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[Toboter]

I mostly play Adventure Mode, and I always found it a bit sad that you can't really discover bits of the worlds history, and that books, while certainly interesting, are so empty, even though the game already generates tons of readable history data. I would love it if books about a certain thing (people, locations, monsters etc.) would contain bits of that things history (to the extent of the writers knowledge - it doesn't even have to affect world gen, just based on what the writer saw himself, or might conceivably have learned - I don't think most of that knowledge is currently tracked), so you don't need to use Legends Mode to find out about the history of the entire world (i guess).

[Loam]

They sort of do. Some types of books, (auto)biographies, chronicles, and cultural histories (others?) contain several "chapters", each dealing with a historical event. These are, admittedly, not very complete or informative, but you can at least get some historical info from them. There's also engravings on walls (usually in temples) which sometimes deal with historical events. And, by the same token, statues and items with images on them.

Again, it's not really a "good" way to learn the world's history, since it's all so sparse; I totally agree that books, especially, should be more informative. Perhaps history books could record the entire history of a person/site/entity up to the authoring date? Or specific events, like wars/battles/etc. As it is they mostly record festivals, since those generate a disproportionate amount of historical data.

[Hamsmagoo]

Real life has its famous writers, like Herodotus and Strabo, who traveled around the world interviewing people so they could fill books with what they learned. It would be cool if there were NPCs that deliberately do this.

[Azerty]

Real life has its famous writers, like Herodotus and Strabo, who traveled around the world interviewing people so they could fill books with what they learned. It would be cool if there were NPCs that deliberately do this.

Notable fortresses could receive visits from scholars wanting to record the history of the site, an event or a person, and some scholars could leave to know the history of other places.

[Hamsmagoo]

Yes.
Like if a certain historian aspires to write about a specific megabeast that visited your fortress, he may stop by to interview some dwarves who witnessed it. Or maybe another historian has a less specific aspiration to categorize all the sites in a certain biome or all the animals or flora.

[Starver]

If we have a Pliny/Strabo type author, as well as Catullus/Seneca ones, that would be interesting.

But there must be a possibility of bias/blindedness in any treatise. Writers of histories are often influenced by/leaned towards their contemporary audience (usually whoever is currently in power, and their societal group) and may also be a little inclined to personally be expansive in describing one civilisation's successes at a site but summarily dismissive of another's victories.

If that can be procgenned, it might lead to future writers seeking copies of multiple works and trying (again with a slant, probably) to get a 'proper' document out of it.

/imagines a Gibbonman[1] scholar producing "The Rise And Fall of the Human Empire".


[1] Imagine this with me. There are ?seven? different species of "<foo> gibbon", but none of them seem to have an animal-man variation, unfortunately.

[therahedwig]

TBF, the history science branch has a buncha things about sourcing, so there's some room for failability there.

What might be interesting... I am not sure if it is possible to have teleological historiography like whig history within the simulation, but perhaps, the problem of narrative in history. Like, you could have generated narrative genres like we have generated poetry, and then have that also serve as a basis for how the histfigs select events?

Like, you could have a war hero story genre, where the first event is always a childhood event of the hero, the second event the outbreak of the war, and the third the event that marks the hero as a hero. So, Urist became a mason in bridgebrooks, a war broke out between the chamber of anvils and the spidery glee, Urist killed the demon master Ast of the Spidery Glee. And so forth. The thing that is hard with this is that you'd need to be able to figure out which events qualify as what, and what kind of culture would prefer which formats. (So, cultures that prefer romance searching for romance events, cultures that prefer family searching for family related events, etc.)

Like, it'd be tricky, but it would give enough cultural bias while still relating a sensible sequence of events, and it'd also leave something for the player to discover. Sequentialism would be equally hard, as it'd require DF to understand that X had the money to do Y because of gambling in the past, and that this was possible because they moved to that town to begin with.

[Hamsmagoo]

All of this could become incidental as the personal value system gets more fleshed out. I don't really know how it looks on the programming end. But, maybe character sets out to tell the history of cities because he personally values civilization. Then, a traumatic event, like watching a friend die to a dingo, sparks a respect for nature that changes the course of his writing.
Speaking of Seneca, he's a good real-world example of this. When he was young, his interest was science, but his family pushed him into politics and philosophy. So, that's what most of his writings reflect. In the last years of his life, he returned to science and wrote his Natural Histories, which were dry as sand and not as impressive as his philosophy.

There could also be writers with no specific theme. Explorers who want to record whatever they happen to come across in a journal, akin to Captain Cook.