Does anyone know how much knowledge about Gith politics the residents of the Sword Coast have? Players can have metaknowledge that the Gith help keep the Mindflayers from taking over the multiverse, but would our characters know that? I asked earlier, and I'm not sure if my comment was missed, or if people don't know. I'm really curious.
I can only speak for 2e AD&D, set 120 years before BG3/5e, where your average Doust Sulgrym from the Sword Coast certainly wouldn't know anything about spelljamming, the fight of the githyanki or the Blood War. You needed a lot of magic to even reach these vistas to begin with. Only a handful of nations and city states had spelljamming vessels and jealously guarded their economies from goods that could be valued differently on other worlds. Even gold coins did not have the same value across the spheres, so this was strictly controlled. Therefore, landing spelljammers would turn their vessels invisible, and landing facilities were kept secret. Of course, this also provided an in-game explanation why worlds like Toril (FR) or Oerth (Greyhawk) still had medieval/renaissance societies while other campaign worlds had advanced firearms, different magic, other racial variations and so on. It actually became a part of my home campaign to show how species, technology, exotic goods and knowledge slowly spread and advance.There are even rules for this in some of the old TSR books.
Other planes of existence, like Astral Space, the Inner/Elemental planes and the Outer Planes that contained many of the divine domains where more of a religious or spiritual idea to someone born into a small village on the Sword Coast. Planar natives would therefore call folks from the Mortal/prime material plane the "Clueless". Tales from these fantastic locales would probably be known to Doust, but coming with poetic liberties from the side of the priest or bard spinning them. From encounters in adventures and their monster book entries, Githyanki would mostly be known as raiders coming out of nowhere and would either be fled from or get attacked on sight. So, a moderately advanced character who has been around could know these things, but without either a sagely background or hands-on experience, most commoners would not be able to tell fiends apart or know mind flayers as anything more than these brain-eating monsters from the Underdark.
Not having played any of the WotC editions, it was part of the fun with BG3 for me to explore the world 120 years on. The devils seem to have gotten the upper hand in the Blood War, at least I can't think of finding any demons/tanar'ri in the game. Gith were no longer attacked on sight, but still seemed to be fairly unknown to most of the folks we met. Tieflings on the other hand seem to be way more common on the Sword Coast in 1492DR than in the olden days. I'm not sure how much this has to do with the events in Elturel, but they were quite rare and superstitiously feared in 2e.
