Paradox wrote:I'm kinda against Nexus-type setups, because they feel too much like solely gameplay mechanics. The Guild of Writers wouldn't have had a mechanical Nexus with KIs, they would have had a private library to showcase Ages and probably an archival vault of Ages based on author/family rather than generic terms like "jungle" or "exploration" (How many Ages are designed solely for exploration? That sort of thing would never have been approved by the Guild of Maintainers!).
Of course, Cyan theoretically still has a ban on creating libraries; and a library is totally impractical in terms of game play.
But if we're going to go with a bad idea (Nexus), can we at least not pretend that it was used by the original Guild of Writers in the D'ni days? There are plenty of modern day explorers who understand the Lattice well enough to write a Nexus for us

Well see that's the thing, and something i mentioned to Kaelis. When I first approached this idea of the Writer's having a Nexus at all I thought about why they would. And it occured to me that, besides the Maintainers being the first to visit an age, the writers themselves must have surveyed it as well after the initial link, for any flaws in the age before it ever passed into public areas where people could get at it. So what I thought was that a Nexus would better suit this than a library like area that could be accessed by anyone smart enough to get into it. And then people suggested the viewer and the idea kind of flowed from that, than rather than the Nexus being used by the D'ni GoW's for archival purposes it was used by them for in part with the writing phase. Thus it would go
1. Age is Written
2. Age is linked to by Maintainers
3. Age is placed in Writers Nexus for review by GoWs
4. Age is approved and sent to libraries or archived.
Thus the viewer, the imager, and the terminal itself would all fit the idea that it wasn't so much as a way of archiving the ages for use, it was a step in the process that the Writers used to approve ages after Maintainers deemed them safe.