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Message: <blockquote data-quote="zakael19" data-source="post: 9818328" data-attributes="member: 7044099">My wife was just noting that geological studies in the PNW have confirmed various extant tribal stories about the last major earthquake (1700ish), passed down as legends and similar tales. We used to think that oral histories degraded after a few generations, but that's now understood to be much less accurate of an assumption (although given enough time context can be lost). Recent archeological finds in Canada and coastal Australia may match oral histories/songs passed down thousands of years.Written history may still exist if a culture dies, but you better hope you have access to some weird/convenient reality piercing magic or a Rosetta Stone or else you're in the Hrappen Valley language territory (or hieroglyphs themselves which the Egyptian cultures had lost memory of until said stone and other fragments were found).Edit: and back to the topic, Stonetop has various mostly "dead" languages - but there are ways for the players to have access: fictional permissions via the Seeker (scholar/pursuer of ancient and forbidden lore) playbook, making a plan to find sages who may know or writings with translations (a la said Stone), or certain beings who may help. By picking a Seeker or highlighting the Makers as a topic of interest in Session 0, a player is indicating they care about this lore and are going to want to uncover more. So you give them the tantalizing tidbits up front and see what grabs.Here's the way the (really freaking excellent) Setting Overview presents the Makers to new players:Concise tidbits, and of course "hey, your village is built on ruins of these people, let's talk about that" is part of session 0. It's relevant because it's the player's home, and they know about it.</blockquote>

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