"As a new young scholar yourself, you will not have access to all the books in our collection. If however your father left you with some extra money, Borden's Bookstore down Becker Street is quite good, and no such restrictions exist there."

-Head Keeper of the Scholarium in Aegyr, Samuel Fischer

Scholarly Upbringing

The life of a scholar is a life of bookish and homey pursuits - as such, scholarly parents and guardians tend to live in a stable kind of orbit, around home and scholarly institution. There are a few exceptions, scholars who do field work and the like, but on average they tend to work in the same location for most of their life. Those to cultivate this kind of upbringing are likely to be scribes, tutors, librarians, writers, philosophers, historians, etc. They are of course quite busy, but often their work can be brought into balance with raising children - furthermore, scholarly parents and guardians tend to think a good deal about how to teach and bring up a child. As such, children from a scholarly upbringing will tend to live a neatly curated existence, where the sandbox of childhood is marked out with mathematical precision by parents with a fear of the unknown and untamable realities outside of a class on the letters.

          Those brought up in this way are of course going to tend to be very smart, particularly when compared with their younger peers. Even for those who do not later go own to do anything intellectual, they will likely carry with them an imprint of their childhood forever, and those from less-enlightened upbringings will often get a sense of cognitive cultivation from those who were raised with a book always in their lap. Much like those from religious backgrounds however, rebellious tendencies are not uncommon among those raised in this manner. Scholarly parents and guardians often rush to get their children prepared for adulthood, and in doing so, often forget to give them a childhood.

          Characters from a Scholarly Upbringing will have a Topic Encyclopedia, a tome of collected knowledge from a particular subject or field of study. Perhaps left to them from their studies as a youngling, the book is rare and remains an extremely useful reference book. Choose from one of the following: Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Architecture, Geography (an Atlas), History, Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, Rhetoric, Strategy, or Theology. While in your possession, and so long as you are in a position to browse it for a minute or two, it grants you +2 to knowledge checks within your chosen topic.

If you choose the Scholarly Upbringing, you gain the following:

~A +1 to your Intelligence score~

~Either a -1 to your Strength score or a -1 to your Dexterity score~

~A language of your choice, one taught to you by a parent, guardian, or mentor from your upbringing~

~A Sub-Discipline in every social skill on checks dealing with other members of Scholarly Upbringing~

~A topic encyclopedia on a subject matter of your choice~

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