Chapter 10.3 Core Journals
Core Journals
As characters encounter events, small and large, journal entries will automatically populate. Journal entries show a character's history and the events that occured to a character. When characters are retired or die journals are left behind, leaving a written craft of their history. These journals are written through magic and are linked to a character's core. At any time, a player can put an alias, or remove the name off of the journal, and can re-edit this at any time.
Adding Footnotes
Players can add text below a journal entry to add flavor text, ideas, warnings, hints and tips, or anything else if they want. These don't edit the original entries.
Editing Entries
Players can edit journal entries while alive. It may be that if a player discovered something great, but want to keep it hidden. Others may thought they were onto something, but weren't, and spun a tall tale of half truths. Or perhaps they thought they had found the answer to a puzzle, but only want other players to know through another riddle or code.
Adding Entries
Players can add their own entries if they like the idea of adding their own entries for story flavor, tips, rumors, or warnings to other players.
Written Crafts - Journals
Players can craft copies of journals using another copy or an original; whole, or a select number of page(s). Original journals are worth more when used in remembrances, culture, and after-life worship. Copies can take on the form of any long format written craft (books/scrolls/walls/flip plaque/tablets).
Translating Insanity/Drunken Journals
Some character traits and debuffs can put characters into a state of incomprehension when their journal entries are populated. These garbled entries will need to be translated by a scholar. This can occur when players interact with deities, ethereal and cosmic beings that are too difficult for them to comprehend, or are merely drunk. Scholars with the right skill can also repair ruined journals to allow them to become legible, or ready for translation.
Journal Visual Decay
All journal pages visibly age over time, matching the timing of a character’s skill decay rate. They remain legible (if not illegibly in cases of insanity,) but appear older.
Reclaim Your Skill History
Players cannot learn skills from another player's journal. However, after death and creating a new character, a player can obtain their old character's journal (copy, or original.) They can use the old journal the same as a written skill resource. This way, players can reslot them once they obtain enough skill slots. This also re-links a new character to the old's active quests, and NPC, pet, and mount bonds that were made. This can only be done with characters you own. (You will not obtain your old character's legacy, those must be earned again, but may come sooner with your old journal as a written skill resource.)
Journal Skill Entries
Journal entries will naturally show entries about a character learning a skill. Players can reference their journal using skill tabs to show which skills are still learnable. Skills and their decay levels already show up for players to skill swap in their core skill window, but is also accessible through journal entries. The icons will show the decay timer and visual decay level of the skill memory. Clicking on the skills will turn to that event page, showing a matching decay rate. Clicking on a skill from a journal entry page will open your core skill window as well.
Untrue Entries
Rumors, tall tales, and lies in core journals are not crimes and are up to individual players to decipher if they are real or not.
Journal Storage
Players can carry journals or place on tables, shelves, or place in container storages. Buildings will be defined as libraries when enough books and shelving meets the criteria. Libraries allow settlements to start unlocking culture skills related to scribes and research. Your core journal cannot be removed from your core inventory unless while interacting with it. It will appear in your character's hands, reading it or writing in it, and returns to your core inventory. However, you can make copies that can be stored, dropped, or placed in the open world. Copies will only contain the pages you have at the moment of creation. Trying to place a core journal will make it glow, and will then disappear from the world, but it never leaves your inventory (to avoid weird glitches.)
Decay Rate
Core journals decay rates slow down based on the character's legacy scale. Low legacy will result in a normal decay rate, higher legacy will slow down the decay. Some areas will halt a journal's decay if the legacy matches the context. For example, a player may find a journal in the halls of a deity's dungeon, ruined, but recoverable. It may present some warnings or records of the player's journey to get there.
NPC Interactions
NPC will only rarely interact with journals and entries. Often times this will just help NPC recognize a character's death (Spirit Relics and other core items linked to a player, or memorials, will do the same.) In some cases, if a quest was tied specifically to a player, the NPC will offer the presenter the quest instead.
Player Death
When players die, they will leave their journal behind. Upon player death, if their journal was not picked up yet, a player can change their journal name to show an alias instead, or no name, or create a new alias. This setting will apply immediately, and can continue to be changed until someone removes the journal off of their body, or the journal decays. The entries will be present as it was in life. The journal becomes one of the relics that players will leave when they die, and can be used for festivals, museums, and other forms of remembrance, culture, and/or after-life worship, using the name that is applied to it.