Introduction

As someone who will likely work as a Scribe in the final game, that frequently unseen but incredibly useful profession...I thought I would take a swing at trying to expand on the mechanics of the profession a bit. I'm going to try to talk through a few specializations, as well as looking at what a Scribe is able to do. This will end up meandering into Contracts a bit as well.

I'm basing the existence of these sub-skill on the sort of hierarchical layout that the combat skills have, just with fewer layers.

The Basics

What a Scribe can do

At its heart, a Scribe is responsible for creating written works, in whatever form they take, as well as copying basically anything on a piece of paper/parchment/hide/etc. Whether it is writing up histories, making copies of maps, creating instruction manuals, or drafting trade agreements; if it is at all complicated and needs to be put to paper, a Scribe is the one who does it.

Necessary Co-professions

I'm not going to list the professions each of these rely on...just the ones with a direct connection. Obviously, these could also be synergistic professions (secondary professions taken by a scribe)...the most obvious of them being for a Scribe to have some skill in Alchemy so they can make their own inks.

Leatherworker or Papermaker - Needed to produce a material you can write on.

Herbalist - Provide Reeds for Reed Pens. Or,

Hunter/Farmer - Needed to acquire quills to write with. Or,

Blacksmith/Carpenter - (more advanced) create pens to write with.

Glass Blower - Making vials for inks

Alchemist - Producing inks as well as chemicals for Preservation and Caring for your tools

Farmer (Apiarist) - Produce wax necessary for sealing important documents and messages

Actions/Specializations

This section takes a closer look at what a Scribe is able to do, what increasing in skill allows them to do, and what these sorts of actions are useful for to the wider public.

General Skill

Improving your baseline Scribing skill does a few useful things for you.

Your work gets neater and the 'skill challenges' get easier. Furthermore, you can automate more complex actions as OPC scripts (a higher skill scribe could automate the creation of more complicated Contract Templates than a low skill scribe could).

Additionally, improved basic Scribing improves your characters skill at Calligraphy, meaning the things you write look more attractive. Depending on the sort of document you are seeking to write, improved appearance of your writing could be required. After all, it's fine to just have chicken scratch for a simple agreement to trade iron for some coin...but if a King is handing down a consecration as a Noble...the paperwork for that should look a lot nicer. The side-effect of this is that improved Calligraphy means improved control over your writing...which makes this synergize nicely with the Forgery skill, because you will be better able to imitate the handwriting of someone else.

Scribing also includes the skills at how to take care of your tools. How to prepare and sharpen quills, care for and clean pens, store your ink, and so on. Naturally, a Scribe can also serve to simply write letters.

Copying

The simplest task a Scribe can undertake, but one that is very useful. This allows a Scribe to take any other written item in-game and produce a copy of it. You do NOT have to be skillful enough to create that item by itself in order to make a copy of it...allowing a high-skill Scribe to pass complex documents down to their apprentices to have multiple copies of the document made.

Higher skill in Copying increases the speed at which you can write without making mistakes (this expands into all other fields of Scribing, making Copying an important skill to build up in order to increase your writing speed), and expands the library of things you can make accurate copies of. At first, it would only be written text you were copying...but higher skill would also allow you to copy Blueprints, Maps, Crafting designs and schematics, things written in a script you don't understand, and more.

Obviously, this would be a marketable skill because contracts are only enforceable if you have a copy of the contract, and any information that needs to be distributed, or even just protected against destruction, would need to be copied.

Contract Writing

This was largely covered in Developer Journals and other posts, so I won't go into all the nitty gritty details here. As was mentioned, basic templates like "I give you X if you give me Y" will be commonly available to anyone. However, anything more complicated than that is going to require a scribe.

Higher skill in Contract Writing, as stated by the Devs, increases the complexity of the contracts you can write. Allowing you to add in variable penalties, terms of voluntary contract termination, long-running contracts with repeating requirements, as well as allowing them to create different kinds of contracts--such as marriage contracts, child contracts, laws, treaties, declarations of war, etc.

Another benefit of higher skill in Contract Writing is the ability to create Contract Templates. These are basically just fill-in-the-blank contracts that you can sell...and anyone who buys them can fill in the blanks. Obviously, this would apply only for the sorts of contract that are trivial for a contract writer of your skill to produce...but it gives you merchandise you can sell freely without having to be actively online to write up what people want.

Again, obviously, the marketability of this comes from the fact that Contracts are the way to enforce behavior in-game in a tangible, punishable way.

Writing Instruction Manuals

As we know from the developer journals, it is possible to acquire Instruction Manuals that can teach you information about different skills by reading them. This branch of Scribing involves the creation of them. Now, to be clear, this does not remove the necessity of the Scholarship (teaching) skill, it involves transferring the lessons of someone with the Scholarship skill into a written form that can then be distributed.

So, there are two different ways this can be handled. Either, you can use a skill you possess, your own Scholarship skill, and your skill at writing manuals to create an Instruction Manual on a topic you are proficient in. Alternately, you could sit in on someone else teaching a profession and write a manual based on their teaching. Naturally, the latter is the more difficult.

The higher your skill is at Writing Manuals, the better the result you turn out is, and the less you have to actually know about the subject matter in order to write about it.

In terms of the result...You can consider your Writing Manuals skill to be a modifier on the Scholarship skill that is generating the content. A book is never as effective as a real teacher, and that's what this adjustment represents. So, just to spitball an example...say you had a Smith who was a good enough teacher to raise someone to skill-level 20. A poor manual writer might produce a manual that is basically useless, a fair one may produce something that can raise the reader's skill to a max of level 5. Mediocre might get it up to 10...and so on. You'll never reach quite the quality that a live teacher can provide...but you can get closer the better you are.

And in terms of knowledge required. Being able to take complex concepts taught in person and translating them into written text is hard. The more you know about the subject you are writing on, the easier this is. So, transcribing for that smith, if you have two fair-skilled manual writers, one of whom is also an apprentice Smith--the writer who understands Smithing is going to be better at writing a manual for Smiths. However, an Expert manual writer with no skill in Smithing may produce a better manual than a fair manual writer who does have some skill. So, in short...a higher skill in Manual Writing allows you to make up for the fact that you don't actually understand the topics you are writing about.

Again, this is marketable because learning from a book is always more accessible than having to wait until a teacher is available to teach on the subject you want to learn.

Writing Histories

This...is an odd one, but I feel like it should be included. In a similar way to the fact that Maps can influence the records of the world (such as by changing the name of a town), Histories can impact the common memories of people. Events that happen in the world, and how common knowledge they are, can be impacted by how prevalent written record of these events are.

Furthermore, histories can provide ammunition for Casus Belli or related claims to nobility. If all you have to prove that you are the rightful ruler of that location is your signet ring...which has been stolen...you may have a hard time making a solid claim that you are the rightful heir. Unless of course you have all of these official documents, sealed by your ancestors. The documents could be a listing of your genealogy, your family's history, a description of the circumstances of your birth, descriptions of your ancestors, or even descriptions of you directly. It could also include historical record that the person you are trying to depose is an usurper.

Naturally, the reverse of this...is that if you are an usurper, you may set out on a campaign to destroy historical record of your predecessors...or fabricate (by mixing in the Forgery skill) history indicating that the transition of power was intentional, or create false genealogies painting you as the rightful heir.

In order to write a history, your character needs to know what happened. That means seeing history yourself, or gathering information using the gossip mechanic. Naturally, using that mechanic with someone who saw history unfolding first-hand will provide more reliable and provide you with more complete information.

Increasing your skill in writing histories increases your efficiency at gathering information via gossip, produces more detailed write-ups, and increases your 'clout' as a historian. In essence, the higher your skill is as a historian, the more likely people are to believe what you wrote. This produces a weighting to the impact of the histories you wrote. If you are a high-skill Historian and wrote that history happened one way...and a low-skill Historian wrote that history happened another way, people will tend to believe you over them.

The marketability of this is unusual, as it mostly applies to more prominent individuals. But, use of histories can increase a character's renown, make sure that their renown persists longer, and provide alternate material for use in Casus Belli...possibly even helping you rouse the public to your side if they all know that your ancestors were excellent rulers, and you can use those histories to prove yourself the heir.

Cryptography

Your skill in Cryptography is representative of how good you are at inventing and working with codes and cyphers, intended to make sure that communication between two individuals is secure. This allows, for example, for the creation of a contract that cannot be read by most people, or allows you to encode schematics and designs such that, even if they are stolen, they cannot be read.

To create a new Cypher, a Cryptologist will need to spend some time in research to develop it. Once a new Cypher is created, the Scribe who made it may now write in that Cypher at will. Additionally, by way of the Scholarship skill (difficulty depends on the complexity of the Cypher), they may teach other Scribes how the Cypher works, allowing them to write and understand the same Cypher. To read a Cypher you do not know how to use would involve the Forensics Skill: Decryption as an opposed test.

Increased skill in Cryptography allows you to create more complex (and thus harder to crack) Cyphers. You'd likely start off with something simple, like letter substitution...eventually moving up to alternate symbolic alphabets...then eventually reaching the pinnacle of Encryption where you can effectively disguise one piece of writing as an entirely different sort of writing. (For example, disguising your newly developed Alchemy Schematic as a set of cooking recipes)

There is a special kind of Cypher that a Cryptologist can create at middling skill that is entirely focused on speed of transcription, rather than being resistant to decryption. Effectively, this allows the Scribe to invent their own form of Shorthand. A Scribe writing in shorthand can write incredibly fast, with the trade-off that most people cannot read what they wrote until they go back at a later time and copy it back over to the local language. A scribe can also develop a more advanced form of Shorthand that is purely phonetic, and would allow them to transcribe literally anything they heard, even if it was spoken in a language they, themselves, didn't speak. Upon which they could get it translated later.

The marketability of this is, again, obvious. Any organization wishing to keep secrets that need to exist in written form in-game would want a Cryptographer to prevent others from being able to read their secrets.

Preservation

One of the more common, but less visible roles of a Scribe involved ensuring the preservation (and at times, restoration) of documents. Over time, if documents are not cared for, they may begin to degrade and eventually cease to be usable.

This particular sub-skill is a measurement of how careful the Scribe is when creating and handling documents, a measure of their ability to identify candidate documents that are the least likely to degrade based on the ink and writing surface used, as well as active methods of preservation such as cleaning methods, ways to kill and prevent paper or leather-damaging pests, washing and alkalization, mending, and so on.

It also allows the Scribe to take pro-active actions to protect a document in the short-term, in exchange for decreasing its long-term survivability. For example, if one treats a map with a lacquer, you can protect it from water damage...making it better suited for an Explorer or Sailor. However, the chemicals in the lacquer may be bad for the paper in the long run, meaning it will degrade faster and need to be replaced sooner. But, in the case of a map...that's probably okay. You can always just make another copy of it.

And, ultimately, it allows a Scribe to identify when a document is beyond repair and may simply need to be copied to preserve its contents and, if any signatures or seals are on them, go about whatever process is necessary to see them re-confirmed.

Furthermore, this serves as one of the research skill that produces design schematics for other professions. This is covered in more detail below under the Research header

Obviously, this skill is fairly situational, as it's only important for documents that need to survive for a long period of time. Example documents could be histories, long-term contracts, documents bestowing a title or rank, and so on. But, when it is necessary, it is very important.

Material Considerations

When working as a Scribe, there are considerations you need to take into account when deciding what you will use to write stuff down.

Ink

Different sorts of ink should have a variety of different attributes. Color being an obvious attribute, but inks should also have differing durabilities (May be more resistant to water damage, but harm the paper...or may last nearly forever as long as you protect it), and depending on how thick the ink is, could impact how quickly you can write while using it.

Writing Utensil

Different sorts of Writing Utensils are useful in different ways. A Reed pen wears out quickly, but is excellent for the broad strokes of Calligraphy, and is ridiculously easy to obtain. A Quill can produce incredibly fine lines (even finer than a pen), are fairly durable if properly prepared, but are a little harder to come by. And a Pen doesn't need sharpening and doesn't often wear out, but can't produce as fine of lines as a quill and may not have been invented yet.

Writing Surface

The final consideration is what do you write on?

Leather is very durable in the short term, but becomes brittle and vulnerable to moisture as it ages (unless properly cared for and treated with oils). It is also quite bulky and can only generally be written on one side. So documents written on Leather would take up a lot of space relative to the amount that could be written on them.

Papyrus is dependent on a very specific kind of plant being around, but is very easy to create and is as thin as paper. However, it is also rather brittle...and thus easily destroyed.

Paper is a fair trade-off...it's cheap to produce once you learn how to do it, is compact, can be crunched, smushed, folded, and abused without suffering any significant damage, and it accepts ink very well. However...it is not durable in the long-term, and shouldn't be used for something you want to keep for a prolonged period of time. Note, this does not refer to only wood-pulp paper, like we use today...but also includes the flax and rice-based papers made prior to that.

Parchment, odd as it may seem to us in modern day, is one of the best writing surfaces available. It is made from animal hide, prepared in a way extremely different from leather, taking a lot of work to produce. The result is something with the consistency and malleability of paper, but lacking paper's severe vulnerability to aging. (There's a reason the US Constitution was written on Parchment). The very best Parchment is that made from calfskin, and is called Vellum. The one consideration with Parchment is that it is extremely vulnerable to moisture and dramatic changes in humidity, and can turn into rawhide if it gets soaked. Thus, it is not really suitable for maps or other things likely to get wet.

Research and Technology

This is the point I struggle the most on, in terms of coming up with ideas. There is only so much you can do to improve the trade of writing stuff down, and most of that involves Preservation, or working in Cryptography. That is where I came up with the idea of pseudo-inventions. The idea here is that a Tinker wouldn't have much reason to try to figure out how to make a better pen...and a Carpenter or Leatherworker wouldn't have much reason to figure out how to make a document case. So, a Scribe doing Research on their own profession may end up coming up with ideas for how to make tools useful to themselves. However, as they can't make the tools themselves, they write up their idea as a special sort of schematic and take it to an appropriate craftsman, who can use that design to research as well, and come up with a functional crafting schematic.

I would imagine that this sort of research could apply to many other professions as well. There isn't a lot of physical invention an Astronomer, Teacher, Miner, Herbalist or Cartographer can do....but they might be able to come up with ideas related to their skill that other professions can make use of.

Wrap-up

So, I know that was a simply colossal wall of text, and that was after a significant bit of editing to pare back my wordiness. So, what do you think? Feedback of all sorts is welcome.

This was the first of several deep-dive design ideas floating about in my head. I think I'll tackle Alchemy next...then maybe Astronomy.