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<blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6364332" data-attributes="member: 177">&quot;Positively identify&quot;?&nbsp; Sure, if you want to speak directly to a local lord, a letter of introduction may be required from some other personage of note.&nbsp; And governmental types who wanted their people to travel might give letters of safe passage, to tell others that getting in the way might have consequences.&nbsp; Henry V seems to have invented the thing we consider a &quot;passport&quot; to identify his important people when they were in foreign lands.&nbsp; But these are less about &quot;are you who you say you are?&quot; and more about &quot;are you important enough to worry about?&quot;But identity documents for the masses - what we think of these days as &quot;positive ID&quot; - didn't really become common until around WWI, if I recall correctly.&nbsp; Before that time, you don't really have the information infrastructure to support such.&nbsp; And photo IDs, kind of obviously, require photography....So, yes, if you need a reason to support a forgery plotline, by all means introduce the idea of positive ID.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />&nbsp; But I don't think this matters for merchants - it doesn't matter if they are who they say they are, except insofar as they say they are somebody with stuff to sell or a desire to buy.&nbsp; You can call yourself by whatever name you want to use, so long as you have the goods or the cash to dump into my local economy.Pay a fee?&nbsp; Sure - that may work if your town has a wall, and we are talking about merchants.&nbsp; For PCs, we have to set aside how frequently murder hobos can climb things really well, sneak past wall guards, and, you know... fly and stuff.&nbsp; Obey normal social conventions - of course.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Umbran, post: 6364332, member: 177"] "Positively identify"? Sure, if you want to speak directly to a local lord, a letter of introduction may be required from some other personage of note. And governmental types who wanted their people to travel might give letters of safe passage, to tell others that getting in the way might have consequences. Henry V seems to have invented the thing we consider a "passport" to identify his important people when they were in foreign lands. But these are less about "are you who you say you are?" and more about "are you important enough to worry about?" But identity documents for the masses - what we think of these days as "positive ID" - didn't really become common until around WWI, if I recall correctly. Before that time, you don't really have the information infrastructure to support such. And photo IDs, kind of obviously, require photography.... So, yes, if you need a reason to support a forgery plotline, by all means introduce the idea of positive ID. :) But I don't think this matters for merchants - it doesn't matter if they are who they say they are, except insofar as they say they are somebody with stuff to sell or a desire to buy. You can call yourself by whatever name you want to use, so long as you have the goods or the cash to dump into my local economy. Pay a fee? Sure - that may work if your town has a wall, and we are talking about merchants. For PCs, we have to set aside how frequently murder hobos can climb things really well, sneak past wall guards, and, you know... fly and stuff. Obey normal social conventions - of course. [/QUOTE]

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