Good Lore/Bad Lore

For our purposes let’s just say that lore is “setting background”: information about the setting of a campaign. The paradigm is perhaps the history of the setting, which is literally lore that could be learned in game from sages or history books. But I would count also count its metaphysics, theology, organized religion, the nature of magic, and the like. And while we’re at it, we can add more humdrum facts about languages, prevailing forms of government, the economy, different social groups, etc.

Lore bears a close relationship with world building. Tolkien was really, really, into certain kinds of lore, like the language, myth, and history of Middle Earth, although he didn’t care much about other kinds, e.g. lore about demography and economics. As this excellent post at Welcome to the Deathtrap makes clear, world building and ttrpgs are two different things. One can GM ttrpgs without doing much world building even in a homebrew setting, and one can world build without ttrpgs, as Tolkien and so many other fantasy and sci-fi authors make clear. But we are interested here in what happens when the world building impulse comes together with table top roleplaying games. Lore and its troubled relationship to play is our way in.   

The Problem with Bad Lore

Bad lore is irrelevant to play; and for this reason boring; and for this reason hard to remember; and for this reason doesn’t deepen the sense of inhabiting a shared world.

Lore, done wrong, presents a problem for both players and GMs. Players are concerned with concrete tasks before them. In OSR games this is the stuff of adventure and sandbox exploration, haggling with factions, pulling heists, navigating the dark spaces of the earth, overcoming rivals, and the like. The problem for players is that when done the wrong way, lore has little to do with what they are actually trying to do in the game. Who cares about ancient history or obscure metaphysics if what we are trying to do is explore and have adventures? In other words, one of the main reasons lore is boring is because it’s irrelevant for most player activities.

While there’s definitely a spectrum, with some true lore hounds out there who just soak it up no matter how irrelevant, I think in general players also have trouble caring about or remembering facts that have little to do with what they’re focused on in play. They will remember an incredible location, or beloved or hated NPC, or some remarkable unplanned twist of fate that emerged during play. But they likely will struggle to remember some lore they heard 15 sessions ago in a speech or the summary of some book their character read. If the GM had hoped to bring the setting alive and infuse it with depths using lore, or get the players really engaged with a richly imagined setting, bad lore is headed for heartbreak.

For the GM, the problem with bad lore is the flip side of the same coin. GMs get hung up on creating irrelevant lore in ways that makes prep unnecessarily overwhelming. How can I run a city without knowing what street food there is like? Or what different artisans are operating in the city? How can I run a campaign without building a model of the economy? I think for some GMs this makes prep an impossible chore. It also directs their attention away from gameable things towards other irrelevant topics.

But I’d like to turn the problem around and think not about the creation of lore by GMs, but about the informational presentation of lore in published material. For some GMs who are reading published setting material, the presentation of lore in walls of text containing lengthy histories, seemingly irrelevant encyclopedic descriptions of economics, or pantheons, or banal facts about cuisine, and so on, makes the eyes glaze over. It’s also intimidating homework to master. Again, there’s variation for sure. There are GMs who love soaking up ttrpg lore in the way they obsessively soak up details about a beloved IP. But for many the problem is real.

These are not the only frustrations with lore. There are deeper critiques of world building as adopting a total unified perspective on the world that can be a stultifying approach to imaginative material, with a fraught history. I learned a lot about this by talking over the years with Ava Islam and Zedeck Siew. Zedeck has tried to dispense with the single omniscient point of view that lore often presupposes in his own work by adopting different points of view and sets of assumptions for the different islands in the A Thousand Thousand Islands project before it disbanded. You can hear about his thoughts on these two podcasts here and here. (To hear Ava talk about some related questions in the context of her rpg Errant, you can listen to her interview on the Lost Bay podcast here.)

I respect Zedeck’s approach tremendously—it’s a fascinating experiment. But, at least for now, I’m less interested in complicating and contextualizing the presentation of lore. Maybe I can explore interesting ways to do that one day. But before we complexify and contextualize, we need to get the foundations in place. We need to answer the prior question: what is good lore in the first place, and how can it be presented to players and GMs?

The One Principle of All Good Lore

Good lore is actionable intelligence.

The key to making good lore is that it helps players do things they want to do. In other words, stop thinking about lore as encyclopedia entries or hidden ambient background for a setting that somehow provides it with depth. Good lore is information that feeds directly into play. If lore is tied directly to exploration of an adventuring locale, or interacting with a faction, then learning about lore gives one new resources to act. Sometimes history will be relevant to exploration and action, sometimes social structure, sometimes the economy, sometimes metaphysics, sometimes the true nature of magic or organized religion.

For example, if one is trying to figure out how a terrifyingly powerful and complicated magical artifact works, it may help to learn that it was constructed by a zealous mystic in imitation of the musical instruments played by angels in the heavenly throne room. Perhaps the key to unlocking its power is to find some angelic sheet music—or perhaps the answer lies with lore about angels and the acoustics of the throne room. Or again, if there is a complex social dynamic, say a slow burning war between two groups going back a couple generations, then knowing something about the source conflict, and even a little about its history, may be very helpful when interacting with warring factions.

If you make lore relevant to play, then players will be motivated in discover it. They will also remember it , because it will be presented in the context of the things they’re focused on in play. When they discover this kind of lore, it will feel like making progress. For this reason, learning lore becomes fun. Generally speaking, when the players uncover lore, it should produce the feeling that tactical information is coming into view that lets them accomplish their goals. Or, even better, that new possibilities for adventuring are opening up in front of them.

How to Create and Use Good Lore

Develop lore along with adventure elements.

But how can you prep so as to produce good lore, rather than bad lore? When you want to explore some kind of lore of your precious snowflake of a world, do it by designing an adventure possibility that makes use of that lore.

If you want to think about the history of some legendary badass from your setting, put their magical sword somewhere in the campaign world, along with hooks to its location that tie to it to the history of that personage. If you want to get into lore about some religion, then create an abandoned temple as an adventuring locale, or rival factions the PCs might interact with, each tied to, and motivated by a, different faith. In my dreamlands game I created a (so far unpublished) temple devoted to the entire pantheon, where one could travel through portals to spaces sacred to each Archon of Zyan. This was how I developed many of my thoughts about Zyanese religious practice and theology.

If you want to get into the early history of your setting, put a dungeon in your sandbox tied to, or designed to commemorate, that very history, as I did with The Catacombs of the North Wind. If you want to think about how the legal system in some part of your setting, then make an adventure location, or factions, that involve corrupt lawyers and court cases, as Gus did for Zyan in Beneath the Moss Courts.

But won’t this limit world building to small bore questions of direct relevance to a given adventuring context? The answer is that it will only be as limiting as the kinds of adventure locations or situations you populate your sandbox with. It doesn’t limit you to small bore possibilities—as long as your adventure possibilities go big. Want to get into something really cosmic and crazy? Design cosmic secrets along with the possibility of cosmic adventures!

For example, suppose you want to explore the idea (that I floated here) that the waking world is really just one rung on a ladder of dreams, all flowing from the original dream of MANA YOOD-SUSHAI, the slumbering god. Then why not include travelers from a deeper level of dream in your setting as NPCs who are trying to get home? Or perhaps dangle the hook that the devotees of the slumbering god are desperately searching for some item has flowed down from the original dream to the current level, and is fated to flow on to still other layers with their help? And while you’re at it, why not explore gates or other ways of travel between these levels?

In other words, develop habits as a GM that tie the creation of lore to adventure possibilities. This will give your world depth in ways that mean something to players. They’re more likely to care about and remember that the dreamlands of the dreamlands is called Phantamoria when they get embroiled with the shenanigans of actual phantamorians. Even more so if there is the distant lure that they might actually make it to Phantamorian to do some truly cosmic exploration.

Throw players into an informational vacuum.

Here’s a trick I use all the time that makes it a lot easier to create adventures that hinge on good lore. The general principle is that to make lore actionable intelligence, start with a gaming premise where the players are in a condition of ignorance about the crucial facts relevant to navigating the adventure well. By placing them in an informational vacuum, you immediately heighten the importance of learning adventure relevant lore. The nothing to stimulate the impulse to uncover lore more than a good mystery!

The strongest way to do this is to create a campaign premise where all adventuring happens beyond the known world. In that case, lore becomes actionable intelligence immediately, because the player characters are just as ignorant as the players. For example, if a doorway to the undercity of Zyan has just opened in the waking world, and the PCs are literally the first people to step through into the dreamlands, then they are in a condition of extreme ignorance about what they are getting into. They must learn quickly in order to survive and make progress.

In The Ruins of Inquisitor’s Theater some factions react badly to characters with bare faces, and others react badly to masked characters. Right away, in order to navigate a social space, players need to figure out what the hell is going on with masks in this strange society. Or in Catacombs of the Fleischguild, the catacomb guardians are shades that operate on different principles than undead in traditional settings. The PCs will need to figure out what is going on with Zyanese necromancy in order to deal with these strange guardians and others like them that they meet in different locations.

There are smaller versions of this trick too. Even in a campaign where adventuring happens in the world and setting where PCs are from, you can have adventure locations and elements that are secret or unknown to PCs. The more you do this and tie it with lore, the more you make discovering lore a resource for player success. In Nick K.’s Twilight Age campaign I was playing in, which we discussed on Into the Megadungeon here, the campaign premise is that a megadungeon was recently unsealed for the first time in centuries. Although it was part of the world where our characters lived, and is tied to older history, it was still to a great extent an unknown world within a world. You can do this on an even smaller scale too. If there is a secret cult that nobody outside the cult knows about, then figuring out what is going on with the cult may be crucial to recruiting them to your side, or preventing some strange ritual from being completed.I’ve just been talking about a GM designing their own world and adventures. But earlier I raised the question how to communicate lore to GMs. How can you present lore without long walls of history and encyclopedic entries that make the eyes glaze over? How can you help GMs to keep the lore they need at their fingertips when they’re running adventures rather than buried deep in some encyclopedia article?

How to Publish a Setting with Good Lore

There are a lot of ways to approach this problem. But the advice to GMs suggests one general answer for the information design of published setting material. I’ve argued that good lore is actionable intelligence for adventuring and sandbox exploration. The advice I gave GMs to produce good lore when writing their own material is to develop lore in relation to adventure materials. This suggests that when presenting lore in published settings, the key for information design and presentation is that lore should be presented in direct relation to adventuring possibilities.

One way to see what I mean is that dedicated setting books that present a setting separately from material that might be used to create or run adventures in that world, such as so-called gazetteers, contain a glaring flaw in information design. If setting information is in one book, and campaign premises, adventure seeds, sandbox materials, and full adventures are in other books, then you’re separating the lore from the context of adventuring. This will hide what good lore there may be in walls of continuous text, and probably let in reams of bad lore. The more you separate the presentation of lore from materials useful for prepping and running adventures, the worse the problem will be. The number one goal should be to provide lore with a view to the materials for adventure. Furthermore, it’s got to be accessible, so when GMs prep, they can have the actionable intelligence they need ready to hand and not hidden behind walls of text.

Suppose we set aside “pure” gazetteers that just present setting information without orientation towards adventure and go for something more directly integrated. I’m sure there are numerous ways of doing this, depending on what sort of product one is putting out. Is it, for example, a toolbox for GMs to create their own adventure material in the setting? Or is the setting going to be presented along with pre-made materials for a campaign? Or is it something between, say setting material presented along with a starter adventure or a little corner of the sandbox fleshed out, and a toolbox for further adventure creation? This will all affect the presentation of lore tremendously.

The first question that needs to be addressed if we want to present lore in relation to adventure material, in any of these modalities, is: what do adventurers do in this setting? Where is the adventure to be had? In other words, the most crucial question to frame the whole presentation of lore to follow is what are the possible premises for campaigns that occur in this setting? Without clarity on that basic question, there is no way to present the lore as actionable intelligence. Intelligence for what?

When moving from the broad premises for campaigns to the more concrete presentation of toolboxes or adventures, I think the key is to develop all and only that lore that is needed for the use of those toolboxes and adventures, and to present that lore in such a way that it’s handy to access for the GM in prepping. While that can sound restrictive, it’s less restrictive than you might think, at least if the world is developed for sandbox play, since sandbox play in all its modalities is so open-ended.

Here I might also register my disagreement with a prominently tendency in the OSR voiced eloquently here by Warren of Prismatic Wasteland fame to hide lore by embedding it in tables, rules, character generation, equipment lists, and monsters write-ups. While I agree that those are all opportunities for world building, I don’t think good information design should funnel all lore indirectly into such channels, since this requires GMs to intuit or infer the lore, which they need to know, since it is actionable intelligence. In Warren’s case this advice actually comes from a place of disliking lore, even good lore. Naturally, he then wants a spoon full of sugar to make the medicine go down. But since I fucking love good lore, I don’t find it helpful to constrain information design in this way. When done right I think of lore less as medicine and more as a delicious and heady elixir. 

Here’s One Way to Do It

I think I’ve reached as far as I can go while speaking in generalities. Beyond this I think I can only give examples. I’ll tell you what I’ve been noodling as a format for the final form of my Zyan material. It will take the form of a setting presented along with complete material for a campaign. So it’s not intended as a toolbox. (Although I do hope to release lots of toolboxes for people who want to play in that setting using their own adventure material in addition to, or in the place of, my pre-made stuff.)

I’ll probably start with an overview of the setting, a brief background that will give GMs the vibes and basic idea of what we’re talking about, as well as an overview of how to use the text.

Next I’ll present, in fleshed out detail, several possible campaign premises or framework for adventure. Since the setting is intended to be used in campaigns that begin with large informational vacuums, they will all be premises about how adventurers find their way to Zyan from the waking world. But they will support different styles or modalities of play and will be integrated with my downtime system. I’ll also present a number of alternative campaign seeds that could be developed by GMs using the fleshed out examples I provide as inspiration for how to build a campaign.

Next, the crucial bit for our purposes. I intend to write up the lore that supports the different adventures and sandbox material in little sections, written as evocatively and briefly as possible. I will try to keep them discrete, although there will be many that connect. The key is that each adventure location or sandbox area will tell a GM which lore entries they should read to prep the relevant material. (Ideally the PDF will have lots of hyperlinks to help GMs even more.) There will be no entires that do not support prep for some adventure location or situation.

If I were ruthless, I would probably present these entries in alphabetical order, so that they could only be used in prep. But since this would needlessly bar those who want to read the lore continuously, if that’s their thing, I will probably instead present them in the most rational order I can muster. But the feeling will still be that of reading little discrete entries on different topics. It will, I hope, also be perfect for GMs who want to dip in here or there from time to time, when something catches their eye or strikes their fancy, even aside from prep. (OF COURSE, illustrations will play a key role as well.)

And Speaking of Good Lore…

I have a Patreon going in full swing, where I present tons of lore as I build up to publishing more zines, and ultimately the integrated edition I speak about here. This material is released to patrons many months or, in some cases, years before it will reach published form for a general audience. So far I have released 38 solid text zine pages soaked in lore, all geared towards adventure material. If you want to see the kind of approach that I’m gesturing towards here in action, or just want to get a glimpse of more dreamlands lore, go check out the Patreon here!