A queston that keeps coming up a lot is : How big IS a library. After all, there will be several duplicates of texts, some books are of strange material et all.
(Among the most fun I have had as a GM was letting the players find some huge sandstone tablets with a very nice high level of Terram inscribed in good quality. And then trying to get them home on the back of a wagon without ruining them too much... )
For normal books, 1" per level and quality in the art? More?
Sandstone : 1 square foot / levels with 1" thickness / "page"
(( Quickly gives us : 30x30x2.54 = 2 286 Cubic Centimeters
On a 2.32 kg / cubic meter... IE = 5303 grammes or --- about 10 pounds a tablet. ))
When you run the numbers on the size of a library, remember that unless you have magical recovery aids, the glutton for library space is actually the walkways betwwen the shelves that allow a human to retrieve items from the collection.
In the real world, this is why the compactus was invented.
Yeah, but the real killer is moving it ... and keeping it intact on the road. I have plans that might well have them moving their covenant soon. (Plague is coming...)
Make the SG move it. Hang him out the window until he agrees to do so...
Not really a problem...
Create a spell...terram in this case..
Modify the tablet until it is soft...as long as the spell is 'Sun', you should minimize the problem...
Recast the next day...move along, rinse and repeat as needed.
Why should they move on account of plague? Plague would be nothing but a minor itch to gauntleted magi with even basic creo corpus ability. Better to let the plague do its thing and then get in a Tremere necromancer to whip up endless streams of compliant covenant staffers from the decimated local mundane population!
Imagine the cost savings in covenant grog upkeep (food, shelter, salaries, etc.) that you would no longer have to pay your newfound pool of shambling servants. Moreover, no more complaints or need to worry about how the Gift will affect people. The undead are are most accommodating bunch, really!
Edited to add: And just imagine the land acummulation possibilities of an area cleared of most of its mundane inhabitants - less potential for irksome questions as to why strange robed men are trespassing on the local Lord's land at midnight to collect those odd firefires for ignem or auram vis .
A mundane plague I would agree... One created by a diabolist hellbent on erradicating the order is something else entirely. In fact the plague in question seems to do less damage to mundanes so far...
Basically the plague as such is striking at the magical core of beings, affecting peasants lightly... those with a more realized magical potential are affected in a much harsher manner.
(This is actually something we debated in group as a way to restart a winter covenant into Spring... and changing to the aprentices as characters as well as cleaning the slate of the surrounding area. )
Ah nevermind then. With only your comment of "Plague" to go by, I presumed you meant the Black Death, but of course that was in the mid 1300's so I guess not.
Yeah, I was thinking of something similar -- finding a friendly, very powerful Terram magus on an island, who was willing to trade for a copy of his Terram grand opus: a 300-page text scribed onto poster-sized sheets of iron.
))
