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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 2133884" data-attributes="member: 30001">Oops, I missed this point earlier when you made it in the form of "why do you think bards have to be Celtic bards" (or British Isle bards, what-have-you).   My rant that started this thread, and subsequent points, have *definitely* made the assumption that the bard's technique is part of his ability.  I mean - IMO the bard is a master of the spoken word, and his knowledge is contained in the poetry.  A bard who does not hear and speak IMO is not a bard because my definition of bardic lore is certainly tied up in the medium. And it's not just the Celtic cultures that have this concept of bards based on the medium.  Snorri Sturlson was the Icelandic poet that rescued a huge amount of what we know about Scandanavian mythology because he feared that subsequent generations would fail to understand the kennings because of the spread of Christianity.  I've already given the example of the Greek Muses, their spheres of influence are a variety of forms of poetry, and you could probably find a historian that will say that this is because poetry=knowledge in the bardic era of Greece.  In fact, (realizing that I'm not providing proper footnotes) I suggest that my "narrow" definition of bardic lore is actually shared by a wide variety of cultures outside of the British Isles.   Because, then, poetry is the medium of choice for bards, I do not consider exclusively written knowledge, including heiroglyphs, to be an area of interest to bards.  As I suggested earlier, I believe it to be the case that members of socieities without writing thought bardic knowledge to be ALL knowledge, and if a DM were to want to treat bardic knowledge favorably, they would take this into account.  IMO, to take bardic lore as I would have it, it parallels written knowledge about the world.  As I said earlier, if it's written down, if someone knows it, then it's a candidate for information to be learned. And the reasons my comments were broader than just mentioning WLDs poor handling of the matter is because I constantly see bardic lore interpreted as a sort of "gather information" check.  Whether or not it's in the flavor text - I still think it unduly influences DMs to short-change the bardic lore ability because so much of the bardic ability is a matter of DM interpretation.   3E Players Handbook:  "A bard picks up a lot of stray knowledge while wandering the land and learning stories from other bards." (emphasis mine) I acknowledge that I've already been advised to make up my own flavor text, and that's fine.  But I'm petitioning for some respect in the core rules and in the FRPG community, even outside of DnD, for bardic knowledge.  Calling it "stray knowledge", I believe, does not do the archetype of the bard justice.</blockquote>

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