AD&D's Most Expensive and Irritating NPC

No NPC embodies the Gygaxian maxim that dealing with NPCs "should be expensive and irritating" quite like the sage.Like the spy, the sage is a special class of expert hireling which follows its own bespoke rules and procedures. Also like the spy, their main gameplay function is the recovery of information on behalf of the player characters. They are the "encyclopedias" and "computers" of the AD&D milieu:Each sage has a chosen field of study (their major field), expertise in two to four special categories within that field, and some knowledge of one or two other fields of study (their minor fields):Intuitively, the higher one rolls on the above table, the better the sage, with a roll of 91 to 100 indicating a sage with knowledge of four special categories in their major field of study as well as knowledge of two additional minor fields of study.A sage's major and minor fields of study are determined by rolling on the table below:Let's say I roll d100 and get a result of 76, which is a…