Lore Like Soul-like Games
For TTRPGS
I read Emergent Lore' in collaborative world-building. A post about collaborative lore building during play at the table.
I wanted to give my thoughts about how to give lore as a DM. Elden Ring and Souls-like games give lore in a few ways.
First, I’ll say souls games are rarely a lore dump. It’s snippets and clues at a time for the players to piece together. Half the fun is “solving” the lore or the clues you're given. A lot of players don’t want to just have an NPC give them a 10-minute lore dump.
Second, this approach works great in an open-ended/open world game.
So how do Souls games do this?
Item Description
Visual Storytelling & Architecture
NPC Dialogue
Boss Designs
Cutscenes
Gameplay Mechanics & Progression
I’ll go over the ones I think I can give useful input about.
Item Description
An example from Elden Ring is the Remembrance of the Rot Goddess
Its description reads:
"Remembrance of Malenia, Goddess of Rot, hewn into the Erdtree.
Miquella and Malenia are both the children of a single god. As such, they are both Empyreans, but suffered afflictions from birth. One was cursed with eternal childhood, and the other harbored rot within."
This single item description reveals multiple layers of lore:
Identifies key characters: Malenia and Miquella are clearly named and identified as siblings, sharing a unique parentage.
Introduces the concept of Empyreans: These are powerful beings, children of a single god, who hold special significance within the world's power structure.
Establishes their afflictions: Malenia's Scarlet Rot and Miquella's eternal childhood are directly linked to their Empyrean status and single-god parentage.
Hints at a larger conflict: The afflictions suggest a struggle or curse impacting even the highest echelons of power, setting the stage for the Tarnished's involvement
How to do this as a DM?
Give items unique features that are clues to other things.
A dagger with a serpent handle is a relic of the serpent god.
A shield has the symbol of a tree on it. Instead of fruit, the tree has babies growing out of it. There’s also a giant tree in the middle of the map. Players could put clues together to figure out that the symbol of the tree growing babies symbolizes the tree giving life. It’s the tree of life!
In the dungeon, there’s a mural of a dragon eating a child while a king and queen watch in the background. “Have the king and queen been sacrificing children so the dragon doesn’t destroy the kingdom!?”
Have an NPC share lore from items as the players bring them. They could be a scholar or a merchant. They shouldn’t have all the answers and know all the lore, but just a piece. They might be misinformed themselves and so only give a half-truth or half the story.
Visual Storytelling & Architecture
When players first encounter New Londo, it's a flooded city, filled with ghosts and remnants. The environment paints a picture of a place that met a tragic end. Later, after activating a specific mechanism, players can drain the water, revealing a lower section. This lower area is filled with countless corpses, hinting at the fate of its inhabitants and the reason for the city's ghostly appearance.
The architectural remnants, the ghostly enemies, and finally, the drained, corpse-filled lower section tell a harrowing tale of a city that was intentionally flooded to contain a terrible threat (the Darkwraiths).
How to do this as a DM?
Don’t have a lore dump about how this dungeon was once the temple of Odin. Instead, have NPCs say there are ruins with treasure in them. At the ruin,s describe to the players murals of lightning bolts and ravens (Odin’s pets) on the walls. Have a few dead priests in their sacred robes lying around. Have an altar in the center room. Have Frost Giants (Odin’s enemies) be the monsters inside (NOTE: This would be part of the Boss Design section, which I’m not doing in this post. A quick, simple points having specific enemies at specific locations can give lore). From this, the players could put together that these ruins are a temple to Odin that the Frost Giants raided and overthrew.
NPC Dialogue
An NPC in Dark Souls whose dialogue isn't entirely accurate or provides a biased perspective is Kingseeker Frampt.
Frampt, a primordial serpent residing in Firelink Shrine, guides the player to gather the Lord Souls and link the First Flame. His dialogue emphasizes the glory of the Age of Fire, the greatness of Lord Gwyn, and the impending doom if the flame is allowed to fade.
However, his advice and perspective are clearly skewed towards maintaining the existing order and the rule of the Gods, rather than presenting a balanced view of the Age of Fire and its consequences. He neglects to mention that the First Flame is naturally dying and that linking it repeatedly is prolonging an unnatural state. He doesn't reveal the full truth about the Abyss or the implications of the Dark Soul, which is tied to humanity and the potential for a new age, the Age of Dark.
Frampt acts as a propagandist for the fading Age of Fire, presenting only the information that benefits the Lords and encourages the player to continue the cycle, even though this cycle comes at a heavy cost to humanity. This highlights how NPC dialogue can be used to deliver lore, but it's crucial to be mindful of the speaker's potential biases and the information they might be intentionally or unintentionally withholding.
How to do this as a DM?
Instead of the lore dump, have NPCs give parts of the lore that are beneficial for them.
Have NPCs only know parts of the lore as rumors or hearsay.
Have NPCs lie and give the opposite of the truth. The players can come to figure an NPC is intentionally giving them the opposite of the truth for the NPC’s benefit. Players wouldn’t be able to do this in isolation or a vacuum, ie, there’s only one NPC giving lore, but when done right, players would be able to figure it out in addition to all the other clues and types of lore they’re given.
I’m going to refrain from going further…
Other than to say you could have some cool lore about magic with clues from the mechanics of the game.
Additional Key Points
Dark Souls lore is done gradually, slowly over time, in pieces, so it isn’t an overload.
There is rarely “free” info or lore handed over on a plate to the players. This allows the players the joy of collecting them and putting them together to “solve” the lore.
It’s the combination of all the types that would work well together, instead of just NPC dialogue or just item descriptions.