This rant is way overdue to the FRPG community. I'll start with a quote:
From the World's Largest Dungeon, page 12:
"Because nobody's heard of the World's Largest Dungeon until now, bardic lore isn't going to help much. "No, I don't know any sons about demon princes banished to the Abyss for slaying everything [sic] living fire elf. I've never even heard of fire elves. Can I just sing my song now, please?"
The author of this was apparently interviewing Britney Spears and knows nothing about true bardic lore. It's not really his fault. The author, I'm sure, is the product of a modern society that is a few ages removed from the barest notions of what true bardic lore represents.
The situation is as if someone were going to run an FRPG and never heard of a sword before, or worked on their campaign without any thoughts given to who the gods were and yet allowed clerics in their campaign. You need to know something about bardic lore if you're going to do any justice to the bard character class.
But sadly, there is just no way I can tell you what you really need to know in the limited space of this message board. You need to put down the video-game controller and do some reading about what historians have manage to preserve but most of you have obviously never learned. Take a gander at the Icelandic Eddas or Bullfinch's Mythology and try to comprehend the reality - that at one moment in human history ALL of this information was preserved EXCLUSIVELY within epic poetry. So here's the one thing you should know about bards if you remember nothing else:
BARDIC KNOWLEDGE IS THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL KNOWLEDGE EVER POSSESSED BY SENTIENT BEINGS.
Here's the best way I can think of to help you grasp the truth of this statement:
Forget about bards for a moment, let's talk about peasants. Now the people that wrote 3E DnD called the only illiterate members of their world "Barbarians". The fact is that peasants of the age prior to this one were illiterate, and in the modern world we take this to mean uneducated but that's just an indication of our own ignorance. As a child, the peasant has absorbed and remembered hundreds of rhymes, "nusery rhymes" that were really coded statements about the political happenings in that peasant's kingdom. Growing up, they memorized the songs of the every historical and mythological character of significance who ever lived. Add to this hundreds of little ditties and rhymes that encoded the basic facts of life. The best amongst them became mere minstrels - AND THAT'S NOT A BARD. Anymore than a peasant who keeps a fauchard fork in his barn is comparable to Conan.
"30 days hath September. April, June, and November" See - you possess barely the faintest glimmer of what even peasants knew of bardic lore. Because the bardic knowledge of the peasant (which dwarfs yours) compared to a true bard is the same comparison as throwing salt over your shoulder to ward away evil compared to Meteor Swarm. You know something about minstrels? Minstrels are the guys who can pull rabbits out of a hat - more impressive than the salt trick but that's still not meteor swarm.
And by Sentient Beings I mean Sentient Beings. Man now does not even remember the poetic lore known to the gods. They didn't write things in books, except maybe one of their number - some oddball like Thoth. So everything that the gods knew of creation was at one time commited to memory in the form of poetry and song. And when man was taught the art of civilization, this knowledge was passed on to him. Don't believe me? Google the words "Greek Muse" (note how the goddesses of poetry are the daughters of MEMORY and the KING OF THE GODS).
Sentient Beings: The fey who charm kings into speaking their secrets in their sleep and then sing these secrets in rhymes on the moors. The sirens sing songs, do you know them? The harpies? Bards know these things. Dragons know magic. Do you think it's written? Do you seriously imagine these monstrous and wise creatures with little pens in their hands sitting at writing desks? The mythology of our current age as preserved the truth about the true breadth and scope of bardic lore and yet we are unaware. Bardic lore contains all of this, because it contains EVERYTHING CONSIDERED KNOWLEDGE. If it is written somewhere in a book, it is certainly contained within the collective knowledge of Bards. If it was ever spoken of in any group of learned creatures, it was composed in the form of song and preserved for eternity in bardic lore.
The problem is that song and poetry to you now means something about "Freebird" and information about one man from Nantucket. Whole ages have passed where man has even the faintest recollection of what bardic lore and song is, and you have forgotten even these scarce facts.
I'll begin my closing statement with what SOME CLERICS wrote about one of the greatest bards of all, and these were his words that they quoted:
"I am Wind on Sea,
I am Ocean-wave,
I am Roar of Sea,
I am Bull of Seven Fights,
I am Vulture on Cliff,
I am Dewdrop,
I am Fairest of Flowers,
I am Boar for Boldness,
I am Salmon in Pool,
I am Lake on Plain...
I am a Word of Skill,..."
-Amairgen, Bard of the Sons of Mil
Compare this with
"I am the Alpha and Omega"
-God of the Christian Bible
I hope you're starting to see that a bard is NOT A MINSTREL. (And as a side note the Bible itself was, in the age of bards, ENTIRELY commited to memory in the form of epic verse before it ever occured to anyone to write a single word of it on a piece of paper.)
SO YES, I think that bards know something about the World's Largest Dungeon.
I think I can rest now, and hopefully the ghosts of the bards of ages past will leave me now in peace.
From the World's Largest Dungeon, page 12:
"Because nobody's heard of the World's Largest Dungeon until now, bardic lore isn't going to help much. "No, I don't know any sons about demon princes banished to the Abyss for slaying everything [sic] living fire elf. I've never even heard of fire elves. Can I just sing my song now, please?"
The author of this was apparently interviewing Britney Spears and knows nothing about true bardic lore. It's not really his fault. The author, I'm sure, is the product of a modern society that is a few ages removed from the barest notions of what true bardic lore represents.
The situation is as if someone were going to run an FRPG and never heard of a sword before, or worked on their campaign without any thoughts given to who the gods were and yet allowed clerics in their campaign. You need to know something about bardic lore if you're going to do any justice to the bard character class.
But sadly, there is just no way I can tell you what you really need to know in the limited space of this message board. You need to put down the video-game controller and do some reading about what historians have manage to preserve but most of you have obviously never learned. Take a gander at the Icelandic Eddas or Bullfinch's Mythology and try to comprehend the reality - that at one moment in human history ALL of this information was preserved EXCLUSIVELY within epic poetry. So here's the one thing you should know about bards if you remember nothing else:
BARDIC KNOWLEDGE IS THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL KNOWLEDGE EVER POSSESSED BY SENTIENT BEINGS.
Here's the best way I can think of to help you grasp the truth of this statement:
Forget about bards for a moment, let's talk about peasants. Now the people that wrote 3E DnD called the only illiterate members of their world "Barbarians". The fact is that peasants of the age prior to this one were illiterate, and in the modern world we take this to mean uneducated but that's just an indication of our own ignorance. As a child, the peasant has absorbed and remembered hundreds of rhymes, "nusery rhymes" that were really coded statements about the political happenings in that peasant's kingdom. Growing up, they memorized the songs of the every historical and mythological character of significance who ever lived. Add to this hundreds of little ditties and rhymes that encoded the basic facts of life. The best amongst them became mere minstrels - AND THAT'S NOT A BARD. Anymore than a peasant who keeps a fauchard fork in his barn is comparable to Conan.
"30 days hath September. April, June, and November" See - you possess barely the faintest glimmer of what even peasants knew of bardic lore. Because the bardic knowledge of the peasant (which dwarfs yours) compared to a true bard is the same comparison as throwing salt over your shoulder to ward away evil compared to Meteor Swarm. You know something about minstrels? Minstrels are the guys who can pull rabbits out of a hat - more impressive than the salt trick but that's still not meteor swarm.
And by Sentient Beings I mean Sentient Beings. Man now does not even remember the poetic lore known to the gods. They didn't write things in books, except maybe one of their number - some oddball like Thoth. So everything that the gods knew of creation was at one time commited to memory in the form of poetry and song. And when man was taught the art of civilization, this knowledge was passed on to him. Don't believe me? Google the words "Greek Muse" (note how the goddesses of poetry are the daughters of MEMORY and the KING OF THE GODS).
Sentient Beings: The fey who charm kings into speaking their secrets in their sleep and then sing these secrets in rhymes on the moors. The sirens sing songs, do you know them? The harpies? Bards know these things. Dragons know magic. Do you think it's written? Do you seriously imagine these monstrous and wise creatures with little pens in their hands sitting at writing desks? The mythology of our current age as preserved the truth about the true breadth and scope of bardic lore and yet we are unaware. Bardic lore contains all of this, because it contains EVERYTHING CONSIDERED KNOWLEDGE. If it is written somewhere in a book, it is certainly contained within the collective knowledge of Bards. If it was ever spoken of in any group of learned creatures, it was composed in the form of song and preserved for eternity in bardic lore.
The problem is that song and poetry to you now means something about "Freebird" and information about one man from Nantucket. Whole ages have passed where man has even the faintest recollection of what bardic lore and song is, and you have forgotten even these scarce facts.
I'll begin my closing statement with what SOME CLERICS wrote about one of the greatest bards of all, and these were his words that they quoted:
"I am Wind on Sea,
I am Ocean-wave,
I am Roar of Sea,
I am Bull of Seven Fights,
I am Vulture on Cliff,
I am Dewdrop,
I am Fairest of Flowers,
I am Boar for Boldness,
I am Salmon in Pool,
I am Lake on Plain...
I am a Word of Skill,..."
-Amairgen, Bard of the Sons of Mil
Compare this with
"I am the Alpha and Omega"
-God of the Christian Bible
I hope you're starting to see that a bard is NOT A MINSTREL. (And as a side note the Bible itself was, in the age of bards, ENTIRELY commited to memory in the form of epic verse before it ever occured to anyone to write a single word of it on a piece of paper.)
SO YES, I think that bards know something about the World's Largest Dungeon.
I think I can rest now, and hopefully the ghosts of the bards of ages past will leave me now in peace.
