Yesterday, I talked about the movement of information across distances, and all the factors we need to take into account when dealing with them. Today, I’m going to talk about some general methods by which it does so, and how it affects the speed and consistency of the message.
The basic way, of course, is word of mouth—people just telling each other. If the characters are staying in one large city, you probably won’t have to worry about too much else, but if they’re traveling between cities they’ll probably travel faster than the news does—unless, of course, this is a setting in which people in different cities have easily available means of instant conversation—the Internet, telephones, bizarre universal dreamlinks, whatever you can come up with. The other thing to remember about word of mouth is that the message is subject to change—as anyone who’s ever played Telephone knows, the more people a given string of words travels through, the more likely it is to change in the telling.
Some places, most often in low-tech settings, utilize written messages and living messengers. This can be nonhuman, like messenger pigeons, single human couriers, or chains of messengers like the postal service or the Pony Express. One of the main things to keep in mind is that these sorts of messages are limited to the speed and endurance of their carriers; if you’re using horseback messengers, for instance, you’re going to need to make sure that they have fresh horses waiting if they’re traveling long distances; birds will have to stop and rest, should only deliver to places they consider home, and have an obnoxious tendency to get eaten; mechanical conveyances break down, and messages sent in bulk have a risk of being mixed up.
Then there are systems that have more direct methods of relay. Note that, depending on the message, this doesn’t have to be limited to things like television broadcasts—with the right codes and the right vantage points, all one really needs is a mirror and some sunlight, or a fire and a way to mess with the smoke. Some messages are expected enough that all people need to relay is “This is happening”, in which case there might be some sort of simple signal that gets passed on—this most often happens with watchfires. Depending on the magic available, some people might come up with more subtle means of delivering their messages; I was once in one game where I exploited someone else’s information-gathering tricks by turning the order of items on a certain shelf into a way of coding different messages.
How—and how fast—does news travel in your worlds?