It's a horrible process, and no doubt many a reader has their doubts about mine, or anybody's ability to actually flesh out the impossible scale of the sage studies that I've taken on, but the truth is that sometimes it's a very gratifying process. Yesterday and Friday I faced up to two difficult pages, based on practically no information at all.
The first was the study of "cuisine," which as the history page shows, looked like this on Friday morning:
One sentence, which I transformed into this:
Have a look at the 12 proposed sage abilities through the link. I find them very interesting, especially "culinary familiar" and "temporal feast." It's all just an overview, of course, but should I get a character who wants to take up the study, I've at least created the street signs to be followed.
The study of "animal performance," which is distinct from the usual animal training as it originates with circus-performance, was as barren of content as the cuisine page until yesterday. Now it looks like this:
Again, there are 12 proposed sage abilities. I'm a bit less satisfied with the base material, perhaps because I have so little familiarity with the subject. Still, there'd be plenty of time to sort it out should I have a character that went in this direction. It does at last explain how characters can obtain bears, yaks and tigers as mounts, should they want them.
Each time I rework one of these pages, I find it drastically enhances and expands the possibilities of D&D and even fantasy fiction. I sense there's a novel about a young, talented cook who begins a series of adventures as a camp servant for a gang of adventurers, helps defend the camp from a humanoid attack and is given a gift of 20 g.p. for his trouble.
He promptly runs off to town and buys his way into a guild, whom he quickly impresses with his natural talents. Meanwhile, he gets involved in some other intrigue in the city, overhearing something in the kitchen where he works. His knife gets more handy as he improves his skills and through pluck and risk-taking he saves some high member of the council from a poisoning while winning over the heart of the council-member's daughter with his strawberry-pecan pie.
Next, this same cook uses the council-member's influence and some wealth to set up a very nice kitchen and public house, where upon the adventurers at the start reappear. They become regulars at the tavern, surviving their dungeon adventures on the cook's remarkable crabcakes. This sets off a third adventure in the book, while each of the sage abilities I've described get their play in the book, startling both the host of allies and enemies of the chef and the book's reader.
Anyway, I haven't the time for such things, but again it says to me that D&D is a game whose scope has been hardly examined. Shame that the masses cannot play anything more than the same scenes over and over again.
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