Overview

If the Ruin’Dwell love finding artifacts of the ancient world, the Scholars collect its lore and revel in learning and archiving. A wise, intelligent, and highly adaptable tribe, they often live in close proximity to the Ruin’Dwell.

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Culture

No tribe has as much information about the ancient world collected, codified, and understood as the Scholars do. Not content just to store this information away, they allow it to live again, to aid the world for the greater good. Knowledge hidden is knowledge lost, as Scholar philosophers are known to say.

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Religion

The Scholars would describe themselves as not so much religious as philosophical in their belief systems. Having access to such a wide variety of information has led them to explore just as wide a variety of philosophies, and Scholar philosophers of just about every description can be found.

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Secrecy

The Scholars have little tolerance for the intentional hiding of knowledge, although there are a few terrible secrets of the ancient times that the Scholars fear letting loose into the world once more. These include the science of nuclear power and the development processes behind the Cylophene. Beyond these taboo subjects they believe strongly that information should, and indeed must, be shared.

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Trade

The Scholars are willing to trade with just about anyone, and often trade for artifacts with the Ruin’Dwell. The Merchants, of course, are frequent trade partners. The Scholars love to trade with the Beneath, but the while the Beneath are heavily trade-oriented, they are only occasionally interested in information trades of the type the Scholars specialize in. The Scholars persist though, hoping one day to get through the Beneath’s veil of secrecy and bring them into the light of open knowledge.

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Governance

The Scholars are ruled by a version of a technocratic conclave. Rather than a council made up of scientists, the greatest philosophers of the Scholars engage in debate and are judged. Those judged most worthy earn a seat on the conclave and guide their people.

This system of contested appointment is used at all levels of Scholar governance, from determining rulership of territories, cities, or districts and all the way down to the level of laboratories and research teams.

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Character

The Librarian is a near mythological figure to the scholars, though contrary to what most might expect, he was not actually a scholar by trade. Rather, he was a logician who was responsible for planning out and implementing one of the greatest information sharing networks in the mycelial world. It was the Librarian who first engineered the nanotechnological framework of the world-wide information pathways in use by all of the mycels to this very day, and codified the framework in which the Scholar’s work would thrive for millennia to come.

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Biology

The Scholars are primarily composed of honey fungus mushroom folk, oyster mushroom folk, and king oyster mushroom folk. This has left them with the ‘honey oyster’ nickname, particularly among brigands who see them as armored but sweet pickings. The nickname has a more positive connotation among other tribes.

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Native Lands

There’s hardly a community of mushroom folk anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a Scholar enclave near it. Their command of ancient and current knowledge allows them to easily adapt to nearly any environment they encounter.

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Relations

The Scholars are closest with the Merchants and the Ruin’Dwell, and generally get on well with most other mycel tribes. They have a very difficult time truly trusting the Beneath, however, whose insistence on secrecy and unwillingness to share information dramatically dampens relations between the two groups. The Scholars regularly attempt to use their information assets to penetrate this rival’s secrecy but the Beneath are all too aware of these efforts and are constantly improving their counter-intelligence efforts.

Though the Scholars and the Beneath have never formally gone to war, their information warfare never ends.