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A dedicated scholar can learn much about a culture from the stories of its inhabitants. Most of the liberal education mundane Mar receive comes from listening to the tales told by their elders. Marrishland has a long and respected tradition of scholarship, especially among its wizards. Any Mar who wishes to wield magic must first master a range of mundane subjects. Any Mar who wishes to wield power over others must first contribute new knowledge to the vast libraries of Marrishland's academies. It is unsurprising that many other nations modeled their education systems after the Mar academies, for despite being rural, poor, and politically disorganized, no nation has devoted so much time to scholarship.

We have taken it upon ourselves to transcribe and make available to the public a number of essays related to Marrishland. These are mere introductions to the subjects they explore, written in plain and accessable language as free from the jargon of scholars as possible. We hope these will provide a useful introduction to our culture for visitors to our country, as well as a basic education for Mar wishing to expand their understanding of their nation and their world.

Posted by Eric on 2/6/2006: If I have one great weakness as a writer, it is my overwhelming desire to include everything I know in anything I write. I've gotten better at cutting unnecessary exposition, over the years, but I still struggle when faced with the prospect of writing a short story.

It is far more appealing to me to explain something to a reader. I like writing these little informative articles in the voices of various scholarly authorities. Partially, I like knowing how things work, so the more pieces of the picture of a world I have, the happier I am about writing about events taking place in it. Encyclopedia articles give me a chance to explore parts of Marrishland that never even came up in Lesson of the Fuel.

Also, I am sometimes saddened by how little space there is in a 500-page manuscript to describe all the neat things about our world that I've worked out. Matt and I definitely don't want to burden our prose with lengthy and unnecessary explanations, so this has been a great place for me to put those extra details that we couldn't include in our book. If anyone ever wants to know more about Marrishland than what is in the book, I am willing and able to answer all their questions.

Well, almost all of them. Lesson of the Fuel is intended as part of a larger series, after all, and an author is entitled to keep any secrets that would spoil the plot of another book.

Posted by Matt on 2/7/2006: Knowing this encyclopedia is not essential to understanding Lesson of the Fuel. The very important things are explained, of course, in the book. But I have to say it's fun knowing how the Mar came to be, or the specific details of the individual types of guer.