The FR is not an FR convention, it's people have lives that don't involve being immersed in this lore. I feel a lot of this is coming from a perspective drenched in media, this is something fairly recent in human history, there was a time most people couldn't read, and weren't bombarded by iconography.
Library's used to refer to things kept under lock and key in manors, and museums were open by appointment, the dissemination of information in a pre-industrial society is a completely different animal.
+1
All the magic in the world doesn't change that people living in the setting don't have setting books and FR novels tucked under their pillows. It's something I've been trying to get across, but it's a point that's surprisingly difficult to make here.
I feel like there's a major divorce between understanding the viewpoint of an individual in the setting versus an armchair viewpoint that sees the setting top-down from a source book.
Not so. It doesn't matter if you're an illiterate peasant. When a Realms Shaking Event happens, such as the Spellplague or the Twilight War, where hundreds of thousands of people die and cities and even entire countries are destroyed, you hear about it and know about it. Furthermore, it is precisely events involving the gods that the peasants will especially know about, because they all live in fear and awe of the gods. And last but not least, we are not talking about people living in some location that is a very remote corner of the Realms. We are talking about Baldur's Gate and the Sword Coast. People know. *You" may not know. But people inside this game absolutely should know.
