Welcome home to your ancestral estates in the Duchy of Hidgeon!
The Duchy has been struck by the plague.The Duke needs your help.
Duke Jerome hasn't taken action for an entire month because his grandfather, the Seventeenth Duke of Hidgeon, had in his day successfully dealt with the plague, and Duke Jerome was convinced that his own physician, a Florentine trained in the Holy City, would be able to assemble an equally effective plan. You see, the Duchy had been blessed, centuries ago, with a ring of scribal monasteries following the Isidorean Order. These monasteries are like no other in the entire kingdom, preserving huge catalogues of arcane knowledge wholly unknown, some say knowledge from the future. The Duke assumed that his staff could aid the physician to search through those libraries and assemble a plan of action equal to that of his noble ancestor.
But there is a catch.
The Isidorean's are obsessive about order above all else. When the Seventeenth Duke of Hidgeon had sent men to gather information from the monasteries, they were unschooled and in a panic. They simply grabbed all sorts of resources, anything they could find, and like bandits or raiders, sacked up their loot and carted it back to the fortress at the heart of the Duchy. The information was scattered and erratic. Important documents were absent, and the royal physician of that age had been forced to sort for weeks through the pile of papers. Hundreds died even after all of the necessary information had been gathered because there was just too much to be useful.
The Duke has contacted the monks, and they both have agreed that despite the emergency, action must proceed with patience. Rather than open their libraries to the ravages of another destructive and ineffective book-raid that would potentially put the current Duchy at risk, and certainly put future generations at risk, the monks have decided they will only open their collections to certified investigators.
This is why the Duke has called you.
You've been chosen, along with the few other noble houses, because of your long and patriotic service to the Duke, and because you are the few literate people in the Duchy who can be trusted to reliably sift through the material. So, you and your opponents have been sent out into the Duchy to demonstrate to each of the monasteries that one of you is the most best researcher in the Duchy.
What the Duke ultimately wishes to do is to create a new position, a new defender of the Duchy. Equal in status to the royal physician, the Duke seeks to create the office of Lord Researcher, Defender of Hidgeon.
The most skilled researcher in all the noble will take on that new role, bringing honor to their family name.
The plague must be stopped! The people must be saved! And all of this will be done through Research!
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