Reading Books

Throughout your adventures you will find interesting books that will keep your attention and fill you with knowledge for event preparation.

Finding Books
Throughout the world NPCs will have books that the players can borrow, buy or steal. Most farmers and simple folk are not fond of reading, they work hard, earn their coin, and rest up by eating well and playing games. However, you will find some folk who have a knack for it, so you are more likely to find books in places that have universities or libraries. You could try The Ganymere Book & Manuscript Collection located in Villuton, or maybe The Grand Toravellian University?

Dedicating Reading Time
To read you must dedicate an amount of time, whether it be a short rest, or half a day spent reading. To determine how many pages your character can read, multiply your intelligence score by 4, this will give you pages per hour. Now your character can read, but can they understand the book? To see how much knowledge your character has obtained, roll an Intelligence check. Usually the difficulty is DC10 to pass, DC15 to understand it well, and DC20 to absorb the knowledge extremely well.

You will need to re-read a book a few times to understand it, and your skills will eventually fade over time. Intelligence score divided by 2 = Months usable. This means the amount of months you retain the information before needing to re-read the book. Most intelligent folk should be fine for around half a year, however the dimmer folk will need to read a lot more.

What Does it Accomplish?
Once you finish the book you gain a proficiency limited to specific scenarios. For example, if you read a book on the potential healing properties of mushrooms, you would gain proficiency in Intelligence (Medicine) when making a medicine check on mushrooms.

Many books are about circumstantial bonuses. You will rarely find a book that will give you a flat, permanent proficiency. If you already have proficiency in a skill and read a book, it will do nothing as proficiency indicates great knowledge and experience on a subject.

You can also learn languages reading books. However this can take upwards of 250 days, this time can be shortened with a mentor or practicing it with others who speak that language