>tfw your character knows nothing about the place they're from
Some people will be content making drok up, but as the admins sometimes point out, they are either wrong or lying.
How do we find out these things? Why can't we be trusted with public data from other places?
Perhaps it's a case of the timeline being out of date? Should we play twenty questions with the Loremaster?
No H2OSO4 intended, just looking for this to be cleared up.
For the rest, I generally try to fill up my history with the most notable facts. If it's approved - it means a GM read it and said hey this seems legit and feasible. From then on out, it's up to you and the community to use the fabricated mythology of a past as a baseline. If you have people calling out your background as bullshit during RP either you're going too far off the reservation or they're just an asshole.
To contradict Immigrant #2's Number One Gang from Neo York.
Or players trying to define what Las Vegas looks like by saying it has a population much larger than Withmore has (which makes no sense)
The player doesn't need to be world building in their @history, because they're likely the only person who is going to see it from that perspective and they'll meet someone else ICly who has a different idea about the place they're talking about, because players often form RP in huge broad strokes rather than small, individual details about places that only -some- people might know that make that neighborhood unique or something.
I'm from Neo York and Neo York is such and such, rather than I am from this small neighborhood in the sprawl outside of Neo York and it's like this, and you probably didn't know that because you've been been to this particularly small part of the mega sprawl.
So we just need more players thinking on a smaller scale when it comes to world building details in their backgrounds and then it becomes more unique to their character and less interfering with the lore of the game world and other peoples established RP and beliefs about particularly large and significant locations in the world.
It would be cool, and while highly unlikely and time consuming, if someone would go through the various still cataloged/archived histories of characters, and if anything more "major" had been approved by a GM, add it to the landscape.
And then if someone had the time and was really meticulous, they could root out the most commonly shared starting cities and start building their timelines on their own wiki pages. Then someone either coming brand new to the game or an older player rolling a new character could go "I wanna come from London" or "Neo York" and be able to have a brief glance at the broad strokes of the area, as well as being able to see a bit more detail, so they can take those details and put their own character's perspective on them.
Also this reminds me..
Pokes Johnny.. Can I post those logos/ads somewhere? I want to share them with the community super badly but IDK if that's cool or not :/
Where is the appropriate place to ask about/suggest a particular government's stance about a historic event? It's something that became relevant in a conversation, and I felt my character should know the answer, but I couldn't find any record of it in the wiki or timeline. It would've made for a good character development conversation either way. Instead of making something up or making a suggestion, I just sidestepped the conversation.
I don't want to accidentally alter history. Nothing good can come of that. :)
Thanks!
However, as others have said, it's often time easier to drill down and worry about things more at a granular level. Who cares what the North Pacific Economic Commonwealth's stance is on a historic event? The truth is that it is likely divide. Some hold one opinion while others hold another. Rarely is a government, nation, corporation or any other large entity truly unified in their thoughts, goals, opinions and beliefs.
Instead, drill down to a specific element. Maybe a black ops squad belonging to a midsized security corp contracted by a small governmental committee. You can probably say whatever you want about how that black ops team and that committee feel about most anything. As long as it is theme and doesn't contradict any existing lore, you'll probably be fine.
Ant that right there is why I don't want there to be official truths on more than a macro level. Because I like being able to take a tiny piece of the world and defining it so freely. I don't want to be limited by the 16 premade corps operating in New Houston. I want to pick a spot on the map, zoom in and create.
