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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8240616" data-attributes="member: 6785785">For the most part, yeah. Like the central mystery of the true nature of the castles and all that was largely gleaned from different NPCs along the way. I didn’t want to prolong discovery of these central ideas once things started moving toward them, so very often there weren’t even skill checks involved. I’d place the knowledge behind some other obstacle....so if the elven sage knew about how the castles were all connected, the challenge was in rescuing him from an opposing faction rather than in convincing him to reveal what he knows. Rescue him, and he’ll share the information. And of course I had multiple such sources in mind so that the players could pursue different avenues in the fiction and still have the chance to learn the lore. I didn’t want it gated behind rolls, for the most part. Nor did I want there to be only one route to the information. There are a few exceptions to this, though, but only when it made sense to do so. A Dabus named Fell in Sigil who only “speaks” in images comes to mind. He knows the Lady of Pain’s history and how it connects to the castles, and I had the players make some checks to determine how clear his images were. So I gave them the “essential” details as soon as they interacted with Fell, and then allowed follow up questions for additional details, and I based the clarity of those details on the results of their rolls. So they got the “actionable” information for sure, and anything else was a bonus.  We’ve now passed the point where learning that campaign history is still necessary, though. I didn’t want that to be the focus of play for too long. Now that they have all that info, they’re able to steer the direction of play more easily. I read a good bit of advice a couple years back that was along the lines “a secret revealed is always more interesting than a secret kept”. I kind of look at it as players being able to act on what they know rather than on what they don’t know. The former seems much more suited to gaming.</blockquote>

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