Using the Medieval Reference Library

Hearth & Crown comes with a library of grounded medieval knowledge: how injuries behave, what farm work involves, what crafts require, how settlements function, how news travels. It exists to help you reason well — not to dictate your world.

Reference helps answer "what is plausible?" Project truth answers "what is true here?"

What the library holds

The library covers the texture of ordinary life and physical reality: skill and competence; injury, care, exertion, and exposure; pregnancy, childhood, aging, illness, and dying; household and daily life; agriculture, livestock, and land work; household and specialist crafts; markets and availability; land, buildings, and tenure; community, rank, and custom; lordship, office, and law; religion and custom; war; travel, transport, and news; settlements; weather, terrain, and materials.

At the center sits the master Skills reference — what each competence rank actually looks like — with trade-specific detail beneath it for field, craft, trade, social, combat, travel, and household domains. Alongside the deep entries sit Quick References: short, practical summaries for questions that come up constantly. The current Quicks include Injury & Recovery at a Glance, Craft Requirements at a Glance, and Seasonal Food & Availability at a Glance.

Think of the deep entries as the shelf and the Quicks as the tools kept on the workbench.

Load the narrowest answer first

Use the smallest piece of reference that answers the question in front of you — and stop there.

If the question is "could this injured traveler realistically walk tomorrow?", start with Injury & Recovery. Do not also pull in agriculture, settlement, household, and travel references merely because they connect. If travel conditions later become consequential, load the relevant travel reference then.

An intersection is not an instruction to process everything it touches. Related entries are pointers, not requirements. The library should make the world easier to reason about, not harder to run.

Reference is never canon

Reference explains how things generally work. Your world decides how they work here.

Reference may explain how grain production generally depends on season, labor, storage, weather, and transport. Your truth determines what crops are actually grown here, the local climate, who owns what, current harvest conditions, local customs, and actual shortages.

Reference may explain common physical consequences of wounds. Your truth determines available healers, local medical traditions, cultural interpretation — and any unusual substances or supernatural facts your world contains, if it contains them.

After consulting reference, always check Project truth for local differences. Where your facts speak, they win. Where they are silent, use the baseline conservatively — and do not silently promote a guess into permanent truth.

What is true is not what a character knows

The library informs the world, not the people in it. A healer may recognize what a wound portends; a bystander sees pain and blood. A merchant may read a market's mood; a traveler sees stalls and noise. Characters receive only what observation, skill, training, experience, education, local knowledge, testimony, investigation, or another plausible path justifies.

Do not create knowledge scores or databases to enforce this. Simply narrate through the character's eyes: model the truth quietly, describe only what they could actually perceive or understand.

Numbers stay contextual

The library deliberately avoids fake precision. Do not turn it into universal prices, wages, travel speeds, crop yields, construction times, recovery timers, army sizes, or market inventories. Where reference contains genuinely useful numbers, treat them as contextual illustrations — helpful for calibrating judgment, never as mechanics. Tables organize knowledge; they never become a second resolution engine.

Good Builder Questions

• "What would ordinary work on this farm actually involve?"
• "What resources would this craft require?"
• "What makes this settlement viable?"
• "How might winter affect travel here?"
• "What signs of this injury could an experienced healer recognize?"
• "How might news move between these settlements?"

Ask the question, consult the narrowest reference, then check your Project truth. That sequence — question, baseline, local truth — is the whole method.

You Usually Do Not Need...

...to copy reference material into your Project files, build mechanics from it, create fields because it mentions something, track every physical variable, compile universal tables, load every related entry, or rewrite grounded baselines as your canon. The library is a reasoning aid. Use it, close it, and get back to your world.