The Cloak-and-Sword compel souls that seek a life beyond the cold rules of caste and class. Often people imagine that such folk must be adventurers, wanderers, cutthroats at worst and pilgrims at best. But there are other ways to violate the laws of modesty. Some find excellence in the arts of the mind.
Class: Scholar
Start with a post in a university, monastery, or abbey. Depending on the wealth of your host institution, this can mean a sinecure for life or a roof over your head so long as you have a good hand for copying out old books. You can be of the cloth (a monk or ordained clergyman, with all the commitments and oaths that implies) or not. If not, your options for advancement are limited. You are always literate in the local and official languages. This means that you can read words out loud and transcribe words into text, with a good working vocabulary and the ability to parse and form grammatically correct sentences. You will also take a discipline, an academic specialty: Numeracy (ability to do arithmetic), History (either regional or imperial history), Doctrine (church scripture and religious ritual), Grammar (oratory and writing skill), or Philosophy (either concerning politics, logic, or naturalism).
Initial Posting
If you want, roll 3d6 to determine your initial post:
3-6: Outskirts of Propriety
7-8: Town School or Church
9-11: Monastery, Nunnery, or Hermitage
12-14: Urban Academy or Gymnasium
15-17: University or Cathedral-school
18: High Stations
Outskirts of Propriety: You are the student of a hermit in a cave, scribe for a retired alderman, or the procurator for an anchoress in a small village. Your education is ad-hoc, often improvised, and probably heretical in more than one aspect. You share in the esoteric beliefs of your teacher, and cannot easily find a posting elsewhere using what you have learned here. Still, there are benefits to being taught free from the constrictions of official doctrine. For one, your education stands a chance of intersecting with lived reality. Choose any discipline. You hold espirit for your teacher.
Town School or Church: In these enlightened times any town with more than a hundred souls probably has a school of some sort, and definitely a church. If you are lucky, your town is host to a beguinage where you can learn useful trades as well as scripture from beguines or berghards. If you are unlucky, your days will be spent as an improvised record-keeper, scribe, and amanuensis for the local church or town officials. Still, if you perform well there's often a chance of being offered a scholarship to the city, or a chance to join an order of the cloth. Your discipline is numeracy. If you were taught by beguines or berghards, you also know the basics of a trade.
Monastery, Nunnery, or Hermitage: You are either a lay scribe to or a member of an order who live in seclusion. Your days are spent in prayer, reflection, idle hypothesizing, and furthering the preservation of important texts by copying them. Sometimes, you scrape off useless books from the valuable parchment they are bound to, such that you can overwrite it with more useful text in the scriptorium. You live in vague antagonism to the towns nearby and the religious and temporal authorities above you: too independent to be subjugated, too useful to be annihilated, taking tithes from the farmers and orders for books and scripts from nobles. Your discipline is grammar.
Urban Academy or Gymnasium: You live and study in a great city of the empire, a centre of commerce and moral decay. You keep your student's tonsure so that you are not subject to temporal laws when you get into a drunken brawl and are hauled before the city magistrate. Of all the posts this one is the most easy to escape. Of all the posts this one is the most likely to teach you nothing. You start with no discipline, and take on a vice.
University or Cathedral-School: The greatest sites of learning in the realm, sponsored by regents and founded by dead kings. Here the locus of power is within reach. Students here act like nobles, often because they are descended from nobles. What is debated here may, in time, become law or church doctrine. Be careful and courteous, and you too can one day sit on a solemn wooden throne to eat great feasts of flesh and blood. Your discipline is philosophy or doctrine.
High Stations: Beyond even the University of Saunt-Theresia (mater scholarum, mater philosophorum) are the three Great Schools: The Imperial Academy in Widdernmark, the Court of His Revealed Excellency the Emperor at the Capitol Mount where He was borne, or the Cathedral-school of the Great Fountain of the Numinous Divine. Here the highest matters of policy and scripture are but bread and butter, fodder for demonstrations of wit and lunchtime chit-chat. Here we learn the hollowness of words and letters, as men twist them into pretty patterns in service of power. Choose any discipline. You hold esprit for the emperor.
The Path to Acclaim
Working in your post often involves researching or resolving academical questions. An assignment will usually combine 1d6+3 such questions with a deadline, usually in a week's time. As you climb the ladder to higher and higher postings, the number of questions in each assignment will increase (1d6+3, 2d6, 2d6+3, 3d6...). Failure to complete too many assignments will lead to your expulsion from your post or your order. Success may mean promotion up the cursus honorum, going from town schoolmaster to rector of a college to advisor to the Imperial Court.
The Path to Wisdom
When you make a esprited attempt to attack some academical question, make an esprit reaction roll against the Spirit of Wisdom herself using Intelligence instead of Charisma. This is an Academics roll.
- If you roll 2 or less, you are frustrated. Lose 2d6+3 hours of work and 1d6 HP.
- If you roll 3-5, you are lost, wasting 2d6+3 hours of work and 1d4 HP. If you want to answer your question, you must become frustrated.
- If you roll 6-8, your question is answered after 2d6+3 hours of work and 1d4-1 HP.
- If you roll 9-11, your question is answered after 2d6+3 hours of work.
- If you roll 12 or more, the question is answered after 1d6+3 hours of work, and you can see whether it was the correct question to ask in the first place.
Frustration
When you are frustrated, you make all checks and saves with disadvantage. Frustration goes away after 1d6+3 hours of non-strenuous activity and smelling the daisies, or a good night's sleep. If you make any more attempts to work while frustrated, you make any Academics roll at -1. If you become frustrated again, roll 1d6 on the following table.
1-2: You become obsessed.
3-5: You become enraged. Break a quill or scratch some parchment, or go outside and howl at the uncaring skies. Until you lose your frustrated status, further Academics rolls take an additional -1 penalty.
6: The Spirit consoles you in your distress. Clear frustration. Your next Academics roll is done with +2.
Obsession
Once you become obsessed, you can no longer choose whether to work on the problem or not. You will make Academics rolls until you either lose all HP and become unconscious or until you solve the problem and make a breakthrough. If you make a breakthrough, you now hold esprit for the Spirit of Wisdom. You gain +1 permanent Intelligence for the purposes of Academics rolls and can no longer voluntarily leave the vocation of Scholar.
The City of Mind
Once you have made a breakthrough, the higher arts are known to you. In addition to resolving Academics rolls, you can enter the City of Mind. Here you can mythologise your struggle against questions in geometry and ars poetica by turning them into literal monsters. Death in the City of Mind ejects you from intense concentration, costing you 1d12 HP. Triumph over these monsters means that you can answer 1d3 questions in one go, and you earn one Insight.
Insight
Something lurks behind all these facile, surface-level problems. There is a greater issue, a greater rot which prevents you from seeing the heart of Truth. There is an order to the world, something which defies basic observation and challenges the reasonable animal to seek her out. Once you accumulate 6 Insight, the words of your colleagues and the happenings of the world begin to betray this special character. You begin learn the secrets of magic and spellcasting (Spending 1 Insight = 1 point, spells once discovered during adventures in the City of Mind cost points equal to their spell level) while possessing no magical talent at all. Once you accumulate 10 Insight, the connections are obvious. You gain knowledge in disciplines not your own, and surprise yourself with conclusions that you did not consciously reach. Once you accumulate 14 Insight, you can challenge any grandmaster in any field of study and begin to work on your Magnum opus, the great work that will reveal your higher learning to all.
Once you accumulate 20 Insight, you retreat permanently into the City of Mind and become a consort of the Spirit of Wisdom. They find your bed empty in the morning, one last manuscript on the bedside table. If you are lucky, some neophyte will dedicate their life to studying it, beginning the cycle anew.
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