Knowledge, General and Specific
I've been thinking about knowledge this week, prompted by Elmcat's Common, Recalled, Obscure. It's a great framework for thinking about how to provide characters with knowledge that they might have, but their players don't. Bidding lore in Josh McCrowell's His Majesty the Worm is another structure that's stuck in my mind since my first reading. These two inspirations have knocked some ideas loose that have been percolating in my notes for a while, so here's my attempt at a framework for knowledge.
How we know what we know
General knowledge is information that is known by everyone with a given background or profession. A peasant knows the name of the local ruler. A farmer knows the right time to plant potatoes. A merchant knows which road to take to get to the market two cities away. Specific knowledge, on the other hand, is information that most people of a given background or profession can't be reliably expected to know, even if it is related to their expertise. The historian doesn't know who briefly ruled a kingdom on the other side of the continent a century ago. The priest doesn't know the details of the rites of another religion. The herbalist doesn't know how to tell a poisonous mushroom from an edible mushroom in a region they've never been to before.
When a player asks a question about what they know, the GM should consider whether the knowledge in question is general or specific. Exactly which category the knowledge falls into is contextual - the general knowledge of a farmer from the irrigated floodplains is different from that of a scholar from an oasis city. For a general knowledge question, the GM will simply give the player the answer. Specific knowledge takes a bit more work.
Specific knowledge has a cost a character must pay before it's revealed to them. When the player asks about specific knowledge, the GM will tell them what they know, which includes, but isn't limited to, the following options:
- This has been revealed to you by previous research. Take a turn to consult your notes and mark off one Research (a resource generated in downtime) before the knowledge is provided to you.
- You don't know, but you know where to find out. A text, NPC, or other source has what you want to know. You'll have to find the text or convince the NPC to reveal their secrets.
- You don't know, and you don't know where to find out. Keep looking - the answer may be closer than you think! If you can't find it in your local environment, you'll need to do research in downtime specifically targeted at this question to learn where you can find out.