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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 7356260">I think players with certain skills, or certain combinations of skills might know "Cosmic History".  Also, I think sometimes players might have stumbled upon this knowledge by accident.  It's why at the start of the game I give them each "Five Things They Know".  It can be local information, "cosmic" information, random trivia, but it's a nice way to give them knowledge without them having to go "I roll 15 on to recall what I know about the King, what do I know?" instead they've already got a little flash-card telling them the King is a tall, portly man with a big beard and a constantly grim expression who is known to sometimes execute people who try to make him laugh.I also think that if the knowledge once existed, it should still exist somewhere in some form.  Maybe only in the Last Scroll of the Elders, which is lost in some deep dungeon depths in the hoard of some mighty dragon, but still, the information should be discoverable for the players.  The relevance, distance and availability of the information should determine exactly how difficult it is for the players to uncover that information.In short: if I know it, there should be some what for the players to know it too.  In your case, perhaps there are ancient ruins with tomes covering long-forgotten ancestries, with the most recent of which matching up to a legendary Elven King, who, if the players delve into Elven history books, is recorded as some kind of founder of the distinctly Elven-and-not-human Kingdoms.  Perhaps another tome covers another family that lines up with some ancient human history, and the players are left to piece together that these ancient descendants are actually from the same race and that humans and elves are derivatives of that.In my campaigns, I run that the material plane has similar effects on planar beings as the planes have on material creatures: Over generations the immortal planar beings become more solid and "material" just as the "material" creatures take on increasing planar traits over time.  This also happens to a planar creature that remains on the material plane for thousands of years, or a material creature that does the same on the planes, or encounters strong planar effects.  For me, the elves we know know are all long-long-long descendants of the "fey elves" the magical immortal elf-kind of the FeyWild, Eladrin are something of a "bigfoot" middle-step, not immortal magical fey, not mortal fleshy elves.  It's not terribly far off from what was described, I just don't care for their specific explanation.</blockquote>

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