Based on your approach, you could also say that the Thirty Years War is myth and legend for your average real life person, because they might have trouble identifying the protagonists by name. Which might be the case, actually.
I studied History and got my degree in it. Sadly, haven't used it much in the past thirty years. When I was immersed in it, I could have spoken to this. Now? I would have to look it up. Humans tend to make things personal and then it sticks. Someone a person knows dying is a tragedy. Someone dying they don't know is a statistic.
But I'd like to address the possibility of more formal learning as a solution.
I guess I'm not offering a solution. I'm merely saying what the RAW says. Certainly we can discuss what we would each do and can be inspired by it! I welcome that. Personally, I'm fine with the RAW. Recent discoveries have shown that Vikings were more literate than was previously thought. Same for many ancient cultures. This is for a lot of reasons. One of them is writing and sharing of knowledge. That's technology, though, and the Realms not only has magic but it has deities. That is not the case for the Realms among humans. It is explicitly said that humans know local history and are limited to only up to four centuries in the past. What gets strange are other sources of knowledge that don't seem to share.
Chauntea is the goddess of agriculture. This gets tough because game worlds are usually based on some real world time period and tech is stuck there. In our world, corn grows one ear per stalk, maybe two. (I'm from Iowa and have read up on our corn crop. Again, I'm no expert and used to know more. Now, I know where to look.) We have hybrids and have been hybridizing corn for a long time and it's still only two ears per stalk. The third one, if it does start, doesn't finish and isn't usable.
The Realms is loosely based on medieval Europe, with some other cultures in there. As I have discussed before, most game worlds are real worlds with magic thrown over top. The natural laws are assumed. Corn grows as it does because that's the most efficient it can be. Too many ears, and it would probably crack and fall over. Similar to what has been done with wheat, IIRC.
Is this still the case with Chauntea? Is planting the same or can a farmer put seeds in the ground, pray to Chauntea, and then they will grow? Do her clerics need to bless it? Are her corn stalks strong enough to allow for three head of corn? Four? Are farmers who worship Chauntea allowed to worship Gond and have a plow? Or is that not allowed and they must plant by hand? I don't know but could be interesting to explore, here on the forums or in a game session with a group.
The elves specifically met and interacted with the Netherese, though, and taught them magic. They'd have been aware of what was going on with the major human magic empire that arose next to them. Plus elves often remember things from past lives during their reverie, which could/would include what happened with Netheril.
Well, actually... The elves were teaching humans magic until the humans found the Nether Scrolls. Then the humans went their own path and found their own magic. They might not have abandoned elven magic but it certainly wasn't what the magical kingdom of Netheril was based on. That was the Nether Scrolls. At that point, again by RAW, the elves saw the humans using the Nether Scrolls and they backed off in teaching. From what I can read, the elves were fine with humans learning for themselves the benefits and dangers of magic. To that end, there aren't many elves that lived in Netheril to know the intricate workings of Netheril. Indeed, it could be argued that the elves that did live in Netheril went native and were caught up in the fall, same as the Netherese.
Netherils probably better documented than say Rome. Average person probably doesn't have access to these documents or are interested in them.
This is an interesting statement on several fronts. With regards to Rome, if you mean the Roman Republic or Empire, I'm not sure I can agree with the idea that Netheril is as well documented as Rome. Rome fell but in a "natural" way in that others slowly came in until they were doing their own thing, not Roman tradition. Now, we have a lot from Roman times but not nearly as much as real historians would like. They wrote a lot on clay tablets that, when filled, were fired to be made permanent. Few of those have survived. (I think that's the same in Mesopotamia. Egypt had writing on papyrus, of course, and some of that did survive as well but less.) Some cultures that came after looked back to Rome and thought they had the right of it in some way. (Holy Roman Empire and then later the Third Empire.) People would want to find and keep relics from the Roman times.
In contrast, Netheril exploded! Two cities of forty were saved. Shade was in the Shadow Plane and we can argue if they are still Netherese or something else. Sakkors survived its crash but is still ruins. Most of what made Netheril was lost until Shade came back. This was a society that ran on magic, literally. I posit that at least ninety percent of High Netheril was destroyed. I think finding something of Netheril would be like someone in hundreds years finding a random piece of technology from the 00s. First, you have to figure out which company (archmage) made it. That will tell you power settings that is needed. Then connect it to something that can read it, which requires figuring out which OS it was formatted for. Then you need to know which character set and language is used so it can be read. This is why, in Gamma World, you can find all of these artifacts and relics and most of them aren't useful to people who want something to help them survive. If the DM is running the Realms as more of a simulation type game, it could be a random table of gadgets. It could be a recipe, a book on grammar, a thesis on a ruler of Cormyr, how to clean armor, or anything else. If the DM is running more toward drama, it might be some useful thing for the group, perhaps tied to the story they are telling.
This is why I tend toward drama. I can explain that fate/deities pushed the characters where they needed to be to find the McGuffin that they needed to win. I think that's more fun.
Remind me again that book youre quoting from about elven memory?
Maxperson seems to be quoting Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes on the section of Elves. It is RAW but it is also not written well in the book, imo. It seems young elves gain visions in their trance of past lives of their elven immortal soul. In later life, sooner if they adventure or have died and come back, they start seeing memories of "another life, another time." It's not very clear to me what this means. It says that elves have memories not from personal experience or from their primal soul but that another life and another time. Here is the first inconsistency. Later passages indicate that the young elf has memories of their primal soul. Therefore, the other lives, other times could be their own reincarnations, yet it's ambiguous enough that it could be a different soul's life. It doesn't state that it has to be an elven soul but I would think that's a fair assumption.
I don't think any of that contradicts what I have said, though. There are some elves that would know, and could remember, early Netherese people when the elves were teaching them magic. At some point, though, the elves weren't as prominent in Netherese society anymore and wouldn't know mid and late Netheril.
Great discussion! Thanks!
