Elf-wise

Truths from which the lore flows

Awhile back we were in a bit of a fuss about lore (and what is it good for). I also remember a conversation about information and how to make players feel at home in the world. At the time my thoughts were a little half-baked and I hadn't started this blog. So here I am, late to the party.

I think of settings as a set of foundational Truths from which all lore flows. These Truths are kind of like super-structures that dictate what has happened and what is happening in the world. Truths are like Capitalism or the Great Man theory of history: models that predict outcomes. In our real world, many of our models suck and the best we can hope for is they predict things most of the time. But for the purposes of my worldbuilding, Truths are absolute. Because they are so absolute, they end up communicating themes and transporting me to a whole new world that works by a different logic.

I think I do this mostly because I'm not much of a setting reader. I'm usually not interested in detailed facts or chains of events. The intense legwork of setting materials usually hinder me more than they help. It is easier for me to figure this out for myself, often at the table, than for me to memorize facts until a coherent world forms. I want big Truths that are super cool and affect a ton of stuff. I want the world to be knit from the corpse of a titan, one murdered and denied his proper burial rites. I want the sun to have fractured, binding the hungry spirits of the dead to the world. I want civilization to be shaped by an ur-spell that both binds and empowers the world's ten factions.

An Example: Ravnica

Ravnica is built on a clear foundational Truth: the Guildpact. The Guildpact is a powerful magic agreement cast on the world that equally balances the power between ten Guilds. It does this through reversal of fortune, a Guild about to overstep its boundaries suddenly comes to severe misfortune until the balance is remedied.

The key to this truth is it sings if you let it. What does a world look like when the legislative body has an equal amount of power as the demon cult? What civic good does the guild of city block wreckers do? It was answering questions like these that led to a lot of depth of worldbuilding. Ravnica portrayed by WotC isn't much more than a modern city analogue with colorful cliques to join. My Ravnica ended up being vastly different from WotC's portrayal economically and politically. The magic universities are training construction workers! The Gruul bring community and freedom to would-be slums! Your position socially is far more important than your monetary wealth! The Guilds act as ten distinct economies that are forced to depend on each other.

So I'd sum up Ravnica's Truths like this:

  1. The Guildpact ensures the ten Guilds are equal in power.
  2. The Guildpact constrains the ten Guilds to do their civic duties.
  3. The Guildpact ensures each Guild has a monopoly on their ordained activities.
  4. The Guildpact, Jace, is not always on this plane.
  5. Despite this, all Guilds play to advance their power.

Then there are ten Truths for each of the Guilds:

  1. The Azorius are responsible for maintaining the rule of law.
  2. The Boros are responsible for keeping the standing army.
  3. The Orzhov are responsible for money lending.
  4. The Selesnya are responsible for maintaining public parks.
  5. The Gruul are responsible for wilderness management.
  6. The Golgari are responsible for waste management.
  7. The Simic are responsible for healthcare.
  8. The Izzet are responsible for public utilities.
  9. The Rakdos are responsible for public entertainment.
  10. The Dimir are responsible for postal services.

The fun, then, comes by asking follow-up questions and answering them. The juice of TTRPGs I think, that everyone's Ravnica or Doskvol will be different. Building out from big truths lets our settings transform more dramatically in play in a way that IS play!

Spouting Lore

So we can distill worlds into a few Truths. How do we use this in practice? And how does this relate to players feeling at home in the world again?

Well, we let all players at the table spout lore. Make up your little sheet of Truths. Anyone can say something is true as long as they tie it to one of the Truths and doesn't contradict previously established lore.

At least, that's how the GM gets to do it. Character players have two more hurdles: their lore must be given from the character's life experience and the GM is allowed to twist your lore. Life experience is anything your character would reasonably have lived based on what we know about them. This means if your character was a rot farmer you could spout "there's a nasty weed called cloverspore, it's a weak hallucinogen that causes bad nausea" but you can't spout that if you're an Azorius clerk no matter how many books you've read. It also means the GM could twist your lore: "it's a genuine poison, not just nauseous, deadly".

By just putting the Truths in front of your players, you empower them to imagine parts of the world you the GM haven't because they look at the world from their character's perspective. I think we're missing out on a lot of depth by excluding character players from world building! We just need to make sure the line isn't crossed.