Communications

Criers

Criers are orators; though the good ones are also performers, singers and sometimes musicians. They are paid by local authorities to make public announcements - usually three or four times a day in specific, central locations. Essentially the work of the crier amounts to reciting the news of the day in the town square (usually in a mildly entertaining way). In most places, many of the declarations made by the crier have a legal importance. Criminal accusations, or legal agreements between the state and private interests might not be official until publicly announced by a crier, for example. Town criers might also be paid by private interests to make announcements on their behalf; injecting what is essentially advertising into the official daily news.

A village might only have one crier (or none at all) while a town would have at least one, and a large city might have an entire cadre of them supported by a small organization working to prepare a script using dispatches from the authorities and paid placements from businesses, then rushing to their post to announce the most up-to-date news at the alotted time.

News Sheets

The job of crier began to fade with the arrival of printed news following the invention of the printing press. While printed news is more efficient, and can be profitable on its own rather than just a civic expense, it still relies on literacy, which is not guaranteed. As with criers, certain announcements in news sheets may be printed there as a legal requirement. In some places, legal declarations in news sheets might even be printed in a different coloured ink

While news sheets are the predominant form of broadcast communication on Tear, most towns still rely on a crier making daily announcements, and will only produce a printed news sheet every few days at most. Larger cities combine the job of crier with the job of news sheet vendor; the crier calling out the headlines and the ledes in order to attract attention and sell more news sheets. A large city will print a news sheet daily, and a major city might have more than one organization distributing news sheets, targetting different interests (one for traders and merchants, one for the politically and military minded, etc). Conversely, the arrival of printed news sheets made criers obsolete in small towns and villages where the news trickles down by way of news sheets passing through on carriages and transports from larger cities and then is transmitted by word of mouth.

Messenger Stands

Messenger stands are the primary means of sending and receiving communications to someone within a city or town and its immediate environs (within about 10km). A messenger stand is usually a small stone building - not larger than a gazebo - with dozens or hundreds of numbered, slotted shelves that can be rented out. Messenger stands are operated by message keepers who may be employed by the local government or may be in private business. Most message stands also contain writing desks, pens and ink, sealing wax and everything else needed to draft messages.

Individuals pay a deposit as well as a small monthly fee to register themselves with a message keeper, enabling them to receive messages at the stand. Then, anyone who knows which stand (or stands) the individual is registered with can send messages to them there. When a message arrives for a registered individual, the message keeper pays the messenger, and when the individual arrives to collect their messages, they repay the message keeper, plus a small fee.

Messengers usually congregate around message stands, and the easiest way to find a messenger is to go to the nearest message stand. In cities, there will certainly be a message stand in every public square and on every high street, and typically one at every major junction. In towns there may only be a few - limited to the major roads, squares and markets.

Because it is the receiver (via the message keeper) who pays for message delivery, sending a message within the walls of a city is technically free. That said, it is generally a good idea to tip a messenger on hiring them, particularly if the distance to travel is further than 2-3km and certainly if it is closer to 10km. Depending on the local culture, messengers may or may not ask for a 'tip' based on the distance of the delivery, and may or may not deliver the message at all if they feel they've been treated unfairly. So tip.

Note that all hotels maintain a complementary message stand at their front desk for everyone staying at the hotel, and will normally accept (and pay for) and hold messages for several days (at least) for guests that have recently stayed with them under the assumption that eventually most guests will arrive (or return) to collect (and pay for) their messages.

Regional Messaging

Outside of the major cities and their immediate surroundings, sending messages will be more expensive as individual messengers bearing single messages on foot for more than 10km is not cost effective. Instead, when a message is to be sent to a destination between 10km and about 100km, it is usually sent in bulk by carriage along regular routes. Every city will have a centralized message direction service at one or more of its main gates, and towns and villages will maintain a messenger stand at the main carriage stand. This service aggregates messages going in and out of the city by receiving them from the individual messenger stands, sorting them, and handing them off to carriages to see them delivered in bulk to the correct destination.

Sending a message to a destination more than 10km away but less than 100km away (approximately, depending on the geography and distances between settlements) is in fact the most expensive proposition. For distances beyond 100km, messages are generally send via dovecote, which reduces the prices dramatically.

Dovecotes

Sending messages further than 100km almost always means using dovecotes which send and exchange messenger birds to carry messages over great distances. On Tear, the Fellowship of Feathers operates a global network of dovecotes that is sophisticated, secure and fast. While in some cases, private organizations establish their own networks of dovecotes for communication, this is always more limited, less effecient and more costly than working with the established networks of the Fellowship of Feathers. Generally this is only done by large factions or powerful states for very narrow purposes, and even then is usually only considered if the faction or state has reason to doubt the motives of the Fellowship of Feathers.

Dovecotes are operated by maintaining large roosts of messenger birds - often several thousand to support a large city, and perhaps a couple of thousand in a town. Every dovecote sends its birds by carriage to the neighboring towns and villages in a network where each node is between 100km and 500km distant. Some major cities may distribute their birds even farther than that; out to 2000km or even 3000km in some cases in order to increase efficiency.

Sending a message via dovecote is a simple matter of going to a dovecote, drafting a message (limited to 500 characters), and paying to have it sent anywhere in the world. The message is attached to a bird which then flies instinctively to it's home roost - which is either the desintation or the next step toward the destination. There, the message is held or forwarded on as necessary until it reaches the final destination. As each bird returns to its instinctive home it is fed and cared for until it is time to pack it in a cage and send it out against to a neighboring node so the process can be repeated.

The cost of sending messages by messenger bird is based on the distance to the destination - essentially you pay for the message to be sent and resent along each leg of the journey as birds carry it from node to node in the network, with each individual bird along the way carrying the message from its temporary cage back to its home and then having it transferred to another homeward bound bird from there. A message being sent 10,000km would have to travel through at least 20 nodes (and probably more like 30) and so would cost 20-30x the price of sending a message to the next node in the network. In the event that a sender wants to have a message forwarded from the receiving dovecote to an individual at a specific message stand, a marker can be included with the message. The marker tells the receiving dovecote to forward the message using local messengers, who then take the message on foot to the correct messenger stand. Because local messaging using message stands is paid for by the receiver, this does not increase the cost of sending a message via dovecote.

Using a combination of dovecotes and local messaging, a message can be sent from one side of the Tear to the other and delivered into the hand of a specific individual at the messenger stand down the street from their home, after traversing approximately 50 nodes, over the course of as many days, for a cost of approximately $1250. While this is not cheap (it is half of the annual income of a companion basket weaver) it is still incredible to consider.

Magical Messaging

While local messengers and dovecotes are extraordinarily efficient, they are nowhere near as effecient as magic. For sending instantaneous messages up to 10 seconds in length to a recipient within about 20km, nothing beats the Message spell. A scroll enabling the reader to cast the spell costs $150 - a hundred times the price of using a local messenger, but instant and totally secure. Messenger stands and dovecotes will often maintain a stock of Message scrolls for customers as a convenience.

For longer range magical communication, we must revert back to messengers, but this time, using spells such as Teleport or Gateway. Only a small number of extremely powerful spell casters can even cast these spells, so using them for communication is usually reserved for the ruling class. The cost of finding and hiring a wizard to cast one of these spells is left to the discretion of the Director.