Vantage
The town of Vantage sits on the rocky cliffs southeastern Arvor, near the broken archipelago. Vantage is known for being the site of Arvor's Great Eastern Library, and it's because of the library that the village exists at all. With the onset of the Great Spring, arcanists began scouring the land for ancient tomes describing long-lost magical secrets. One such group of arcanists unearthed a cache of books belonging to the great wizard Thaveus in ruins within these rocky cliffs. The order settled here, building a new structure around the ruin to secure these artifacts and provide a place to study them. As their scouts uncovered more books, they returned them to this library.
The accumulation of books led to the expansion of their library, and the growing population of scholars, sages, and archivists necessitated the growth of supportive services: a settlement of farmers, masons, carpenters, papermakers, and smiths grew outside the walls atop the jagged cliffs. Looking across the Broken Archipelago and the vast sea to the Old One, the vistas earned the settlement its name: Vantage. The Great Library has continued to grow, spire by spire and hall by hall. Today the palatial structure is far and away the largest library in all of Arvor.
The Great Library is home to a multitude of scholars and monks called Conservators. Most of the Conservators are low-level assistants, scribes, and clerks, but higher in their ranks are powerful priests and magi. The library is governed by a council of nine erudite sages and spellcasters called lectors, one of whom is appointed to the position of Curator of the Archive – the head of the library.
The library is also home to one of Arvor's finest schools of magic dedicated to the study of Divination and Abjuration, and the continent's largest temple to Oghma.
The current Curator is Benham Monté. Monté studied Abjuration in the Archive's academies, and has held the position for fifty-five years, outliving two appointed successors
