- Pronouns
- He/Him
Slimy_Froggy
Patron
(An image I drew in January 2014)
A book on its own is worth as much as the book itself and what's written in it. But a multitude of books (in the range of several hundreds) is more than just a pile of books. They form together a collective memory through space and time. They are the tangible remnants of players and towns which have now disappeared. HollowWorld exists over six years and many players and towns have come and gone. The only proof of their existence and their only legacy is documented in books. Thanks to places like Thiil, Tahkul-Rimtar, Port Silver's Royal Library and the Compendium, we are able to get to know them. The effort of a few players to protect and find books from players all over the server has created something truly wonderful that I'd like to write about.
I joined HollowWorld on the 15th of July, 2012. I started collecting books in December of the same year, in a city called Tahkul-Rimtar (translating to Book Castle). I want to share with you what the process of categorizing and collecting these books has brought me.
The book castle had a library with 170 books. That's a large amount in a player run town on the 29th of January 2013. That is only about 2 years after the start of the server. It's years later now, and people have continued to write books through time and space. They've written about events that took place in RP, they've written about their towns, about their trade, anything you can imagine. The Compendium is the place to go nowadays, its thread mentions that the town holds over 300 books by now. That's double the amount we had back in 2013.
When you are responsible for a library, you have to know about every book in it. So when someone comes to RolePlay, looking for something in particular or on a certain subject, you can guide them there and get them the best books to study. I have read each and every word of all the books that were in that library of my own town. After reading, I categorized them into 15 sections. Now, reading these books brought me a lot of answers and understanding of what the server was like before I joined, but it gave me as many or even more new questions in return: Through books, I found out what the players were most excited about on the server.
People don't write about things they are indifferent about. I noticed they wrote mostly about magic, places, guides, and most of all journals. Journals are easy to write, just documenting what you do, but they give a great insight in how someone is experiencing RolePlay and what their way of roleplaying is. Guides give insight in what characters specialize in. I found that guides were the perfect starting point for characters to learn a trade. Just get a book from someone who mastered the trade before you and you have a perfectly good reason to get some skill in that. Magic is of course a very interesting subject, but as long as I can remember, I had to keep those books hidden, because magic lore does change very rapidly and the books tended to be outdated.
Now about places, there was a lot of writing about a particular town. That town is no longer here, nor are the players that used to own it. It was that old. But there was a vast amount of books that were either dedicated entirely to that town, or made references to it or to the people running it. Now, this is one of the values of books. Books (together) provide a way of preserving the large events in history within a server. When you are a roleplayer with lots of contacts and you've done things that affect other characters, you're bound to be written about. And someone, maybe FIVE years from now, can read about what your character did back then. You were 16 years old when your character lead an assault on another town in a great war. You're now 21 years old, not even on the server anymore, and someone reads with great enthusiasm about what you did so long ago. The fact that this does happen has got to mean something!
But books are worth even more. You see, these 300+ books in compendium are written by at least 100+ people, I'm sure. They write from their own perspectives. They write perhaps about the same event, with different opinions about it. A soldier writing about a war will have a very different view on that war than would a farmer or general. YET, their books are categorized on the same shelf. None is more important than the other, and the one studying this particular war gets a wholesome image of it by reading their journals. Thus I dare say: Books are the soul of a server. They embody the hundreds of real people that have come and gone on this server. Who have left things behind, and from the books we see their efforts, interests, emotions, etc.
We find our place within Altera by situating ourselves relative to others. The books of those characters from the past help us to do that. We read about a former hero, and we allow our character to be inspired by this hero and maybe attempt to bring back an age that is similar to the time in which that hero lived. These books are as important to RolePlay as is the actual roleplaying. They are the voices from deceased characters, that still influence the lives of characters at this moment. It's almost divine, a religion, to be a librarian or collector of books.
Time passes relentlessly. It is up to players' emotions, norms and values to pick out what is important and write it down. If not, time will fade away towns, players, events, etc. Books written by different players give us not a total image of our server's history, but it gives us what they thought was important to give us. It can be very confusing when two people write about the same thing but give it a different name. So we must always be careful when drawing conclusions from a collective mind as is the hundreds of books on our server.
But by all means, we must continue to preserve and protect our history. Keep an archive of originals out of reach of the public, but let the public copy whatever books are of interest to them. Let the history of the server be as intertwined as the blocks we walk upon. At first, I thought it was just a fantasy roleplay thing to be a librarian, but now that this server is reaching an age where a human would start to go to school, it becomes more than that. The books, to me, are of immeasurable value.
This is what I wanted to share with you and I hope it raises some awareness of the great importance of books and the sharing 'knowledge' in our little server.
Thank you.
Last edited:
