Let's Play: Riven - part 25 - Gehn's 233rd Age
242We pay a visit to Gehn in his 233rd Age, and get captured. For the third time.
My description of descriptive books versus linking books in this video is not very clear. To clarify: a descriptive book describes (and links to) a new Age. A linking book links back to an existing Age. To write a linking book to an Age, you must be in the Age you wish to link to (so you can never write a linking book to an Age you haven't visited). Descriptive books can link to places you haven't visited before (and in fact, due to the chaotic factors involved in creating books, it's as good as impossible to write two descriptive books that link to the same Age).
An Age can have only one descriptive book, but as many linking books as you want. Only the descriptive book can be used to modify the Age, to an extent; there are very strict rules to how an age can be modified; modify the text in the descriptive book too much, and it ends up linking to a different Age altogether, and you lose the link to the original Age forever (the linking books also link to the new Age when that happens). If the descriptive book is damaged or destroyed, the linking books to that Age stop working. Destroying the descriptive book doesn't destroy the Age itself, you just can't go there anymore.
When you write a descriptive book, it links to some existing quantum reality that most closely matches what you wrote; so unlike what Gehn believes, you don't create a new world. If the text in the descriptive book contains contradictions, the Age linked to will be unstable and will likely destroy itself soon. This is what's happening to Riven (and every Age Gehn wrote, since he doesn't understand the Art and just copies passages from other books he found into his own books).
To use a modern analogy, I guess you could compare a descriptive book to a file, and linking books to shortcuts to that file. If the file is altered, the shortcuts point to the altered file. If the file is deleted, the shortcuts stop working.
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