Capraria Auction Registers

Bethanie had no idea about the authenticity of the tablets she carried with her. Having that information would have jeopardized her strategy. She had therefore asked her assistants either to draw the tablets from a certain part of the family reserve, kept for that purpose, or to produce convincing forgeries. Before her departure, copies of the tablets had been archived for future reference, should she learn on her return that she had sold original pieces. All she had been provided with was a set of descriptive cards, which she now transcribed by hand into the family catalogue. This was the only documentation admitted to the auction, constituting an unalterable archive of all the pieces put up for auction by a family over the centuries. Finding too many proven frauds in an organization's register inevitably diminished its status among the corridori.

The first recorded Auction of Capraria was held in 1264. It is an event held at irregular intervals. In times of relative peace among the competing corridori, it can be held annually. In times of raging conflict, the Auction has been suspended for as long as a decade. But inevitably, the corridori are drawn to it like moths to the flame. They just cannot resist the opportunity of having a glimpse at the treasures contained in their competitor's collections... even though many of the items put on the block of Capraria are forgeries meant to deceive them into sinking inordinate quantities of resources in wild goose chases.
The only way that has been found to prevent the general degradation of the Auction into a pointless bazaar of fake objects is the careful consignment of all the offerings brought to Capraria by an organization over time. Each organization has its own handwritten and authenticated register. It is, in a way, the ticket that grants them entry on Capraria. Upon arrival, the register is presented to the Auction Masters. It is meticulously compared to a duplicate in their possession. If the committee finds that the register is conform, they take custody of it for the period of the auction. They put their duplicate back in a safe room, and temporarily bind the original with all the other participant's registers. The volume thus constituted is called the Auction Grand Catalogue. It can be consulted and commented throughout the period of the auction, In it, one will find both the description of an organization's current offering, but also descriptions of all its previous sales accompanied by signed comments regarding the eventual fraudulence or authenticity of the objects. This document is of great value for building status among the corridori. It also a means of establishing provenance and authenticity of items that come back for a second or third time on the block, sometimes after centuries.
Once the Auction has ended, the Grand Auction Catalogue is de-bound and individual register are handed back to each corridori organizations. The duplicate held in Capraria's safe room is updated, and the assembly dissolves until the next auction. However, it would be naive to think that the duplicates rest peacefully between auctions. They are targets of significant value to the corridori. Of course, one has to proceed carefully, as being caught trying to alter them can very well get an organization suspended from the Auction or even banned from Capraria if the offense is too egregious. Altering registers in a convincing manner might be quite a feat, as it involves gaining access both to the original and the duplicate, but it pays tremendous dividends to those who can achieve it. Altering the provenance of an item can greatly reduce its value, allowing an organization to acquire it for a fraction of its prize. Deleting entries relating to a particular artifact can render it all but invisible to other organizations. Such disinformation, or any other alteration one might think of, are in any case the very core of corridori tactics.

Type

Record, Historical

Medium

Paper

Myth

The Tablet of Balthazar

Location

The Guyot Vault