Prefatory question 1: Because you had success on the check, you were able to narrate that the tower was where you wanted it to be, without consequence or complication?
Sort-of. The sequence matters to the play experience.
I've just reviewed my notes on the session in question and it is not more specific than this:
Thurgon and Aramina debated what their destination should be (Aramina - being learned in Great Masters-wise, believes that the abandoned tower of Evard the Black lay somewhere in the forest on the north side of the river, and wants to check it out). Thurgon persuaded her that they could not do such a thing unless (i) she fixed his breastplate, and (ii) they found some information in the abandoned fortresses of his order which would indicate that the tower was, at least, superficially safe to seek out (eg not an orc fortress a la Angmar/Dol Guldur).
It wasn't until the session after this that we arrived at the tower.
My recollection/conjecture as to how it played is along these lines:
Me: Aramina has Great Masters-wise. She thinks Evards't tower is around here.
GM: OK, make a check vs Ob [x] <probably 2 or 3? I don't remember now>
Me: <roll dice? Success!
GM: <narrates something affirming Aramina's recollection of the lore of the Great Masters>
What's important about the sequence is that the player
states the task - here, remembering something - and
states the intent - here, knowing oneself to be in the vicinity of Evard's tower - before the dice are rolled.
Success in BW is sacrosanct, and means that the task succeeded and the player's intent is realised. So in this case Aramina knows that we are in the neighbourhood of Evard's tower. But there is never a point at which I, as the player, had to
narrate the location of the tower, nor declare any action other than from my PC's perspective.
To actually find it I think that Thurgon Circled up a friendly former knight of his order, who took us there on his barge.
Prefatory question 2: Had you failed, the GM would have been able to say "It's not around here" or "It's around here but it's cursed/in ruins/otherwise a mess"?
So the GM would have to frame the consequence in relation to the check. He can't say "It's not around here". He can say "As you think more, you remember that there are two rivers name Jewel and you've got the wrong one"; or "You remember it was around here, but you also remember the tales that it disappeared, together with Evard himself, a century ago"; or, to follow your examples "You remember it was around here, but it's said to have been cursed. He can even say "No, that's not what you remember. It's not around here" but that sort of flat-"out negation would generally be considered weak BW GMing.
The tower could be ruined or a mess even when we find it following a success, because that wasn't part of the declared intent. But obviously the ruin or mess can't be so extreme that we don't really count as having found
Evard's tower at all. The GM knows that this is related to Aramina's Belief that she will find spellbooks, and just flat-out blocking that despite the successful Wises check would be poor GMing. (In response to the question: so what stops a player declaring unlimited Wises checks to contribute to/shape the content of everything in the setting? the answer is, in a sense nothing but in practice the player will eventually want to do something other than just have his/her PC recall facts! And it's no skin off the GM's nose to work within the fictional context that the player has helped to establish.)
But to have had the tower incorporated into a castle so that to find any spellbooks we first have to deal with the castellan - that would be fair game.
As you can see the boundary between
fiction that honours success and
fiction that gives effect to failure is not bright line but rather about the spirit in which downstream elements of the fiction are established and presented by the GM, and - roughly - whether they are opportunities (Thurgon is all over castles and castellans and that sort of thing) or whether they are hurdles (a powerful curse would be a hurdle for Aramina and Thurgon given the limits of their capacity to deal with such a thing).
Would it have been fair (in this context, within expectations for the game) for the GM's response on a failure to say, "Yeah, it's around here. You practically walked past it on your way to town. Why didn't you stop?"
Not as you present it, no. That's just an attempt to retrofit on a perceptual experience that the player (as the controller of his/her PC) should already know about.
Here's one way to make that work: the GM could narrate something like
As you ponder, Aramina, you realise that that small outworks you passed a couple of days ago must have been it. At the time you thought nothing of it - but you do recall that Evard was a master of cloaking and antipathy magic.
The failure would then require further tests - eg whatever might be involved in retracing our steps, and/or piercing the illusion - to get what we want.
A further comment: I hope you can see why I think the idea that a game like BW is about "doing without a GM" is just ridiculous. You can - I hope - see how much GM skill and judgement is required just in adjudicating and then building on this one simple action declaration. Done badly and the game will sour - the GM I play under has never GMed any RPG (but has played quite a number of them) before this campaign, and especially in the first session or two made a few bad calls. Done well, though, and the back-and-forth between player and GM will quickly generate a rich and compelling fiction!
Finally: I summon
@zarionofarabel who I think has BW experience.
