Understanding the Law on Lore
What is not Ancient Lore?
Again, to put it simply any story that is about real events is not Ancient Lore.
Now, the above is an over simplification. Just because a story is about something that never happened does not automatically make it Ancient Lore. There are extremely few quest stories that focus on actual events in MD – the quest itself in fact is what makes these events real, for as long as the quest lasts. The important difference is that we usually know that the events described never actually happened.
This was always the core of the old, currently disbanded, Legend Speakers alliance. We would create stories, often from nothing, to teach a lesson. Most of the time, we would not write these stories down, or perform them more than once. And we would always make it clear, that the story was made for this place, and this time – that it was the past that created this story, and not the story that shared the past.
Just because a story is old, or about people who have been gone for years, or even about something that never actually happened, does not automatically mean it is Ancient Lore. If a story begins at it’s own beginning, and ends at it’s own ending, then it’s not likely to be a part of Ancient Lore.
A lot of research projects that people want to look into get treated as though they are Ancient Lore, and this is wrong. It stops people from trying to learn the lessons MD was designed to reveal, and more than that it stops MD from continuing to grow. A lot of what MD has to offer was not put there by design, but happened by unconscious accident. The conclusions we draw from research might be able to become just as dangerous as Ancient Lore has become, but the act of researching in the first place should never be treated the same.
I think there’s a misunderstanding here, story mode is not part of “ancient lore”, unlike you imply in the article.
It is the stories that came out explaining characters from story mode, expanding their background, adding on further characters based on location names (or were the locations named after them indeed, interesting question), like Wind, Willow, Raven – that are part of ancient lore.
Whether it is or isnt is actually a point for debate. Stay tuned for Jubarius’s reply to this post!
I never caught any of that, but I have to say it’s a bit weird to read poems and scene names that talk about Willow, Wind etc and then, when asking what that’s all about, you get the ‘yeah, ancient lore, banned’.
Why have those names and poems if so?
There’s a scene in MDA that has the following info: “Marind was once the Queen of the land now named Marinds Bell. This remote place is oftenly used […]” I haven’t been there in a long time, but I assume the text is still there. Now, what do I make of this? Can I put it in my research files?
If not, why not remove it altogether, since it only spreads confusion?