Lore! What Is It Good For?

Absolutely nothing! (Say it again!)

Perhaps that is an over-reaction, but I have never found most lore-delivery systems an interesting gaming tool. Sure, the 1,000 preceding years in a setting are relevant to whatever happens in the game, but please don’t ask me to read a history book about it. Unlike many game masters, I don’t want to write history books of lore either. Gazetteers are clearly an easy RPG product to churn out and sell to nerds, but do they make good play aids? Other bloggers (in particular, my colleagues at the Playful Void and Rise Up Comus blogs) have also of late asked how to present lore and world-building in a better, more efficient way.

As I’ve said before, if you want your players to care about your worldbuilding, build the world together. But what if you are writing an RPG product and want to (or need to) include worldbuilding details therein? My advice is similar: build the world together with your reader. How is that possible? Only include the details about your setting that are necessary or are likely to spark ideas in the reader, but don’t flesh everything out. It is more interesting to say in passing that an NPC is a veteran of the clone wars and let the reader’s imagination fill in what the clone wars might have been than to fully detail it when it isn’t otherwise relevant to what is going on during the adventure. Sure, they may get it “wrong” (as a child, I assumed the clone wars involved evil clones of Jedi, necessitating killing off the jedi because of the distrust earned by their evil clones), but it doesn’t actually matter for your RPG product for them to get it right. Give them enough to get the vibes right.

Lore versus Setting

Lore is part of a setting, but a setting is more than just lore. What gazetteers and other lore-containers try to accomplish is to impart a setting. My issue is just that those methods are ill-suited to the purpose. Reading a textbook on American history does not impart how it feels to live in America in 2023. So how can an RPG author transmit their setting to their readers without word-vomiting lore on the page? It’s actually quite simple.

Every mechanic, every random table, every starting gear package communicates setting. Setting is, in fact, impossible to remove. The issue is that it is often hidden; you may be saying unintended things about your setting with the rules you use. For an example of how setting-details can hide themselves in rules, peep my old post about rules for hacking computers. Obviously the existence of the rule itself says something about the setting: there are computers in it, and the computers are protected against unauthorized use, and contain things or is able to do things than unauthorized users want to do. This distinguishes the setting of any game with hacking rules like Prismatic Wasteland from the implied settings of games like Errant that have locked doors but not locked computers. But that isn’t all about Prismatic Wasteland’s setting implied by these rules. Let’s look closer at a snippet:

“Hacking requires access to a terminal connected to the relevant network and selecting the correct hacking actions in the correct order. These actions are crack, hack and smack. Cracking representing brute forcing to obtain the passwords. Hacking represents using coding wizardry to bypass various security. Smacking represents giving the computer terminal a good smack—this sometimes works!”

-Prismatic Wasteland Blog

Every bit of a mechanic or a procedure is a choice. I could have chose three options that all involved hacking methods, but I choose to include “smack” as one of the options. What does this say about the world? It means that most computers need to get smacked at some point to get them to operate. This small choice reinforces the post-apocalyptic nature of Prismatic Wasteland’s setting: most computers are on the fritz, technology is old and left behind.

Character creation is one of the most fruitful areas for communicating setting without setting forth a historical treatise on this land. Something as simple as including a list of polearms your character may purchase already tells me that we are in a quasi-European medieval setting. But you can do more than just embedding setting in the equipment selection process. New games like Troika or Electric Bastionland thrive in painting its setting with its rules for character generation by presenting a ton of character backgrounds that each say something about the world in which they exist. This is of course gameable information—these backgrounds inform the characters the players will play—but it serves the dual purpose of communicating setting without beating you over the head with it. Judging from Mr. McDowall’s Kickstarter page for Electric Bastionland, finding inventive and gameable means of communicating setting was an explicit goal of the book (see below). Electric Bastionland invites its readers and players to construct the world alongside with what is sketched and implied in the book.

Nothing in this book is as interesting as what was implied in OD&D.

“There’s no timeline, no history, no reading comprehension exercise to undertake before you get started with play. Instead, the setting of Bastion is communicated through Spark Tables: lists of random events, characters, locations, and items all written around the central themes of the game. These Sparks keep the city in a constant state of flux, and no two excursions into the mad streets (or the treacherous underground) will be the same.

Your Bastion will be different from everyone else’s: all strange, and dangerous, but all unique.”

-Chris McDowall

Even if you aren’t intending every detail from your games to work together to conjure a complete setting in your readers’ minds, it will happen anyway. A wandering monster table here, a character class there, and you begin to sketch out exactly the type of world the game is set in, without a bit of lore as-such. Probably the best example of this is Original Dungeons and Dragons, which had a setting (of course), but not an explicit setting, as later D&Ds would introduce. Instead, OD&D’s setting is implied, and inferring the setting from fragmentary bits of rules is a vital imaginative exercise. To see this in action, I direct you toward the classic collection of posts from the Semper Initiativus Unum that lay out OD&D’s implied setting. The Grumpy Wizard blog has also made forays into inferring the setting of OD&D. If a game gives its readers and players enough bread crumbs, they will be able to follow them to the setting.

Cheating: How to Include a Setting Timeline without Including a Timeline

Timelines are some of the most boring parts of a gazetteer or other worldbuilding history book. But if you simply must include a timeline, find a way to imbed it, hide it inside something else. Random tables can be good for this. Perhaps one of your character backgrounds is a person from another time, recently cryogenically unfrozen. Then you can include a random table (or a pick-list, depending on your taste, but they both accomplish the same thing) describing the different epochs of your setting. There’s your timeline, but you’ve put it to work. Make your timeline serve more than one purpose.

My upcoming adventure, Barkeep on the Borderlands (still taking pre-orders for the next couple weeks), shares the implied setting of the original Keep on the Borderlands module, but set a couple hundred years later. However, I did not want to beat readers over the head with a timeline that details everything that has happened in the intervening centuries. However, the adventure features a wine cellar with wines of varying vintages, which seemed like a good excuse to sneak in a timeline (and a few wine puns—I couldn’t help myself).

Wine	Description	Vintage
Pinot War	Spoils from the victory over the lizardfolk. Most soldiers won’t touch the stuff. Dry and acidic.	Aged 3 years.
Wizardonnay	Magic was so dangerous before the Academy standardized spells. This vintage was recovered from the wreckage of the original Original Tavern location. Notes of ash.	Aged 50 years.
Clos du Keep	It was too gauche to drink this red wine after the old monarch met their soggy demise in a barrel of it, but enough time has passed.	Aged 80 years.
Hobgobgarganega	The same vintage served when the Pangoblinic Council was formed. Zesty and nutty, best served with brie-yark cheese.	Aged 100 years.
Orchio di Pernice	Left by terrified orcs driven from the Caves of Chaos. Sweet, spicy and terroir-driven	Aged 220 years.
Savior Blanc	The adventurer who built the Keep imported this wine when they felt homesick in this savage land. Tastes like fresh mowed grass.	Aged 250 years.
Tanar’ri Sangiovese	Sour grapes that grew along the River Styx and cultivated by the cultists who first summoned the Gatekeeper, bouncer of the underworld. Robust, notes of iron.	Aged 1,000 years.