Information, Rumors & Knowledge

What is true and what your character knows may be different. Learning to live inside that gap is one of the great pleasures of this game.

Knowledge needs a path

You know what you have reason to know: what you witnessed, what you were taught, what you do every day, what someone credibly told you, what you read where reading is possible, what your training lets you recognize. Everything else — distant deaths, far-off battles, another village's prices, a lord's hidden motive — reaches you only through people and systems: travelers, merchants, messengers, letters, proclamations, gossip. Or it never reaches you at all.

News travels at the speed of feet, hooves, and hulls. It can be delayed by distance, weather, war, and season. It can be lost with a dead messenger, garbled by retelling, misunderstood by the hearer, or outdated before it arrives.

Rumors are not facts

A rumor may be true, false, half-true, stale, or deliberately planted — and repetition never makes it true. Witnesses misunderstand. Records are incomplete. Even honest people misremember. People around you will act on false beliefs, and their actions will have real consequences, without the belief ever becoming true.

So: frame what you hear as hearing. "They say the king is dead" is honest; "the king is dead" is a claim you may not own. Ask witnesses. Seek confirmation. Compare accounts. Inspect what you can. Investigate where it matters.

In Play

Do not assume your character knows what you, the player, have heard about the world. Ask yourself: how would I know this? Who told me? Was I there? At the same time, use what you do know boldly — warn, persuade, prepare, profit, protect. Acting on good information, and surviving bad information, is half the game.