Whimsical
Explorer
Here's how my DM set up Knowledge(local) to work based on regions.
For every rank in K:Local you get, you can select the region. The scope affects the DCs. So, you could take Forgotten Realms as a region for example, and you would be able to answer very general questions about the politics of the world, but questions about a certain continent would add +10 to the DC, a certain region +20, a certain major city +30, etc. But the smaller the scope of the regions that you select for your K:Local rank, the easier it is to recall specific information about any aspect of it.
My character started with four ranks and has his home region and three adjacent regions as his first four ranks. The party has traveled through other locations and my bard would pick up a region that we spent some time in. Then we were stuck in a desert oasis for a year, we leveled several times, and I picked up Patchwork Desert (large geographically-defined region), Yakka (the oasis, pop. 5000), Degimelheist (the capital of the region,) Yak Yak's tribe (1,000 tribesmen who took over the oasis,) Draco (home region of another character that he described to me,) & gnome slaves (100) before we moved onto new locations. This allowed me to answer just about any question about any of the people we dealt with in the desert that I could think of. As far as the microregion of "gnome slaves", I could list off the name of each gnome of the gnome (ex-)slaves "region", along with their family connections, their individual reputations, their skills and mastery, their deficiencies and weaknesses, their recent histories, their personalities, etc. One time I needed to make 1,000 copies of a notice that we wanted published throuout the city. I listed off exactly who was skilled in scribing, listed their order of expertise, and listed off several other gnomes who should be talented in scribing if trained right, and who would be the best gnome to train them. I then organized them to make the copies we needed in short order. This would have been a lot more difficult if I was just relying on the Oasis rank, which is where they were enslaved, or an epic challenge if I was relying on just the Patchwork Desert rank.
For every rank in K:Local you get, you can select the region. The scope affects the DCs. So, you could take Forgotten Realms as a region for example, and you would be able to answer very general questions about the politics of the world, but questions about a certain continent would add +10 to the DC, a certain region +20, a certain major city +30, etc. But the smaller the scope of the regions that you select for your K:Local rank, the easier it is to recall specific information about any aspect of it.
My character started with four ranks and has his home region and three adjacent regions as his first four ranks. The party has traveled through other locations and my bard would pick up a region that we spent some time in. Then we were stuck in a desert oasis for a year, we leveled several times, and I picked up Patchwork Desert (large geographically-defined region), Yakka (the oasis, pop. 5000), Degimelheist (the capital of the region,) Yak Yak's tribe (1,000 tribesmen who took over the oasis,) Draco (home region of another character that he described to me,) & gnome slaves (100) before we moved onto new locations. This allowed me to answer just about any question about any of the people we dealt with in the desert that I could think of. As far as the microregion of "gnome slaves", I could list off the name of each gnome of the gnome (ex-)slaves "region", along with their family connections, their individual reputations, their skills and mastery, their deficiencies and weaknesses, their recent histories, their personalities, etc. One time I needed to make 1,000 copies of a notice that we wanted published throuout the city. I listed off exactly who was skilled in scribing, listed their order of expertise, and listed off several other gnomes who should be talented in scribing if trained right, and who would be the best gnome to train them. I then organized them to make the copies we needed in short order. This would have been a lot more difficult if I was just relying on the Oasis rank, which is where they were enslaved, or an epic challenge if I was relying on just the Patchwork Desert rank.
