Books, Collections, Public Libraries
id like to suggest adding books to the game; books which can be bought, looted, collected, and read by the owner as well as by others. i think players would enjoy trying to complete book collections (there is a collector slumbering in every player). and they would enjoy reading their contents, which can basically deal with everything, but would be a nice source to learn existing and upcoming lore (knowing lore and history makes players feel at home in a game world). and books would be "neutral" items/loot, with no stat boni, neither and favoring crafters or adventurers only nor a specific class, their implementation thus would not lead to the usual "x got that, now give me this" debate.
1. how to aquire books
a) some basic and common books, the contents of which should be common knowledge among the gifted, could be store bought, the sellers being perhaps imperial librarians opening their business in tazoon and some of the player towns. or a hermit living somewhere in the wild might sell rarer books.
b) the rarer and more precious examples could be looted from intelligent mobs (e.g. "research of the blight" could be loot from a withered aegis spell caster, "history of the blood skulks" could be looted from blood skulks etc).
c) quests (darkstaff tells you: "as a reward for helping me i want you to have this book. treasure it! it contains valuable blabla...")
2. book collections
everyone likes to collect something. the reward of having collected a series of books is simply the knowledge of the full story. book titles can be clear enough about what has to be collected ("flora and fauna of the middling lands, volume VII"). might encourage trade among the players with looted books.
3. appearance and contents of books
bulk 1, not stackable, with a nice little booklike icon. the blue popup window might give a more detailed description similar to the one of dragon hoardables along with subtitles, author, number of volumes if collection.
the contents itself might be implemented using the standard npc interaction dialogue with highlighted keywords. thus if chosing "use/read book" from the icon's context menu it might open the "speech window" showing something like (text in [] being highlighted text links):
On the Settlements of Lesser Aradoth
[Preface]
[Chapter/Page 1] - Kion
[Chapter/Page 2] - Sslanis
[Chapter/Page 3] - Parsinia
[Chapter/Page 4] - ...
...
Selecting a page leads to the following text, e.g.:
Chapter I - Kion
On the northern tip of Lesser Aradoth there... blabla. ... While Sslanis will be discussed in detail in [chapter II] we can say that... blablabla. ... which shall now end our description of Kion [Return to Contents].
4. storage of books
with libraries now implemented, add books to the items placable in libraries. with some additional work you could add another option to library storage - a "read only" option, where a visitor to the library can view the books (not necessarily the formula stored), and read all the tales without being allowed to move, remove or otherwise modify the library storage (comparable to the situation in which you can view the contents of your vault, but cannot interact with it since you are out of range. merely the above "read book" option should be allowed).
so players could create public libraries, giving them the opportunity to show around their treasures, and at the same time giving other players the opportunity to benefit from these places of collected in-game lore and knowledge.
Varaenion/Unity
p.s. i nearly forgot to ask for elven buildings, which i always do ;)
