Happily Ahistorical

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

The writing smelt bad, in that peculiar way that most fantasy writing is bad, before half a page went down. The problem came from having to write - every word was vestigial, nothing really mattered; it wasn’t fun.

So when large sections of the rules needed to be rewritten, I took the opportunity to go through every book with a new attitude. Like King Hagard in the Last Unicorn, I destroyed everything that didn’t make me smile, including the whole history of Fenestra. The new vision of Fenestra only has one historical event.

The War of Lies began as people laid claim to fallen cities, and various treasures inside them (often abandoned when the city fell). All disputes were settled by various books on history, which recorded the movements of families, and their deeds. As the price of altered historical documents rose, many relied on libraries as safeguards against the lies. And so the price of putting a book into a library (where it generally waited a few years, allowing time for people to copy it) also rose.

With a few families backing each other up with shared histories, and sabotaging others’ stories with counter-stories, history itself collapsed, as the divide between fiction and non-fiction became guesswork, and every kind of cannon lay discarded and inert.

This mess should leave anyone the freedom to write any background to any module they please, and let me divorce myself from any responsibility to keep a consistent cannon. Because if everything must show contradiction, then nothing can be a contradiction.