The chronicle

The world keeps a record of what happens in it. Anything notable (a plague emerging, a flood beginning, a region changing hands) is written down with the day it happened, and stays there afterwards.

This matters because the world itself only ever shows you now. A region tells you it is flooding; it does not tell you it flooded twice last year. The chronicle is the only thing that remembers.

Four kinds of news

Not everything concerns everyone, so each entry knows who it is for:

   GLOBAL     the whole world
              an epidemic emerges, spreads, or dies out

   COUNTRY    a kingdom and everyone under it
              a crown claimed, elected, or fallen vacant; an election
              opening; a duchy granted or claimed

   REGIONAL   one region
              flooding, drought

   PLAYER     one person
              your own life: a title inherited, an heir named, an
              estate come into, a day's training, a death

All four are read in one place: the event log on the map. The world's news is there for everybody. Your own is there too, among the world's, when you are reading with a character, and it holds every character of your line, so a death and the life before it read as one story.

Four views of the log

With a character, the log offers four views, and switching between them fetches nothing:

   ALL        the world's news and your own, newest first

   MY REALM   what is filed under the kingdom you are standing in,
              and the world's global news

   HERE       what is filed under the region you are standing in

   MINE       your line's own events, and nothing of the world's

Without a character you read everything, and there is nothing to choose: you are standing nowhere.

A happening that concerns several parties is filed for each of them (a war declared is filed under both kingdoms, a front under its region and both kingdoms) and listed once, whichever view you read it in.

Every entry has a subject

Each entry is marked with what it is about, which is how the log colours and labels it: weather, plague, war, diplomacy, politics, trade, faith, family, life, titles or relics. The sentence says what happened and to whom.

Why a duchy is public and an inheritance is not

The line is not how big the news is. It is whether it moves a vote.

A crown changing hands, a duchy granted and a duchy claimed all change who chooses the next king, so the kingdom is told. A title you inherit, an heir you name and an estate you come into move things between people without changing who holds the electorate, so they stay in your own log.

The cost of that is worth knowing: if a king grants you a duchy, you will read about it in the world's news rather than in your own.

What it is not

The chronicle records what happened in the world, not what the game did. You will not find anything in it that is not worth reading.

The log is filtered only when you ask it to be. Under All it shows every global, country and regional entry to everybody, so you see a drought in a country you have never visited and a crown claimed in a kingdom that is not yours. My realm and Here narrow it to where you stand, and Mine to your own line.