As far as modding goes, are Tomes distinguishable from Shields in a way that is addressable via modding? I had the idea to make a skill tree for fighting with Tomes in the vein of Staves and Unarmed, but my initial explorations of how to mod have left me concerned that it's not possible to actually check whether the player is wielding a Tome or not. If it's just difficult, that's fine, but I'd rather not spin my wheels trying to implement the impossible.
Not possible to do that normally. Technically speaking you could just give all tome an additional trigger that would give you a dummy buff that would let the game know "hey, this is what you are looking for", but it's barely elegant and it would make any mod-added tomes incompatible with your mod.
