region. So you'll even be able to specify on the overworld EXACTLY WHERE FROM and WHAT KIND of records you want! Or set different prices for different types of records! And btw note that we finally did arrive at my idea to level a library by paying money. But instead of just dumb-spending the money and the records magically appearing, we are now FULLY SIMULATING MOMENT-TO-MOMENT OVER DAYS AND MONTHS AND YEARS the discovery of these records, and their acquisition and transportation to the various libraries across Golarion.
And btw, I will also rate the records in terms of VOLUME, so that for higher CR you'll need a physically bigger building. Which brings us to the buildings. They range from 2D:
To modular kits that you can use to design your own library (will need an architect though):
To 2.5D animated libraries (will need to buy these in the Battlestore though, as there are only a handful of them so they must be rationed to those who really want them, and help fund the game):
The Arcane Library
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEyLihZyvdE
And finally, to fully-3D libraries rendered in Cult Engine 3, though these will only be available in the River Kingdoms, because only the River Kingdoms will be rendered fully in CE3:
Oops! Is that a dungeon's modular library? Sorry, my bad, it has nothing to do with any upcoming Cult Games title, I don't know how this pic got into my Master Sage folder.
And of course the player-owned libraries will not only be used by the owner, but also by other players. Which means we'll need to come up with prices for access, etc. And with manager stats so that the owner can conduct his own research if he wants to even when he's away, based on the manager's intelligence etc. Properly INCORPORATING new material into the library will also require the proper character, especially when trying to level the library to high levels.
And this is the general outline of how Master Sage will play. Obviously a lot specifics remain to be filled in, but there's only so much I can theorycraft and code before I need to see some playtests, so all you need to do as a player is build or buy your first library, and we'll take it from there. The more players own libraries and the more aggressively they pursue their leveling, the more effort I'll devote to this game. But there are many other games to pursue in my metaverse, so if no one is interested in library-building and the research that goes with it, that's fine too, and we'll concentrate our efforts on the other games until a player comes in who likes the idea of Master Sage enough to devote some resources to pursuing it.
And note that the mechanics can get a hell of a lot deeper than what I just sketched out, if the players want it. We could outright reskin the kingdom-building mechanics to work as library-building, with a full panel of academics and librarians forming the library's "cabinet"/board of directors, a multiphase-turn with all sorts of expansions to build, random events, political struggles for control of the library, perhaps extending the library into an academy or attaching it to an academy, a palace (or a dungeon?), and deriving synergies or penalties from that. But I suspect we won't need to go that far to derive sufficient enjoyment out of this new game. Managing kingdoms is more fun than managing libraries, right? Adventuring is more fun. Roleplaying is more fun. I think the library mechanics best serve the overall metaverse by remaining roughly contained to the level of complexity I have already sketched out. But we'll see how things go. I am always up for adding complexity if at least one player wants to pursue it, and also if we add automation to some of the mechanics in the future etc.
Any ideas or questions, post them here. I'll do more work on all this the moment someone builds, buys or I suppose steals or conquers their first library (or inherits it, or is gifted it, etc.); the moment someone OWNS a library.
