[MUD-Dev] historians

[Mik Clarke]

Laurel Fan wrote:
> 
> Excerpts from muddev: 30-Oct-99 [MUD-Dev] historians by Matthew
> Mihaly at best.com
> > Hmm, I suppose I can just have the God manage a group of dedicated
> > historians, with various ones chosen from each side. The god could
> > then try to sort out some semblance of the truth by getting versions
> > of it from his followers, who would ideally be from various factions
> > in the game.
> > This doesn't seem like a fantastically good solution to me, however,
> > and I'd be interested in hearing others.
> 
> I've never actually done this, so this is just speculation on my part...
> 
> In the real world, historians disagree about what really happened, and
> arguing about this is part of being a historian.  Of course, any
> individual will tend to see things from "their" side of things.  So as
> an IC-ish thing, I think multiple historians wouldn't be a bad idea,
> especially if some events are described from multiple points of view.
> If you have kingdoms or religious groups, perhaps these could appoint
> their own "official" historians..

You could almost use a set of history boards (or maybe a web page with
some clever cgi) to allow each faction to maintain its own annals.
The only tricky bit would be to have some consistency of dating,
although this could be left for later historians to argue over.  
Multiple contradictory versions of events, especially significant
events, are always good to start new arguments.

While I think this approach will give you realisitc history, it will
not be a complete, correct and unbiased.

In one of Barry Hughearts books, there's a minor Chinese diety known
as 'The Recorder of Things Strange'.  Might be worth having a minor
god that accepts history submissions from whoever feels like writing
them and files them all (probably on a web page somewhere).  Hopefully
historians (maybe even warring ones) will emerge.

Mik



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