You may have heard of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or Records of the Grand Historian. Like these modern-Earth records from England and China (though strictly speaking, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a collection of annals), Kesteva of the ancient past had its own project of national storytelling: the Kestevan Chronicle.
In the year 25, King Alfred commanded a narrative of the kingdom be compiled to celebrate the people’s deeds and provide their descendants with a coherent history of their New World. His Great Instruction laid out the manner of creation: Each Founding City should appoint one Recorder to oversee the creation of annals. These annals would form the Chronicle’s running story thread. The archivists also were charged with gathering memorials of people who had served their cities well; tables of property ownership, town revenues and disbursements, militia numbers; descriptions of important places; and narratives of important events above and beyond the basic entry. In time, the Royal Librarians oversaw these duties and added material as they saw fit, endeavoring to create as complete a record of their cities’ occurrences as possible.
Once a year, a clean copy from each Founding City, and those of many more towns, is shipped to Kesteva City. There they are edited and integrated into a single, voluminous record that becomes the official Kestevan Chronicle.
For gaming purposes, the K-Chron, as it was affectionately called in Kesteva and we confess by ourselves at Royal Road West, is as close to a Great Big Book of Everything as can be found in the kingdom. Ulric himself … well, as you might expect, the prodigious writer wrote about the Kestevan Chronicle as early as 290, a year after his arrival in Skara.
The Royal Libraries themselves may make for interesting adventures, or the starting points of adventures, for it is the royal librarians who centralize knowledge for each city, and they are hungry for texts and artifacts from the lost civilizations that can be recovered only by sturdy adventurers.
