Create Better D&D Lore
Good lore is great right? It's the secret ingredient that can get you to jump up off of the couch and hop around excitedly pointing at the screen while your wife stares at you with a confused and slightly worried smile. Just me? It's what turns you into Charlie Day unraveling the Pepe Silvia conspiracy while you try to explain the significance of some obscure reference while she pauses the movie and tries to decide if she's going to try to pull you out of the rabbit hole, follow you down there, or leave wait until you rejoin her on the surface.
As a Dungeon Master we naturally want to deliver that feeling to our players. We can spend hours, days, even weeks or more working on the lore of our campaign world, only to find that the other people at the table don't really care. There's two things to consider when making lore that you expect your players to engage with: quantity and quality.
On quantity: less is usually more. D&D lore can definitely be too much of a good thing. When I first picked up the Starter Set and got ready to run it I got a little overwhelmed trying to study up on the all of the history of the Sword Coast and Faerun. Over the decades and different editions Forgotten Realms has become very complex and often contradictory. We talked about this in the Lost Mine of Phandelver series, but I spent I don't know how many hours reading the wiki, book summaries, old modules, even guides to the video games so that I felt prepared to tell my own story in that setting. And looking back, most of it was an overwhelming waste of time. Almost none of that stuff came up, and I could usually make up something that was a better fit for our game when it did.
Lore overload can come calling on the player side too. While I hope every DM gets to know the sheer joy of meeting a developed player character that connects with the game world and adventure ideas start flowing, there is also the dread of receiving a novel of a backstory that doesn't really relate to anything.
A lot of the quality side can get subjective, but one aspect that is fairly easy to assess is the utility of your lore to the players.
Teos Abadía wrote an article on his Alphastream blog titled “Your Game’s Lore? Make it Actionable!” and it really resonated with me because it's something I've put a lot of thought into. Especially in the last month or two working on my DMsGuild stuff. It's a great article and a quick read, I'm putting a link in the description. He's got a lot of credits to his name including championing the Flumph. In this one he talks about his experience writing an adventure set at the storied Candlekeep, among other examples, but you could apply it to running any official module or homebrewing your own content. One quote jumped out at me as summarizing the research experience: “Most of the lore was encyclopedic and unlikely to ever impact the players and their characters.”
And while this is very true for Forgotten Realms, with its long history with multiple resets and a tremendous amount of authors contributing to it, it is often true for a lot of our homebrew worlds as well.
A lot of what's written simply isn't going to matter to the game. Now, I like verisimilitude, I like things to make sense, I like for there to be a story here to uncover if you're interested. How did things get this way, why are these monsters and treasures here. But if it doesn't impact the players, if it isn't actionable as Teos Abadía says, it is likely a waste of time.
Now it can be a fun waste of time. I'm not trying to yuck anybody's yum here. I have a friend whose only experience with D&D was watching lore videos on YouTube. He enjoyed them and just happened to mention that to me, so obviously I went full nerd and roped him and his girlfriend into a game. Learning lore can be fun. Writing lore can be fun. Some people's favorite part of being a DM is the worldbuilding. But visit any forum and you're bound to find somebody complaining that they just can't get their players to care about all the awesome lore they've created.
And the fact is that the players are probably not going to care about the lore unless it actually matters to them, unless it is actionable, unless they can do something with it. They're not going to be interested in what the dwarves were doing three thousand years ago, they're not playing a dwarf. And even if they were, unless it was somehow relevant to the story that's happening now, it's going to help them locate a magic item and unlock the secret door to defeat the bad guy, they won't care. And that might sound harsh and feel bad, but it is the truth the vast majority of the time.
Listen, if you enjoy coming up with complex cosmologies and have a whole creation myth and vast eons of history, amazing. Just know that's likely to be mostly for you. You don't need anybody else to tell you it's cool if you enjoy doing it, that's enough. And it might be relevant to you as the DM. It might help you determine what's going on when we reach this region, or how the world reacts to the players big moves. But we've got to keep in mind: we're not writing a novel for our friends here, we're building them a game. The parts of the story the players are going to care about are the parts that they interact with, and even more so the parts they help create.
We're not writing a novel for our friends here, we're building them a game
In my last adventure I made Grimlocks the centerpiece, so I did my homework and there is some definitely some cool lore about them out there. If you're interested a lot of it actually gets distilled in the Monster Manual in a pretty digestible size. They were humans who served the mindflayers, who threw them their scraps and that's how they became cannibals, then they got driven underground and eventually their eyes atrophied. That's interesting, but most of it isn't really actionable. We're not dropping Mindflayers at level one or two here, the characters are unlikely to learn or use any of this, and the players aren't going to be interested in a history lesson. Even the DM isn't really going to benefit from this lore during the adventure.
So we pack the most relevant, interesting, actionable details into a quick introduction. We show don't tell, but that's a topic for another video, the first grimlocks we encounter feasting on the dead from the battle between the dwarves and grimlocks that was the inciting incident for this adventure. They're eating both sides, the dwarves and their own fallen. As party approaches the monster looks up and reveals it has no eyes. Now that's freaky and memorable, but it also gives the players a lot to work with. Most parties aren't going to engage with this aspect, but if you know what something eats that can give you a lot of leverage. And the fact that they don't have eyes means a lot of things. The party doesn't have to be afraid of light giving them away, the grimlocks rely on other senses so how to achieve stealth against them is going to be different, and most importantly for this adventure if the players think about it it's a major clue to why no grimlocks have been turned to stone and how they themselves can avoid it.
The stuff that happened a long time ago is only relevant to the game if it impacts what's happening now, or what might happen in the future. How the Grimlocks came to be in the Underdark is not as important as how they got into this mine where we encounter them, and what they're going to do next. The things that the players are going to remember aren't going to be the things that I wrote, they'll be the things they did interacting with what I wrote. So the things I write, or at least the things I leave in and don't edit out, have to do be actionable, they have to do stuff.
When you are creating something for your game, ask yourself if it gives your players something to do. Is it a button to press, a lever to pull, a door that opens onto a whole new adventure if they step through it. Is it actionable? Now, if the answer is no, that doesn't automatically mean you have to cut it out and file it away for when you finally publish your version of the Silmarillion. You could also find a way to make your story more relevant to your game. If you love lore this is actually good news, because it means you actually have to develop your lore one step further. How is the history of this place going to impact what is going on when the players arrive, and what they can do. How is the lore you developed for your BBEG's backstory going to inform their actions, motivation, and weaknesses the players might exploit.
There's a great example in the original article on Alphastream and a bulleted list of guidelines to ensure that your lore is actionable. Definitely worth checking out. Over on Youtube he's just started a series on Success in RPGs which is already off to a great start and I'm looking forward to the next installment of that.
Check it out, get out there, have fun, be kind, write better lore, actionable lore, and I'll see you next time.
Some of these articles become scripts for YouTube videos, others start life as transcriptions. You can view this one here
