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There are a few ways to add useful knowledge to NPCs, one that I have worked with a couple of times works via a collective database.
The Data needs to be grouped based on location and perhaps a social control (station, guild, profession, etc. As NPCs move about they can occasionally spit out a line from the database.
As the social situation changes, new information is added to the Database and other lines are changed. So when Fred takes over, the NPCs living in the city will know it. If you add a simple query function to the NPCs (ie a player can say 'What do you know about .
We tend to look at everything from the point of view of a player driving all the events. Personally I try to build the world from the NPC POV. I am actually more interested in making the NPCs interact with each other, including speaking, than I am about the players. If two NPCs are standing around talking in some fashion, the players can just listen in to learn.
As far as the Shopkeeper idea in the previous post, the idea is great but it would require a large population of NPCs. Few games support enough NPCs to have a pool to draw from. If you could overcome that limitation it would work just fine. The other little hitch is that most games do not have enough stores to allow some to be down for any real length of time, so if the search/training takes too long other problems could crop up.
A.T
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