Folklore is what an educated person of a realm knows about that realm — traditionally parcelled out among six disciplines: geography, history, the nature of the world, mythic beasts, poetics and society. It is the skill that answers “have I heard of this?”, and it covers a very great deal of ground because in a world without reference libraries, one well-read head is the reference library.
Recalling something specific — a name, a date, a custom, which family holds which honour — is a plain Folklore test, and the success level sets how much comes back:
| CF | MF | MS | CS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unknown | Incomplete | General | Specific |
Measuring what a character broadly knows about a topic is a Folklore Success Value test instead, read on the standard table. The distinction is worth keeping: who was king during the burning? is a Success Test, while what was the burning? is a Success Value test, and the Value Diamonds tell the GM how much of the story to hand over. SV 1–2 is bare recognition of the name; higher results open the subject up.
This is the general pattern for knowledge Success Value tests, and any skill whose subject is a body of learning may be read the same way when the four-way success level would be too blunt an instrument.
Foreign knowledge. A character may know something of somewhere else, at a penalty scaling with distance:
| Distance | ML |
|---|---|
| A different realm within the native region | −10 |
| An adjacent region | −20 |
| A distant region of the same continent | −40 |
| Beyond the continent | −60 |
Where the reduction takes Folklore Mastery Level below zero, no test may be made — the character simply has nothing to draw on. Extended travel in a particular country mitigates the penalty, as does access to the right libraries and the right tutors. The same scale governs foreign heraldry and foreign law.