1297

## Turning the Page on a Library

Baldur’s Gate had a lot of things, but a pubic library wasn’t one of them. The closest library was the famous Candlekeep to the south – a scholarly legend all its own. That wasn’t to say there weren’t private libraries in the cities, there were several – but they all belonged to local aristocracy and none of them were open to scholarly research or general education. This included Oghmason’s library.

Oghmason had been building her private library for ten years, and enabled by the Scribe’s Shoppe, had opened it to very select academic and scholarly guests. To that end, the premiere “Candlekeep Calculator” had surfaced – but still maintained a low profile. Rumors moved far enough that Candlekeep compatriots knew she was in Baldur’s Gate, but the factions protesting her work and methods didn’t…

Now with the joined forces and resources of Greathearth, and a newly inspired activist’s enthusiasm, the Stonehearth family took the library public in 1297. This made a splash – *a much bigger splash than most expected*.

## Scribe Shoppe and the Rise of the College

The associated Scribe’s Shoppe was suddenly a comparative afterthought as the library surged. The famous/infamous Candlekeep Calculator was at it again, this time in rough-and-tumble Baldur’s Gate. The day of the opening, there was an instant academic retinue taking residency: a secular cleric, a scholar, a bursar, a theologist, a mathematician, and several physicists, logicians, and natural philosophers.

In what essentially evolved into the Stonehearth College, they picked up everything that Calculators had been doing and built on it, recreating and codifying algebra and trigonometry. They introduced the connection between geometry and the physical world that became a second characteristic habit of Faerûnian thought, making it all comprehensible by representing their results on geometrical graphs (also a new invention).

By the end of the first year, they developed the mean speed theorem (also known as "The Law of Falling Bodies”), and even distinguished kinematics from dynamics.

For the guests, there was a strong sense of Scholasticism, in particular dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference and to resolve contradictions. For the insiders, the *Naturalist Method* tended to overshadow the dialogues, with experimentation and theory-building founding the very basis of a school of applied thought that would come to be known as Research and Development.

## The conspicuous success of the Stonehearth Merchant Company (SMC)

A year after the rebranding of Greathearth’s preexisting business, the SMC had started strong and grown stronger.

The rebranding itself was a risky venture considering the Greathearth name was popular enough to be a “brand” in Baldur’s Gate. Brokers, agents and coordinator of imports and exports, they moved the wholesale staples through the city that kept it alive and humming, from food to building supplies.

The SMC also folded in the specialist business of Oghmason’s Scribe Shoppe. This was the first of the retail storefronts and served as the base business model for a dozen directly held ventures, and dozens more cooperative ventures.

## The *SMC* seeds the paper industry

### Diversification

One of the biggest issues for the scribe shop was paper. Candlekeep had their own forest nearby, which had reasonable stewardship given the stakeholders, but Baldur’s Gate was more removed from a forest that could be harvested cost-effectively (much less safely).

There were already specialty makers of parchment (heavily prepared animal skins), as well as local versions of papyrus, but fiber-pulp paper good for retaining ink and surviving regular use… *was rare*.

The SMC had plans for producing paper that would be high quality for uniformity and ink retention, inexpensive, and durable.

Ink wasn’t a major issue, but the SMC was expanding to make their own high-quality inks as well, including special base formulations for enchanting, spell inscription and so on.

### Making Paper

The SMC Company was using the science of botany to identify a kind of plant that would grow well in local climates and work for sustainable harvesting. The perfect candidate was kenaf, a fast-growing specimen from the Kara-Tur region that matured in 120 days.

The kenaf grew exceptionally well in the warm-temperate climate at the Baldur’s Gate latitude. Every three months, on average, high-quality paper could be produced with the pulp fibre of kenaf alone, or they could mix in fibers from other sources, including cotton, for custom qualities.

The SMC used “waste” land 25 miles west along the coast. They founded “Edgeside,” a massive plantation, and started farming the crop for paper and potentially other uses. The SMC built a mill along the river, mechanizing the use of waterpower and creating finished product before shipping back up river to Baldur’s Gate.

The Edgeside Farms, so named for being on the Southern Sword Coast, did themselves diversify, eventually creating citrus and spice farms.

## The founding of the consolidated Stonehearth Arms

Greathearth maintained a House Guard, but nothing even close to a mercenary company. She was a diversified, conglomerate business woman, and in her extensive experience, war was bad for business. In certain areas, like Baldur’s Gate, war was its own business, and as a business, war was a zero-sum game:

***…Either it’s the business of war, or the business of anything else*.**

Creating a mercenary company was a risk, but bringing Oghmason’s analytical approach meant this would be a very different kind of venture. They started with the extensive House Guard that Greathearth built as security but now applied not only Oghmason’s methods, but Stone’s martial discipline, training and organization – with best practices and lessons learned directly from the Purple Dragons – the legendary army of Cormyr.

*The Stonehearth Arms were soon noted to be a rare level of military professionalism.*

The Stonehearth Arms employed neither “guards” nor “warriors,” they employed *soldiers*. The Stonehearth Arms operated under their own charter and rotated through security details and city guard functions, as well as *executing missions*.

In addition to the soldiers, there were marines – dedicated maritime soldiers that guarded the ships and cargoes of the SMC.

Finally, there were the Sergeants-at-Arms (SA), the personnel protection specialists (body guards) that also functioned as personal assistants. Most of the patriars of Baldur’s Gate had body guards, and that category was famous for being the noble’s thugs and henchmen.

Stonehearth wasn’t so ham-fisted to have that reputation, but the SA did execute very careful *special operations*. The SA were soldiers who cross-trained as spies, and spies who trained as soldiers.