The Archive is a large, leather-bound book with yellow and mouldering pages accompanied by four small metal discs, each inscribed with a strange and indecipherable script. In virtually every way it appears unprepossessing and unremarkable. It is however, one of the grandest pieces of Teklo Wordsmithing that has ever been seen, and certainly that has ever been permitted to leave the Teklo lands.
The few hundred pages the book holds belie the vast reams of words that actually fill it. Whole libraries of works fit easily between its covers. The quantity of information however, is as much a weakness as a strength, for most people find themselves entirely unable to navigate through the weight of words to find what they are seeking.
The Teklo have revealed that, for reasons unknown to them, certain individuals across the five Peoples of Djemity display a unique intuitive grasp of the arcane system according to which the Archive is built and can navigate it as easily as others might breathe or eat. These individuals are known as Archivists. Only these Archivists, then, can navigate the complexities of the Archive, but even so, they cannot do so alone. For reasons not understood, even by the Teklo themselves, four other Heroes of the land are required to let the Archivist access the information.
For those who know how to look the Archive contains a myriad of books, papers, reports and even letters, all of which are at least a generation or more old. Some are written in dry academic style, others are more personal, and yet others are the ravings of mad-men, given over to paranoid fantasies of spies and rats in the walls. Many writings are incomplete, the words stopping mid-sentence and a new work starting the next line over, dealing with something seemingly wholly unrelated.
Nonetheless, despite all the difficulties and incompleteness, for any who wish to delve into the secrets of Djemity, to find the location of lost tombs and barrows or arcane theories on the nature of the Eastern Stars, the Archive is the place to look.
Once per session those with the Archivist trait may make use of the Archive to find a piece of information. There are a couple of steps to making an Inquiry:
1. Find a member of the GM team and let them know your query; they'll confirm whether it's the sort of information you can expect to find in the Archive.
2. Gather up 4 additional players, none of whom have performed the Inquiry rite this session.
3. Go back to the GM who will record who's Inquiring and will provide the Archivist with an answer to the inquiry.
The Archive appears to contain only what people had recorded somewhere prior to the End of History. It's therefore a good source of historical facts.
So some questions that are likely to be answered:
“Where was Hrothgar the Bloody buried?”
“Who composed the Tale of Brittle Iron?”
“What components were used to create the Staff of Frozen Summers?”
The Archive provides no direct insight into contemporary events, the minds of others, or events that were never recorded.
The following questions would be beyond the scope of the Archive:
“Who amongst our number has betrayed us?”
“Why does Zella reject my advances?”
“What did Duggus the Great have for breakfast on the day he completed the Tale of Brittle Iron?”
Sometimes the Archive is unable to provide the answers to an Inquiry even when one would expect the answer to be available. This seems to occur when the knowledge still exists in a physical form somewhere in the world: in these cases the Archive instead provides provides information about the location of the knowledge. This could mean that the Archive directs you to examine the walls of a hidden chasm in Broken Peak, to read words spelt out by coral in a Western reef, or to prize the words from a Blood-Lore skulking in some ancient tomb.