I really love the game but usually I am one who prefers to get around on my own, rather than joining a guild.
In the world of Conan books are probably equal to power as suggested by the recipes acquirable in the book rack near the Archivist. So why don‘t reflect this within the game? And give papyrus a whole new use…
New NPC type: Bookman
New workbench: Writing Desk
Writing Desk „fuel“: Ink (composed of raw ash and whatever else)
Furniture: Book Rack / Book Shelf
This should allow you to have recipes you haven‘t spent knowledge points into(?). As you can use yellow lotus as you want, you could be able to tell the bookman the recipes, you don‘t want to keep. He then uses the ink and papyrus to create the book of the recipe. Sorted into a book shelf/rack you can use the recipe even without knowledge points in it.
Though this should come at a price: As the books are kind of an instruction manual and you are not skilled in creating this particular item, it should take more time and resources to create it. For recipes created by Bookman I, II, III and IV time and resources needed should be increased by approximately 100, 200, 300, 400 % / 50, 100, 150, 200 % respectively.
I don‘t know if this could be implemented, but I‘d really love to see this.
Sorry if my english‘s kind of poor: It‘s not my native tongue.
Lootable recipe books and scrolls. I like it. But, would your book man lose the ability to reproduce said book/scroll if he doesn’t have the original? Or if you lost the book man, would his replacement know the same recipes?
If you know the recipe, you can simply order your bookman to create it using materials.
And such a book can be copied by anyone with a bookman. But copying a book created by a higher-tier bookman should at least take significantly longer. If there‘s not a penalty of some sort.
Every recipe would be available in four tiers, just like the bookman that created it.
And there should be four different ink recipes, one for each tier:
„Ink“, probably made of water and ash and some kind of binder
„Tusche“, made by composing better components
„Tusche Set“, a set of black, red and blue china ink. Should need dyes to be crafted.
„Scholar Tusche Set“, a set of china ink in multiple colors
This would reflect the different tiers: While a T1 book would be a simple instruction manual with step-by-step instructions it would increase to a instruction manual with colorcoded text and (colored) illustrations.
This would also explain why you need more materials and time with lower books: You more often need to trial and error for some steps, costing these extra materials and time.
And now that I think about it: The writing desk fuel should be feathers (for writing) and the ink is material used for crafting a book.
There should be a recipe to create a „writing feather“, acting as a better „fuel“. And for a high-level fuel there could be a mold for some kind of metalic feather, rather than using just feathers.
There might also be a restriction on which recipes can be crafted into a book: The knowledge points needed to learn might come in handy for this:
Bookman I: Recipes up to 4 kp
Bookman II: Recipes up to 8 kp
Bookman III: Recipes up to 12 kp
Bookman IV: Every recipe