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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9576332" data-attributes="member: 7737">Commentary:The Story So Far canonically uses the learn-magic-from-Thayne gamebook path that we didn't take in the first book. But I'm going to continue to assume that OUR Carr Delling took the other path, the one in which after he met Thayne, Carr headed to the College Arcane where he enrolled as a student and learned magic from his uncle Beldon and from senior novice Arno (psycho-killer-in-training).The differences between the path that OUR Carr Delling took and the one that The Sorcerer's Crown assumes we took will cause some paradoxes, but that's part of the fun. OUR Carr Delling already exists in a world in which he has returned from death scenes three times in book 1. I will continue to keep a running total and continue to feel appropriate amounts of shame each time OUR Carr Delling dies.---Let the arithmetic ranting begin.In book 1, we learned that Carr's father, Landor, disappeared "shortly after" Carr's birth 15 years ago. We had assumed this meant immediately after Carr's birth, when he was still a baby. But we could allow for some time to pass between the date of Carr's birth and the date of Landor's disappearance. So it's plausible that Carr could have been "a boy of only sixteen" in book 1.It is now "approximately five years after the conclusion of SCEPTRE OF POWER" and Carr looks "considerably older and more haggard than [his] twenty-two years."16 + 5 = 21, not 22Maybe the word "approximately" does some heavy lifting and it's been five years and 11 months. Maybe in book 1, Carr was "only sixteen" but actually more like sixteen years and 11 months old. Maybe some combination of both allows for the following sentence to be true: "five years ago you were sixteen, and now you're twenty-two."Maybe.---Carr lives in the log house erected for Landor before Carr's birth. This muddles the timeline even further, because at some point after becoming tribal mage to the druids, Landor finds the Sceptre of Bhukod. Also at some point Landor establishes the College Arcane in the port of Freeton on Segate Island, across the water (Pirate's Alley) from the mainland where the Wealwood / druid grove is located.Got all that?The question is in which order these events occurred:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Landor serves as tribal mage to the Kandian druids.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Landor finds the Sceptre of Bhukod.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Landor founds the College Arcane.</li> </ul>I've put them in the order I believe is correct, but readers should not be surprised that there is no definitive answer.I'm working on a new and improved timeline that combines some references from this book with some references from the previous book. But for now, let's rant about one other thing.---"Though you spend most of your waking hours delving into your father's coded spellbooks and extensive notes on the magical secrets of ancient Bhukod, you realize it will take you many more years just to reach the point where Landor left off two decades ago."Ugh. I hate this anti-intellectual bent in many fantasy stories, whereby knowledge transfer is SLOWED DOWN by methods that SPEED IT UP in real life.Landor, a prodigy and scholar, wrote down all that he learned over a lifetime, presumably so that knowledge would be passed along to others including his son. Carr, a prodigy and… OK, not a scholar… will require "many more years" just to get back to the point where Landor left off.Aaaaargh! That is not how knowledge transfer works. That is not how written languages work. If writing things down made it take LONGER to transfer knowledge than oral history, then no one would ever write anything down.This could be a situation where Landor's writings are so erudite and require such advanced understanding that one can only grok them after decades of study. That makes some sense, but it casts Carr in an even worse light than we left him: too dumb to understand his father's writings about the same topics that Carr studies.We have the running joke that Carr has Wisdom 3, but it's starting to seem that Carr also has Intelligence 3.---I promise there will eventually be some actual game-bookin' in this thread. But it's important for me to get some rants going here in the introduction.</blockquote>

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