Research

The Basics

Sooner or later, your character will be faced with a question that doesn't have a readily available answer. It's inevitable. It's also common. Lots of people have made serious studies in lots of fields, though, so sometimes you can dig through their work and derive some answers for yourself. Scholars and other academic types aren't perfect, and there are always some maddening gaps in what they record, but with some practice and a good starting point, it's likely that you can at least push forward on an answer even if you can't derive the entirety of it. It's also likely that the answer leads to more questions, which lead to more answers, which lead to more questions and so on; science at its core depends on this.

Anyone can do basic research. It's just a matter of looking into a question, as basically as asking around or as specifically as grilling one curator at one museum that specializes in ancient dwarven beard painting. It doesn't take any specialized skills to ask someone for an answer. It's axiomatic in research that the better your question, the better the answer can be, so it's helpful to be at least conversant with the material but it's not mandatory.

More advanced or specialized research can require more specific skills. If you're researching formulae or schematics, you'll have to have the relevant skills, and may also need materials with which to experiment and lab space in which to use them. The rules for researching existing recipes are outlined here. Developing all-new recipes is a difficult, demanding task and the specifics will vary depending on the end result.

How To Get Started On Lore Research

Mechanics

There's a BGA category for Research. Drop your question in there, along with where you're starting your research. You'll get one of three types of response:

• An answer to your question. Maybe not a complete, comprehensive, useful answer to your question, but an answer.
• An apology that we don't have that information along with a referral to someone who might.
• An assertion that this is outside the realm of viability for research (you can check every library in every world and not one of them will know why your wife insists on putting pickles - pickles - on her burgers).

A referral can lead to another referral, and for really obscure or deliberately concealed information this can be maddening.

It's easier to find more specific answers for more specific questions. Consider the scope of your research and if it's very broad, consider narrowing it. "I'm researching sea elves" is troublesome because we don't know what you're actually looking for, and you'll be unhappy to get "They're blue and live underwater" back as an answer despite it being the only commonality across all the permutations of sea elves that could be in focus here. "I want to know everything about $subject" is almost inevitably doomed out of the gate. Almost no one knows everything about anything.

Your starting point matters because it decides the chain of events if the answer isn't readily available. Without it, we can't distinguish between library research, lab research-by-experimentation, or hanging out at a busy intersection with a sign that reads "WILL WORK FOR INFO ABOUT MUSHROOM ANTITOXINS". Easy questions are easily answered; for more complicated questions, the journey can be as valuable as the destination. It may suggest some side quests along the way, or introduce people you might not otherwise have ever encountered. If you don't have a fantastic starting point, any of the Nexus libraries can get you on your way; if the building you're in doesn't have your answer, the staff can refer to you a different building with better chances of having what you're looking for. If it's a question that's never been asked before, you might be able to synthesize an answer from disparate data points and the more data points you have the more likely you are to develop your own correct answer.

Finally, there are some things that just aren't vulnerable to research. No one outside of the Grandmaster Mistweavers knows where Mistweaver orders originate, for example. It's not written down, it never has been, and the small handful of people with firsthand knowledge won't talk about it. One person in the worlds knows how to create a Hive Knight and she can't read or write. It's difficult to conceal something so completely that even rumors don't crop up, but whether by design or obscurity there are questions to which no one's bothered to publish answers.