Genealogy is one of my many interests, so when I saw this [Broken Link: https://www.picollecta.com/p/15th-century-royal-manuscript-comes-up-for-auction-1003045685], I immediately made a connection to RPGs. How is the lineage of the ruler tracked? Is it in long scrolls, thick books, carved stellae, or other monuments?

A 23 foot long scroll to document 1,400 years of genealogy. I don’t know the size of the writing, but from my own genealogy, where my parents researched all their lines and each successive family added as they went back, there are ten file boxes of materials (that I have yet to sort), and two or three shelves of books and reference materials. The furthest my parents got back was in he mid-1,400’s, but I have not finished verifying their work. I know some of it for another family is wrong because they took another researcher at their word. This other researcher mixed up places in Ireland and Scotland, two very different places. I spent a couple years trying to find more in Ireland, when the surname had not changed as this other researcher claimed and was looking on the wrong island….

This experience shows how easy it is for a sage in a world without digital information. Digging through musty tomes and scrolls, each sage and library using their own filing system. Do you want to create a fantasy version of the Dewey Decimal System? I think that is taking verisimilitude a bit far. But if one sage/expert/researcher repeats a wrong piece of information and it gets picked up, how many researchers will bother to go check the footnotes as it were?

Lineages of kings and famous people and information research in fantasy settings. Just some bits to ponder.