I'm coming to this not previously knowing anything of FR lore, so this has been a really, really interesting discussion to follow. My first playthroughs, it didn't occur to me as a possibility I should know/care about Shadowheart's religion based on her armor. Someone waaaay upthread made an interesting comparison to the pantheons of the Classical Mediterranean, how for those folks, deities were already nearly allegorical, but in Faerun, it's different because they're tangible and one can see their actions directly. I could quibble points of that comparison, but taken as an example of how societies relate to a pantheon, the comparison raises this point:

Every single person in the Classical world was well-versed in much, if not the entirety, of their pantheon. We know this because we have their fiction, their plays, the songs sung around the fire at festivals. There is a baked-in assumption that the audience didn't require any exposition of any particular deity's role in the world beyond the occasional sentence fragment ("Oh Artemis, lady of the hunt...") probably thrown in for children (I have no citation for that, it's just my assumption). Everybody knew.

So... yes, the PC should know about Shar, hands down. I like the idea of a DC 10 religion check. You fail, you get the bare-bones Shar 101, what your mother told you as a kid. Succeed, you get some deeper lore. But better, as others have pointed out, Shar as a character should not be a walking billboard for her goddess, and that religion check should come when she makes her reveal, before you choose how to respond.

Last edited by colinl8; 27/10/21 02:16 PM. Reason: clarity