BIND's Meta History

RPG worlds need histories, so I had to write some history for BIND. This was a big mistake.

The stupidity came in writing because I had to. This, unsurprisingly, produced bad writing. Now that I'm rewriting the lot for BIND version 0.9, it's all going in the BIND-bin. Like King Hagard in the Last Unicorn, I will destroy anything which does not make me smile when I read it.

Instead of the long, tedious history paragraphs, BIND now has only one historical event: the War of Lies.

The War of Lies began when the king decreed that history should be true, and since true accounts will never contradict each other, history books must also not contradict each other. The king demanded that historians review all books on history, and if any statement contradicted another statement in any book, then they would either have to alter or destroy one of those books.

Of course, writing by hand makes for slow work, and once we add a network of scholars writing letters to each other to organize this overly ambitious task, contradictions multiplied as new passages and events entered the history books in order to make brand new narratives coherent. The historians of the day tried to save their own necks by blaming an Elvish conspiracy.

BIND will display this story in one of the books (probably the book of Judgement), at least on some days. When someone compiles the book on a different day, it will give a different account of the war of lies, and explain that the previous explanation was, in fact, a lie. If someone arranges all the lies, they will find a perfect circle, with story-A claiming that someone fabricated Story-B, and Story-B explaining how Story-C circulated, and finally, Story-C explains how Story-A came about.

This should leave BIND Judges with a very open licence to add any lore or history they wish for any adventure they want to display, and no ability to brush up against 'canonical BIND history'. Because if everything is a contradiction, then nothing is.