Teaching and Learning with TTRPGs, 1:
NPC and Location cards
I haven't begun searching through the "Teaching and Learning with TTRPGs" (Munroe and Cullinan, 2025) book, podcast, or Discord, because I want to take them seriously, and I'm not there yet. (tabletopEDU.org) But they recently shared their reference cards for interesting NPCs, locations, and big ideas. I started looking through those as I downloaded them. As the name suggests, they're all geared to help adventurers (real-world students) experiment and explore different social and academic skills, in a story-telling game framework.
Several of their locations are a library, and the authors suggest having students explore the ideas of research skills and media literacy at these locations. But in particular, the Library of the Void, contains secrets that don't want to be found. So I got to wondering, what if adventurers find conflicting information about the topics they're researching? A PC who has more background information might be able to identify nonsense, possibly accurately and possibly not. But if two equally credible (to the players) present conflicting information, how do the PCs navigate the discrepancy?
This is obviously good school content. Is it a good game mechanic? Is it a fun way to set up inter-party conflict that needs to be resolved, or is it a tedious additional mechanic that the party has to finangle? I don't know. Might be worth trying someday.