Project Truth
Project truth is every fact that makes your world this world rather than a generic medieval backdrop: its customs, terms, institutions, laws, prices, geography, history, and exceptions.
Project truth beats general medieval reference, every time. Grounded does not mean identical. Your world may do things no textbook village did — that is not an error, it is identity.
Establishing facts well
- State what is true plainly: who rules, what the harvest custom is, what a loaf costs here, how marriage is recognized.
- Use your own words for your own things: titles, offices, ranks, coins, measures, festivals, kin-terms. Consistent local language is what makes a world feel real.
- Record each fact once, where it belongs: ownership with the property, membership with the organization, prices with the market, law with the custom.
- Allow exceptions explicitly: the valley that buries its dead standing, the town where women hold the mill-rights, the lord who answers to a council. Exceptions are content.
What project truth covers
Cultures and languages. Laws and punishments. Religions and rites. Rulers and succession rules. Coins and wages. Crops and harvest timing. Property customs. Military obligations. Social expectations around marriage, hospitality, debt, and honor. Local history that still shapes behavior.
You need depth where your world's focus lies. A trade-centered project should detail prices and availability richly while leaving criminal law general; a courtly project should lavish succession and nobility while sketching the economy. Establish depth where play will live.
You usually do not need...
...a complete legal code, a full theology, exact distant geography, or exhaustive price lists before play. Establish what foreseeable play requires. Defer the rest with confidence.