Using Audio Content to Deepen Player Immersion in Shadow World

[Micael]

Hiya to all Shadow World fans,
After months of crafting, revising, and perfecting the massive task of compiling the EMER I History, I realized that simply using it as a review material isn't the most effective way to create engaging audio content. This led me to ask: how would a modern-day graduate in Shadow World prefer to hear their history lessons?

Every DM is familiar with the challenge: a player asks what their character knows about figures like Kadaena, Andraax, Aldaron, or the Titans. The DM scrambles, flipping through the rules (Player's Guide in hand), summarizing bits and pieces while navigating 40 pages of history and countless secrets. Then another player chimes in, "I have 11 ranks in History, and he only has 4. What do I know more?" The DM, overwhelmed, wonders if advancing History ranks even makes sense.

This sparked an idea: wouldn't it be helpful to organize historical information by knowledge tiers or ranks? DMs could share tailored content with players without derailing gameplay. Better yet, imagine players listening to two Shadow World historians debating these eras. Instead of poring over dry text, they'd experience dynamic, engaging dialogue.

Even in Shadow World, facts often evolve through centuries of interpretation and myth-making. A podcast could bridge the gap, presenting not just canon lore but also plausible theories and assumptions, enriching both teachers' and players' understanding. This format offers a fresh, immersive way to deliver Shadow World's rich history, allowing players to absorb the lore without feeling overwhelmed.
What would you think about that?

Here you got a table overview about Lore tiers, skill ranks and examples for bits of Kulthea/ EMER I History bits- and also the links to the audio files:

https://discord.com/channels/737958249936060416/750324220533145680/1320023562542911530


Tier Adjustments Overview

First Era (+Interregnum):

Accessible only to Sages, and even then, limited to mythological fragments like Utha's confrontation with Kadaena or the Althans' remnants.

Most historical details are considered speculative or lost to time.

Second Era (Titans):

Accessible from Scholar Tier and up, with increasing depth at higher tiers, e.g., Experts understanding the Titanic Shoguns' collapse and Sages learning about the Navigator Guild's formation.

Third Era (Aldaron+):

Fully accessible across all tiers, from Novice (broad historical events) to Sage (detailed troop movements and nuanced correlations).

If you also use own audio files for your players, please post them- in the future I plan also to post a few unique songs for heroes of Gryphonburgh...
Have fun and if we don´t hear from each other a beautifull chrismas and happy new year!

Micael

[MisterK]

I would be significantly more restrictive for non-elves. Basically, tier 1 knowledge (up to 3 ranks) would go back a century, tier 2 knowledge (up to 6 ranks) would go back about three to five centuries, tier 3 knowledge (up to 10 ranks) would go back a millenium or two, tier 4 knowledge (up to 20 ranks) would go back to the Wars of Dominion, tier 5 knowledge (up to 30 ranks) would go back to the Second Era, and tier 6 knowledge (more than 30 ranks) would be required to have any knowledge of something earlier than the Loremaster Calendar.

Furthermore, knowledge would be restricted by data access and cultural recognition : basically, people can have a thorough knowledge of their local culture and history, but anything beyond depends on 1) whether the information is accessible and 2) whether the culture they were immersed into is cosmopolitan or not. In other words, 30 ranks for a sage in Saralis is not equivalent to 30 ranks for a sage in Sel-Kai, because Saralis is a backwater land where knowledge dissemination is very difficult and there are many active forces at work trying to suppress it, while Sel-Kai is a luminary of the western hemisphere and has both several centers of knowledge and many ships that reach the far ends of the world and bring back stories, texts, and artifacts. Your Saralian sage has a very focused knowledge base, but your Sel sage can have a much broader knowledge base.

Additionally, the further you go back in time, the more spotty and biased the knowledge becomes. Keeping knowledge requires magical preservation or significant writing effort. It is well-documented that copyists are error-prone and tend to re-interpret what they are copying, thus biasing the copy. After a few lifetimes, only major facts that are still in line with the current cultural founding myth have a chance of having escaped the bias drift. After a few dozen lifetimes, basically everything is twisted and more myth than reality.

Elves, more specifically elves that have a cultural bias of preserving knowledge (Iylari and Dyari, in most cases) twist the general rule : the "lifetime" rule still applies, but elves are genetically immortal and, as such, the drift is much less pronounced - the Prince of Namar-Tol was already alive when the Namari landed in the archipelago, so there is no need to pass knowledge from master to student several times: he *knows* because he was there when it happened. However, they are still biased (both consciously and unconsciously), and they know better than anyone that history is written by those who survive. Expect most "facts" told or written by elves to have a pro-elven bias, and the further back you go, the more pronounced the bias.

All in all, I think it's far better to not have firm rules on character historical knowledge and decide it on a case-by-case basis. Which, in turn, requires being ready to mix truth and falsehood almost every time. The only rule that applies every time being : always tell whatever truth you want to tell according to how those who wrote it wanted it to be told.

Or : fact is what happened. Truth is what people are convinced happened. Facts become truth very quickly, and then, facts are forgotten, and only truth remains.

Or : all witnesses lie.

[Micael]

Thanks for your thoughts,
these rules are directly from the Shadow World player´s guide. They are necessary because not every DM is able to produce fair and exhaustive Rolemaster Rules at the spur of a moment and remember it detailed after 1 year or two (including me). Especially if different players ask you similar questions after a time.
Because most societies are mixed in SW, elves could (and most are- see the Loremasters for example) be teachers and therefore transfer the knowledge to every new generation of humankind. But of course these rules must be interpreted on a case by case basis anyway,

[MisterK]

Thanks for your thoughts,
these rules are directly from the Shadow World player´s guide. They are necessary because not every DM is able to produce fair and exhaustive Rolemaster Rules at the spur of a moment and remember it detailed after 1 year or two (including me). Especially if different players ask you similar questions after a time.
Because most societies are mixed in SW, elves could (and most are- see the Loremasters for example) be teachers and therefore transfer the knowledge to every new generation of humankind. But of course these rules must be interpreted on a case by case basis anyway,

First, I guess I am an outlier of sorts - I GM in Shadow World since 1986 and I always GM in the same world (no reboot or parallel). So I have a pretty good idea of 1) what my headcanon is and 2) what kind of story I want to tell and atmosphere I want to create.
But mostly, I don't care if I am not consistent between two characters - it is normal for two characters with different backgrounds to know different things and have contradicting information, even if they have the same skill ranks and bonuses. Actual exposure trumps everything else.

What I did once was provide a rough map of the continent (the campaign was set in Emer) with colored circles over each area for each player. The color indicated how deep their regional knowledge was, independently of their skill. This basically acted as a significant modifier to all knowledge skills.

And human societies are not really mixed - it is explicit in Shadow World that the Flows of Essaence, the low population density and the general quite hostile environmental conditions, notably for sea travel, make trans-continental travel quite difficult. The world is very fragmented and, in most places, even knowledge of their own continent is lacking, and other continents might as well be in another world (this is quite literally what the Prince of Reandor says to his advisors when poring over a map of Jaiman in one of the SW products flavor text, with Randae Terisonen attending the discussion). Loremasters have a policy about knowledge release that is more a need-to-know basis than anything else, which is probably partly due to their post-War non-interventionist policy and partly due to most cultures having a tendency to abuse knowledge for their own benefit. Otherwise, the Orders Arnak and other sowers of chaos would have much more trouble isolating cultures from one another.

And elves, especially when living in realms of their own, have very little reason to give out knowledge for free. Would Namar-Tol release knowledge of what happened thousands of years ago or what the place the Namari originate from actually looks like ? In all likelihood, absolutely not: knowledge is power, and Namar-Tol is keen on maintaining an edge or two over the human competition.

YMMV, of course, but my take on Shadow World is that it is a fragmented world, with few centres of knowledge and difficult communications, and, in addition, with significant racial biases that prevent meaningful cross-race cultural exchanges. Even in Jaiman, Urulan was basically Terra Incognita until the joint Rhakhaan-Tanara military expedition crossed the detroit over the ice bridges, and Urulan is a stone's throw away from Tanara. People who live on the east coast of Saralis probably don't know what happens on the west coast. Everything north of the great lakes is basically Lost Realms, and half of it was never explored to begin with. So, when you're looking for information about Kelestia or Mulira, you'd better be ready to take what little info you can get with a heavy grain of salt: most of it will be wrong, biased, misplaced, or obsolete, and the Loremasters ain't talking until they actually believe that giving you the information can further their own goals.

And, as a GM, I think it makes for better stories. Both characters and players gain knowledge by exposure, and cross-reference information, which allows them to sort out what is probably right from what is at best dubious. And players who play different characters in consecutive campaigns can have the pleasure of having knowledge their character don't have and savour the idea that they *know* that what their character believe is wrong. You replace frustration (of having been fed incorrect information) with anticipation (of waiting to see when your character will *eventually* catch up).

[Micael]

I was thinking for a school in Haalkitaine- the Centre of an Imperium is mostly more informed about their underlings then everywhere else- somewhere like Rome in their primitive. I never had a longer campaign in Emer using the podcasts to get the lore into my head for future use

[MisterK]

I was thinking for a school in Haalkitaine- the Centre of an Imperium is mostly more informed about their underlings then everywhere else- somewhere like Rome in their primitive. I never had a longer campaign in Emer using the podcasts to get the lore into my head for future use

Oh, you can bet that the Emperor is aware of most important events in Rhakhaan (except those that are purposefully hidden from him, possibly by his own advisors). But in Tanara ? in U-Lyshak ? In Saralis ? In godforsaken Wuliris or Quellbourne ? He is probably more aware of what happens in Sel-Kai than what happens in Saralis, because at least Sel-Kai has skyships that come to Haalkitaine every so often, and merchants love to talk.

Even the Scribes of Nomikos are only aware of what happens when they send a scribe and bodyguards to collect texts from some place. If the scribe returns, and if they return with something interesting, that is. And the volume of information available in Nomikos is so huge that no one even knows what is *actually* available. I can picture rooms upon rooms upon rooms full of scrolls, tablets, tomes, woven tapestries, painted hides, inscribed runestones, and whatever other media people have used to preserve knowledge, painstakingly organised by dozens of generations of scribes, so much that the scribes know where most of the sources regarding some topic are located, but probably not what they are, and the prospective sage spends days, tendays, *seasons* poring over texts and trying to decipher them just to find a few pieces of information that might be relevant but are certainly biased by the point of view of the author. Imagine Gandalf in the depths of Minas Tirith, but a hundredfold or a thousandfold. And that's *the* single most knowledgeable place in the world, possibly excluding the Loremasters headquarters.

The emperor of Rhakhaan knows what is happening in his realm *now*, because that's what he requires. But what happened a few millenia ago ? Not really. I can easily imagine the Rhakhaan elite priding themselves of the "manifest destiny" of the Zori to rule the continent, without any clue of what actually happened even during the previous dynasties, except what happened to the kings themselves (especially when they were conquerors, or, conversely, when they were toppled by a mob or replaced by a more ambitious competitor). History is written by the victors, and they tend to put themselves in the most favourable light possible when writing chronicles. Even Nomikos Scribes and Loremasters can only collect what has been written.

[Micael]

With the newest update of NotebookLM you can load in audiofiles and ask directly (with voice) to the chatters questions about the content and they will answer before going on- so that allows players or DMs listen to a podcast to get more specific answers- but be careful- the answers are focussed on the complete source you loaded in, not only the summary. So it would be advisable, if you want players to use these as asking to "teachers" directly, to only load in these above prepared audio files and not the complete EMER source.

What you can also do is sharing a (free) part with an document and/or audio file inside NotebookLM with one or more of your players- for example you prepare a summary podcast about the 2 ERA and at the background is a much bigger file which the Players can use to ask more specific questions if they are interested- or you upload a summary discussion about a murder mystery and who might it be- and in the background is a much bigger puzzle- so your players can at home ask the chatters (NPCs named of course) about all they know about the murder situation in detail....

Today I want to start with a quick summary for players into Kulthea´s History- look to the thread above ⁠shadow-world⁠
for different tiers and a discussion about using audio content for players. Last time many people thought, that the audio files were too much informationn. So I start with tier 1 (rank 1-5) of the:
1 ERA (only legends and uncomplete stories):  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jle_wf-2_Vz5gxMx0Qsgl-TPC-4SQDj1/view?usp=drive_link

2 ERA  (only legends and uncomplete stories):
 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HKL-xRkt-OHbeBwFt6m_MukqiNufNjqL/view?usp=drive_link

3 ERA short atmospheric general campaign start for players and beginners in SW:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wr9rCOApZAtDGX-nBkfm-zw_QTQxYcyL/view?usp=drive_link

Have fun!
Micael

[Micael]

Today is the first publication for an short audiobook and very short video for Shadow World- you can read more in the Epic Tales of Gryphonburgh thread...

[Micael]

Another small audio book publication about Kalens story from (most probably T.K.Amthor) and the last chapter of "The Loremasters Legacy" you can find in the thread "A Tribute to Terry K. Amthor & Shadow World". And in the coming weeks there will be more about Lore Masters Legacy II in that thread, too.
Have fun!
Micael