setting accessablity

[seppuku me senpai]

I have observed there is a general dissonance between source material (3.5 D&D lore books) and what is actually portrayed in the server by players and historically by DMs. I sympathize, and even approve of Arelith's laissez-faire take on lore and encouraging player creativity. However, I can't help but feel like the atmosphere of fantasy, politics, good and evil, monsters and adventurers, is diluted by what seems to be a lot of confusion as to what the setting is, and sometimes there's conflicting interpretations that can be cleared up by reading the source material.

Unlike Ravenloft and WoW, it is very difficult to wrangle up all the lore one needs to be fluent in the 3.5 setting. The FR wiki is regularly updated with 5E content, with older content edited or removed entirely. The source books themselves are expensive in print, and while the Trove has recently won their legal battles and it is safe to peruse the open source books, it does not have everything. Not to mention, there's Three (Tome of Magic, Spell Compendium, Complete Arcane) books just describing magic and how it functions, a base system a wizard or arcane-fluent PC should already be familiar with.

Realistically speaking, no one really wants to browse through 2-3 full length books for a tl;dr on Mystra or Tethyr or understand the nuances of justice systems or social dynamic. Ideally the nuances are established by DMs and then perpetuated by PCs, but that doesn't seem to be happening. "Setting Enforcement" feels like a dirty word here, but I think it's really necessary to prevent frustration between PCs who both feel like they are "in the right" as per their interpretation of the setting. Anyone whose been to a Game Shop irl knows how heated the discourse can get when discussing interpretations of lore books, which is why I feel it is imperative for the health of the table (or in this case, the server) to have setting enforcement encouraged.

If there was an established baseline of expectations of the setting of Arelith, what the lore is, where to read about it, and accessible (maybe on the Arelith Wiki?) giving some helpful TL;DRs of history, basic information for clerics, wizards, sorcerers, and so on, that would really help the server at large. This is especially important for Arelith, because I understand there's some nuances and change ups from what the sourcebooks say and whats been established in the server. This isn't a matter of telling people "you're doing it wrong" but encouraging people to find common ground through an understanding of the source material.

[donarek]

W00t, thanks for the link.
I woud love to see knowledge of canon be rewared by the world itself. Like if you'd know that some thing shoud be somewhere, you'd get small advantage (like in exploration sense), that it's really there or works like it shoud. But not to be expected from players to know it. Give the loremasters chance to educate others IC.

[Seven Sons of Sin]

I've called for a "1-Pager on the Arelithian Campaign Setting" before and think it would be really great.

There are some truths to the setting that are self-evident and not FOIG and should impact how new players see the server.

For example,

a) the strong presence of the Underdark
b) the presence of a Baatorian portal in a fallen paladin keep
c) the role of Amn
d) archipelago nature of the islands
e) the strong magical presence and teleportation anchors

These are just fun facts about Arelith that would be good to know, and to make more accessible. Also, in big bold letters, about how we diverge from 1372 AR and you can't use most of FR WIKI to the uninitiated, because you need to be able to distinguish 3.5 from anything after, and when certain 2.0 and 3.0 lore still applies.