Discounts on both rooms and meals can usually be worked out for long-term visitors.
| House | Room | Common Room | Breakfast | Lunch | Dinner | Beer | Wine |
| Barber House | - | - | 2 p | 2 p | 2 p | - | - |
| Rabbits Hole | - | - | - | - | - | 2 p | |
| Fallen Leaf | 2 s+ | - | 4 p | - | 6 p | 3 hp | 3 p |
| Fons Tabernus | 1 s+ | 3 p | 2 p | 3 p | 3 p | 1 p | 2 p |
| Amici Doctiloqui | - | - | - | - | - | 3 hp | 3 p |
The Barber House (3)
The Barber House has no rooms, but this public house opens early and serves hot clear soup. It also caters to cutting and fashioning hair. For those who awake early, the Barber House is an important gathering place. The Barber House does not handle surgeries, as this is handled by the Librarians at the Sickhouse.
A good haircut and soup costs 3 pennies throughout the day. Just the soup costs 1 penny, though they don’t advertise it. They serve beer, but only with a meal.
The Bathhouse (4)
Fed by the Old Deer River and heated by wood fires, the Bathhouse is a good place for a cold day. A hot bath costs 4 pennies, a cold bath 1 penny. Memberships are 25 shillings per year and include the steam room.
The Costumers Guild (5)
One of the oldest houses is the home of the intellectual descendants of revolutionary sorceror Charles Dodgson. Dodgson authored the allegorical series on sorcery, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Costumers are known for illusion and spectacle These Costumers also hold to Dodgson’s dream of an open community of magical scholars.
The bottom floor of the Guild is the Rabbit’s Hole, the oldest tavern in Biblyon. The Hole is a major gathering place for scholars in Highland. The scholarly houses tend to gather here nightly for beer and Deep Thought. Bring your own food if you desire any, as the Rabbit’s Hole serves only the Guild’s own brew.
On busy nights such as weekends, full moons, and holidays, there are often one or several food stalls set up on the road leading to the Hole starting around evening.
The Council House (20)
Located smack in the center of the Market Square, the Council House is where most meetings in town are held. The wide windows are kept open in the summer, and shuttered come fall and winter. The town council meets here, and any organization that does not have its own house will also likely meet here if they have official duties to take care of.
The Dormitory of Vincent (24)
Named after the founder of the Order, the Dormitory is the oldest House in Biblyon. Residence is by invitation only, and invitations come by way of the head librarian. Scholars throughout the rest of the world will work their contacts trying to get invited to the Vincent. It isn’t just the free lodging but also the prestige of having been invited.
The Fallen Leaf (6)
With its sign hanging out front depicting a sheet of paper and a shooting star, “The Fallen Leaf” is emblematic of the town’s zeitgeist. The major public house in Biblyon is home to scholars, farmers, merchants, and anyone else looking to stay the night or grab a meal and a drink. Or, more often, just a drink and a lot of talk.
The Fallen Leaf is not attached to any of the formal houses. It contains a game room for dicing and betting.
A room at the Fallen Leaf is two shillings plus three pennies per person, up to a maximum of five persons per room. The Leaf has twenty-four rooms.
Fons Tabernus
Humanity spills out of the doors of the wooden building before you like beer foaming out of a mug on a warm day. A sign hanging above the eaves sports a faded fern and the words “Fons Tabernus”. A jug hangs from a hook on the sign, announcing to the street the nature of this house. On one side of the tavern, a furnace blazes white as the blacksmith works into the night. On the other side, several huge tubs stand behind a sign announcing baths for 1 penny. They’re not making much money.
Located in the merchant’s quarter, Fons Tabernus (“Tavern at the River’s Source” in the ancient tongue) is often the liveliest of the houses. While it also hosts its share of scholarly disputes, here those disputes still can result in personal combat. The Fons contains the widest variety of regulars of any of the public houses in Biblyon. Farmers traveling to Biblyon for metalwork, blacksmithing, or other supplies and services, will often spend the night in the Fons and head back home the next morning, depending on how far their home is.
Sleeping in the common room in the Fons costs three pennies. Breakfast of sausage, potatoes, and eggs with beer, is another two pennies. The Fons has twenty private rooms, which may be had for one shilling plus two pennies for every extra person, up to a maximum of seven persons per room (there are, however, only four cots per room no matter what).
The House of Tutors (7)
The Tutoris Libris were an underground organization started during the degeneracy of the Order of Illustration. Their oral history recalls the fear of that time, though others have forgotten. They were founded in 903 by librarians, scholars, and renegade members of the Order who worried about the new direction of the Order of Illustration. In 916, a few years after the Order “committed suicide”, they built their house, the newest building in Biblyon. The House of Tutors was founded to house the Tutors and their allies.
If the characters bring any Tutoris members in on the plan to examine the castle, the Tutor is likely to brush it off unless the characters have some sort of reason to believe that their search will find something that other people’s haven’t.
If the party brings one of the older Tutors into their confidence, they’ll be warned:
“If there really is a secret complex, I’d be careful. The Illustrators became paranoid and malicious after they retook the castle. There’s no telling what protections they may have laid down.”
If previously broke or itinerant characters bring treasures down from the castle to the town, the townsfolk, especially the Tutors, will become suspicious. If any of the treasures are identifiable as belonging to the Order, this will almost certainly spark a new expedition by the Tutors to the castle.
If the characters bring books from the castle into town, or the Tutors gain knowledge that they’ve acquired books in the castle, the Tutors will consider it a mission to restore those books to their rightful owner: the Library at Biblyon. The Tutors don’t have a library of their own. They consider the Library theirs, or more precisely, they consider themselves as part of the library.
The Tutors have their own boatyard on the pool.
The Tutors are led by a college of seven scholars, one of whom chairs the college for a three year period. Generally, the same small group is voted into the college, and the same smaller group takes turns at chairing the college.
Important Tutors
Abacus Dome (879-957)
Abacus was the chair of the Tutors when the Order still existed. He was the second chair of the group, and one of the founding members. He’s dead now—his grave is in the cemetery, marked “957” for the year he died. He was the leader of the Tutors when the Order “committed suicide”. His notebook, which covers that event, is in the Library. See The Notebook of Abacus Dome in the Props section.
Erin Forney (964-)
Erin Forney studied the architectural development of the castle. Some of his notes are in his folio in the Library. Three years ago he left for further research in Crosspoint. He’s stayed in touch since then, and entertains visiting Tutors in the East.
Anyone who can draw out Erin’s friends in the Tutors will also learn that Erin was undergoing a sort of loss of faith. He had begun to feel that his work “meant nothing” and that “with the castle’s innards spread throughout a fifty mile radius, what could he hope to learn?” Erin felt he needed to find something better to do with his life, sooner rather than later. His sojourn in Crosspoint has more to do with his search for meaning than with his scholarly pursuits, which frankly he hasn’t done much of. There’s nothing odd about that: the scholar’s life requires a special kind of dedication.
What really happened is that Eliazu took notice and decided that someone doing a serious study of the castle was not beneficial to the demon’s goals. Eliazu influenced Erin to leave, instilling feelings of despair, futility, and impatience in the scholar, and then feeding those feelings. Erin has no desire to come back to Biblyon, doesn’t really know what to do with his life, but there has to be something better than poring over old books and someone else’s work.
Erin’s notes contain a map of the first and second floor, an analysis of the movable walls that once existed in the Small Ballroom (room 3 of the first floor), and a lot of geometric doodles—which includes, without labeling it as such, Eliazu’s sigil, so that anyone who has seen Erin’s notes will recognize the sigil if they see it later. Erin outlines the major building sprees in the castle’s history. In 291, the Order built the first portion of the castle and cleared a lot of farmland. The sale of wheat, barley, turnips, apples, and other vegetables and fruit, as well as the sale of clerical work, financed the next major revisions of the castle in 485 and 613. The next major architectural project of the Order was the Library in 615. Construction lasted two decades, though the major portion was finished in five years. They began work on the Dormitory of Vincent in 699, and continued working on it through 723. There is evidence of another major expenditure in the eight-twenties which lasted through the late eight-fifties; what it was is a secret Erin couldn’t find. Diaries from the townsfolk of the time indicate a sharp drop in revenues from barley especially but also from all Order-controlled businesses. Townsfolk alternately blamed it on a string of poor crops, on a land deal in Crosspoint, and on paying off debts from the previous decades. They eventually forgot about it and were pleasantly surprised when book funds began to rise again in the eight-sixties.
See Erin Forney’s Maps in the props section.
Miller Sartoris (928-)
The current chair is Miller Sartoris, an elderly warrior-scholar specializing in the study of bodies of water and their effects on stone and shore. Miller Sartoris is a fourth level warrior and a third level sorceror.
Becoming a Tutor
Any potential Tutor must exhibit a wide array of scholarly knowledge and the ability to act decisively under pressure. Reading and writing is required. If they have a moral code, it tends to be Good or Ordered Good.
In game terms, they will usually either be highly intelligent or have the Scholar specialty, and have an above average agility and charisma. Other specialties that a Tutor might have are the alchemical specialties, Circle Magic and other sorcerous specialties, and Multiple Archetype. Warriors who intend to lead Tutors into battle will often take the Team Combat specialty.
Warriors tend not to have specialties that focus on martial combat (such as Weapons Master or Two-Weapon Fighting), instead opting for specialties that further knowledge and appease curiosity. Multiple Archetype to thief to gain spy abilities is common.
Members of the guard must also learn the War Art field soon after joining the guard. For example:
Albert Elliott, Captain of the Guard: warrior 4, thief 2, intelligence 16, wisdom 12, charisma 14, strength 10, agility 13, endurance 9, survival 38; specialties: Scholar, Multiple Archetype, Team Combat; moral code: Ordered Good; thief fields: Impersonation Art+2 (disguise), Stealth Art+2 (hide), Burglary Science+3 (locks & traps, search); fields: Native Culture+2 (anglish, scholarly etiquette), War Craft+1 (bowyer, fletching), Athletic Art+1 (equestrianism), Survival Craft+1 (mountaineering, hunting), War Art+1 (tactics); Languages+1 (ancient, frankish, literacy), Medical Science+1 (anatomy, medicine), Natural Science+1 (chemistry), Fighting Art+5 (bow, long sword, spear, dagger, short sword, quarterstaff, weapon fluency); age: 33; height: 5’7”; weight: 139 lbs; armor: chain mail, shield, occasionally full helmet.
Albert’s specialty is the study of human anatomy and the interactions between living things and chemicals. He travels often, both alone and with trusted companions, in search of lost knowledge and new knowledge. He is most famous for a field study on the response of the human body to attrition in battle; his treatise has, according to his supporters, the potential to revolutionize field surgery and medicine.
What the Tutors lack in specialized weapon familiarities they often make up in intelligence of overall battle decisions and in the unique battle devices they devise. The Tutoris wing of the library is filled with scale models of siege engines, battle engines, and other devices which have never been created, and also filled with plans for such engines that have been created, annotated with their results in field tests and true battle deployment.
Amici Doctiloqui (8)
This house is about as close to a house of prostitution as you’ll find in Biblyon. They sell minds instead of bodies. Learned companions are versatile, and may be hired as tutors, nurses, research assistants, secretaries, and escorts.
One of your players may object to this name, that it isn’t correct Latin. First, you’ll need to determine if their character would have any knowledge of Latin; if so, any character (player or non-player) with knowledge of Biblyon might be able to relate the following:
There is almost an entire row of books dedicated to this topic in the Library. Some use various survived texts to prove that the Latin is correct; others use competing survived texts to show that the Latin is incorrect; some use the same survived texts to show the opposite of what their predecessor showed. It isn’t just that the texts are contradictory; the texts are argued as fact. The question is our interpretation of tenses, grammars, even spellings. The surviving texts are scant, and the complexity of the Ancient tongue high.
And the Ancient texts themselves are also questioned. There was a contingent about fifty years ago who argued that there were several forms of the Ancient tongue, spread across time and class. Some of these also argued that Frankish was a form of the Ancient tongue pre-existing the cataclysm. Now, few will argue that Frankish is unrelated to Ancient, but most consider it clearly a bastardized form created after the cataclysm fragmented humanity. Regardless, the “fragmented Ancient” theory has fallen out of favor as it was vulnerable on multiple fronts. Part of their argument was based on Biblical sources, and while the Bible, were it available, would count as a strong argument, there is no known surviving biblical text. These scholars reconstructed the text of “The Tower of Babel”, a popular fable of a first cataclysm of Language predating the cataclysm of water. (Some of these folks also consider our expulsion from Eden as the first cataclysm, but this is getting outside of our topic.) Biblical arguments have fallen out of favor in the last few decades, at least in Biblyon, as it is far too easy to reconstruct competing texts. Biblical reconstruction is its own topic, of course, and well represented in Biblyon.
There is a game room downstairs, as well as a well-stocked library. They specialize in card games and dice games, as well as betting on the results.
The Rectory (9) and Church (10)
The Rectory is open only to other priests, usually travelers from Crosspoint, occasionally travelers from Black Stag or upriver.
This is the major church of the area. Father Charles Randall is head priest. Randall is a scholar, having studied at both Crosspoint and Biblyon. His specialty is concordances and textual analysis. He studies various remembered texts, especially biblical texts, in hope of reconstructing the original from its copies. He has two priests directly under his command, and generally from four to ten priests studying at the library who stay at the Rectory.
