Susan Sto-helit. Because in this world, after everyone panics,

So I was fiddling around with the Deck of Many Things again (again again) and yesterday's first card was the Throne (and it took a whole six cards to get to the Void, ah well).

So I was thinking once again about what scale of Keep you should get from that card.

There's a suggested one in the Book of Many Things, which I have a nice hardback of that goes with the DnD versions of cards including but not limited to the traditional Deck. It doesn't give prices for individual stronghold parts and is an adventure location by design, so it's more about clearing out the Stronghold than just like tada have a castle.

The internet reckons the old Stronghold Builders Guide has a listed price of 70,000gp for their Cheap Keep, but the SBG prices for ANYthing building wise are in no way compatible with Pathfinder 1e prices from Ultimate Campaign.
... just looked up Building prices and found https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/downtime/rooms-and-teams/ lists more building components together, including ones from other books, so you too can price a Blood Spa or a Mystic Greenhouse.

... searching my own journal for Stronghold has very much the same topic come up a lot...

I don't think the rules as written even slightly hint that you can pull a fully stocked library along with your Keep, probably just fortifications and some basic wooden furniture. But I always skip to wanting to put a library in it. Obviously. Chanter's House library with 22,000 books would be so lovely. And libraries do come up in Pathfinder Adventures but for some reason the modules don't often expect you to try and loot the place. So I get stuck reading the Acadamae of Secrets adventure and want to loot something the module treats as scenery, so then in other journal entries I try and math the weight of all the books... which may or may not make any gold piece sense at the end of the day but that is, of course, not the point.

I keep trying to figure out the Library prices and what would be comparable prices between the SBG and UC, because the SBG has library book lots that give you a different bonus.

UC has Book Repository for a one topic +3 or Magical Repository for Knowledge Arcana and Spellcraft +3, +4 if you're doing magic item or spell research.

There are prices listed for magic item design that depend on the amount of bonus.
Skill bonus (competence) Bonus squared x 100 gp
UC libraries give a *circumstance* bonus, and different bonuses are x 1000gp or x 2000gp even. So it won't be the same x. But that whole section is bonus squared.

So to figure out the cost of a +6 instead of a +3 library, even though +6 is only a possibility in SBG:

Basic Repository costs 460gp, Magical Repository 730gp
I am going to knock 10gp off each and put it back on later, purely because I can see the multipliers work tidy without the 10gp, so lets call that the shelf costs or something.
A +3 bonus costs (3*3)*something gp.
450/9=50
720/9=80

So a +6 library for one skill is (6*6)*50gp = 1800gp
or Magical is (6*6)*80gp = 2880gp

Stick the spare tens of gp back on the price and it scales in the same way as any other bonus, I think.

A comprehensive Library has 9 Knowledge skills plus a Magical bit, so 9*1810= 16,290gp
+2890 = 19,180gp

Minimum size 40 square maximum 120. You could say a library needs more squares to be more comprehensive but does it really need more than three times more? SBG has it take 1 lot for +2, 3 lots for +4, and 6 lots for +6. UC's +3 is between those, but call it 2 lots for being smaller than +4 and bigger than +1, and then you get to only needing *3 the space, so it fits in that 12.

Fortification costs 300gp per room, or 3000 total for this 10 room library. It includes fireproofing but for the library not the books. Furnishings to turn it from absolute utilitarian into proper fancy also cost 300gp per room, but I would argue you don't need to upgrade the book shelves so a little added fancy reading room might be more the thing. If you want to put the whole lot behind a very locked door then a vault costs 300gp too but you wouldn't get the walls as strong as the door that way. Not in 4 to 8 squares of vault. You could however fit your standard Magical Repository within the Vault, protecting the fiddly or dangerous things there. Might need more than one vault for our dreamed of +6 though.

All that fiddling with UC rules puts an upper bound of one sort on the possible.
But it is well into the conjectural to claim a library can give you that much plus, in Pathfinder rather than DnD.

Still, happier with these prices than the SBG ones, where a +6 library is 20,000gp per subject.

How you'd get a well stocked library using the Deck of Many Things... well there's the smartest way, where you never use the thing but maybe rent it to researchers for book swapsies. There's the smart way, where you use the Gems to buy mostly books, which would take one Gems card for the most comprehensive library and still leave you with spare change. Or there's the Not Smart way, where you use a Wish for it. Given that this is outside the bounds of established safe Wish granting, you will get ever so many Trouble that way.

Which is, of course, fun.

But you may also get a slightly cursed or twisted library.


... you might get ChatGPT.


... that is not fun. nope.



The library from the Acadamae has been in a hell adjacent dimension for a subjectively really long time, so having a slightly hell twisted set of books seems a very realistic possibility, for values of realistic that apply to rpgs. But Hell is Lawful and has an interesting take on Lying, ie technicalities upon technicalities but not an outright untruth. You could easily get stuck thinking you could work around that.


Best to stick with the Gems though.



... if you have time travel in a universe with Lost Knowledge, like when the Watchers Library got blown up, this seems like a very good reason to travel. It's a tiny smidge more than a Cheap Trick, but the books were created in good order, they're just being extracted and shipped forwards in time the fast way. No paradox, perfectly respectable save.

... says a time traveller with a +6 library...



Okays, plot bunnies achieved, I'll go do something else for a bit.

I am reading a long fic right now
where two characters from different horror verses
get together and road trip and date and sort out their mental health a bit

and not one highly metaphorical demon and or ghost or anything has jumped out at them even the once.

Way to change genres.



And, way to make their canon actions look... so much more inappropriate.

Like if you can take time off from being jumped by The Horrors just by the story treating them like people for a bit
the horrors is you.


Like if it's honestly not a big deal to employ or work for demons and devils and so forth
and they'll just sit around and complain about London prices between work shifts
then the general level of ultraviolence towards them from protagonists
is
bad.


And I don't think the story quite means to say that
they're just taking a pause on the killing to do sex
which seems like reasonable story goals.

But if it is possible in universe then the characters are ... in a very weird position vs their own canon actions.




Not naming the story because like clearly this is an odd perspective to read it from
the romance story is about romance and it is weirding me out with social implications
is not the authors problem.



But still.

I watched a couple more episodes of Legends of Tomorrow
and the villains (Legion of Doom, Eobard and his boy band) were doing a heist in the years away future of
January 2025.

... I had a bunch of feelings about it but they are mostly represented by
staring at the wall for a bit.

Now I'm thinking
about how much damage
a retired time traveller could do
just by keeping track of all the days they could stir things up again
by waiting, say, nine years.


... very mess.



Ace and Hex did a time travel from the 2020s and Ace has caught up the long way around by now.
You wonder all the things she'd want to tell herself, even if it's just confined to better control of the nitro nine.



I was not exactly caught up in Legends because the guys were being very playground about whose sword is bigger and kind of embarrassingly bad at, like, crime. The basics of. Leverage this was not.

Also it feels like there is a much more elegant solution that they cannot conceive of or pursue by virtue of being
massive dicks who hate each other a lot.

Kind of like the speedster was not going to think up
try standing still
on his own.

The assassins are just... not well suited to potentially cooperative solutions.

The mind control stuff is epic creepy though.


I stopped after two episodes because if all I'm thinking is how there's a way to speed run the whole season if you start out knowing how it ends then I am not, you know, watching.

I like the bit about Lily and temporal aberrations but I don't like the way they treat timelines as real and unreal based on absolute nothing. I mean post crisis the multiverse exists because of time travel, they need a better theoretical basis than 'unnatural'. But the Lily argument is kind of them discovering that? Maybe.

I can start with the word chronodynamics and spin some technobabble about currents in time and how some are destructive and some are sustaining and some are legit transformational to the whole pattern but they all have to contend with the whole rest of time still doing its thing.

Or you can start with a distinction based around free will and personal choice, and how much of a rug pull it is if the chosen few can make everyone do all their choices over again. That's more satisfying.

But no. Not so much so far.



I do not get Nate and Amaya. Rescue mission first, whatever all that was after. Plus for a historian Nate is not great at causes and consequences.


Mick was great though.
It's satisfying watching the story give him chances to shine but the other characters are... challenging, this year.
Great set up for next disc.


I need more sleep but I have been neither sleeping nor doing much of anything else, outside of those two episodes.

I don't know what I would be looking for in a story.

... possibly I am trying to fill my fun meter when it is my social meter empty.

Shall have to think of something for next year.

I have decided today I am not liking the AUs I am reading
because AUs don't take the hurt person from the canon I know and find a way to help him
they just wave a hand and make him never no more have been hurt in the first place, as if that is the only way.

Reminds me of a stupid time travel movie I saw once where every attempt to change the past just made things worse until they undid ever meeting in the first place. Like the story really wanted there to be no way forwards, only unmaking.

I reject that entirely.

Unfortunately for me I am reading in one of those complicated nested sets of canon that changes between media and gets rebooted a lot, so the character with the same name hasn't the same anything else, including wounds. Which is probably nicer for him, but.

... calling that AUs doesn't seem quite right. Alternate canons? Alternate canons set in canon alternate universes? Fiddly to name.



I have a few tabs open that just throw Jack Harkness at him. Ideally that can be like a happy little reward. ... but if they actually go with what the crossover has in common it'll be horror where one person can die repeatedly and the other can feel very about it.

Guess I shall see.

I am reading fic and figuring out which bits of these dynamics are personally compelling.
( Read more... )

So I keep turning these characters around in my head and the weird blank space of reading lacking canon is being filled in with a variety of configurations and I am today finding them fascinating.

But more in my head than on the page, where different elements change with every telling.