What makes setting lore "actually matter" to the players?

[UngainlyTitan]

The answer for my players has always been a good mystery. All my most successful lore deliveries have been because something was hinted at and framed as a mystery that the players could actively pursue and uncover. Not necessarily a straightforward "whodunnit", but stuff like "what happen to this ancient race that mysteriously disappeared after building all these bizarre structures" or "what does this colossal ancient device that responds to stimulus in unsettling ways do".

Instrumentality can help (how can we use this mysterious thing to out advantage), as can hints of a threat (what if we don't stop what ever this probably sinister thing is), but I've found that ultimately those seem to be secondary to just some compelling breadcrumbs and the right combination of information doled out and held back. I had a party change the direction of multiple sessions when an ESPing a random encounter seemed to reveal it to be part of an ancient piece of computing infrastructure.

People are often compelled by mysterious setting elements but sometimes in unexpected ways, there's surely quite a bit of art to it (c.f. Gene Wolfe, David Lynch) that I certainly don't think I have mastered in any meaningful way, so I usually leave many little bread crumb trails and drop unexplained descriptions in passing - many get ignored, but some (not always the ones I expect) become objects of continued fascination. I try to have a pretty good idea of what is going on behind the scenes with the mystery in question (I don't want to give the impression that I am just contriving things post hoc and changing things around based on what the players propose a la how I understand the show Lost to have worked, maybe it works for some but feels unsatisfying to me), but I also tend to leave room for improvisation and often need to do so (and I think players like a bit of this as well, like the meta level feeling that you've gone and poked at a thing the DM did not expect, kind of like when you find a gap of a map in a video game). Not every mystery needs to be solvable, many not without great effort.



All this to say that I think rpgs can be a great medium (maybe uniquely great) for lore delivered via partially solvable mysteries, partially because a good mystery is just naturally compelling to people, but also because it makes it interactive - players can zoom in on things they find particularly compelling, and use their actions and brains to uncover more. I think you just have to be comfortable with the possibility (probably the guarantee) that many things will not be revealed - which can be great, you should probably be just hiding many things in your setting for your own pleasure. The sense that there is a lot out hidden out there is nice for players, even if most of it is never made concrete. Luckily a lot of rpg settings (like the DnD implied setting) are great for a natural texture of mystery - generally pre-modern cultures, ruins of ancient more advanced civilizations, horrible sinister forces, etc.

I think another way to make lore matter to players is to give them a hand in creating it, either directly (players can create gods, regions, maybe there are multiple DMs in the same setting) or indirectly, by giving them control of factions or resources - political power, strongholds, armies, etc. - that are at the scale that their interests force them to contend with "lore" (the other factions, political systems etc. of the setting).

Lastly, I've always been compelled by the idea of making NPCs more memorable, more intractable, more useful to PCs by attaching "lore" - again not necessarily exhaustive ethnography, but distinctive bits of custom and (perhaps slightly alien) mindset. Along the lines of this blog post, and this other one on usable customs:

I think there is a reason players love "speak with X (animals, plants, objects" magic (and I do to) - you get to explore a particular alien mindset that likely has information about the world that would otherwise be inaccessible.

In general, I think this all is very useful as a DM, because ultimately I'd prefer my players care about the world even more than any individual character (who may come and go - it's a dangerous game they play) - not in the sense of having an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the setting, but caring about and engaging with the movers and shakers of the world and the marks they can leave upon it - they should be key actors in creating the new lore, the stories future setting inhabitants would tell, as the game proceeds. "Lore" is only a piece of this, even in a broadest interpretation of the term, I think you also need satisfying mechanics at various scales. But I aspire to the following description by Anthony Huso:

I agree that mysteries are a good way to go but it seem you are saying that a lot of seed will fall on barren ground. In that a lot of these clues will be missed or ignored.
It also sounds like it needs the players that pick up on these easter eggs and look for them and sounds like it is awesome when it comes together but it does strike me as a lot of work and possibly suit all DMing styles.

 

[Pamphylian]

I agree that mysteries are a good way to go but it seem you are saying that a lot of seed will fall on barren ground. In that a lot of these clues will be missed or ignored.
It also sounds like it needs the players that pick up on these easter eggs and look for them and sounds like it is awesome when it comes together but it does strike me as a lot of work and possibly suit all DMing styles.

Yeah, probably not the best way to communicate clues or info that needs to be known. It probably does work best with a somewhat open-ended campaign where something the players get unexpectedly interested in can blossom. I think mystery can be still useful as an avenue or added texture to a central threat - you can structure a lot of a campaign against a BBEG as a multilayered mystery - why are these goblins acting weird -> what is the dark entity they keep mentioning -> where did this thing come from -> etc, where delving deeper at each step (seeking lore, in a sense) can give the PCs a way to short circuit pure brute force. I think part of the reason why the campaign structure of local bad guy -> turns out he was working for a bigger bad guy -> turns out that bigger bad guy is a pawn in an even bigger grand scheme of the BBEG is popular (besides providing leveled threats) is because it naturally builds in a mystery in to game play - players start assuming there is an even deeper plot afoot at each step, and once they start conspiracy theorizing, they are naturally engaging with the world and what ifs about its various actors (what if the king's vizier is really pulling the strings of...). Players as crazed conspiracy theorists might be one of the best states of things - engagement maybe behind only seeking vengeance for a slight and deranged scheming, in my experience.

 

[Lanefan]

Cultures with strong oral traditions but no writing are generally big on memorizing these details. It’s a Western bias for writing that wrongly assumes oral traditions are unreliable.

The rather large advantage of writing - even more so if the "writing" consists of nigh-indelible carvings in stone or metal - is that it has a half-decent chance of still existing well after the culture that produced it has died out.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I love the idea of Big Mysteries that are hinted at by the discoveries that the PCs make. And it might spark curiosity about what exactly happened. And even if they don't pursue answers to those questions, just wondering and hypothesizing can be fun. (And immersive, even!)

But I also think the GM should be prepared to just accept it if the players don't bite, and either want to simply loot the next dungeon, or are interested in the lore only in as much as it helps them find and loot that dungeon. (Which, in my mind, would actually be roleplaying verisimilitude. How many Egyptian tomb robbers loved history for its own sake?)

 

[overgeeked]

The rather large advantage of writing - even more so if the "writing" consists of nigh-indelible carvings in stone or metal - is that it has a half-decent chance of still existing well after the culture that produced it has died out.

True. But that doesn’t make oral tradition unreliable. Again, in the West the cultural bias towards writing is strong. Like most biases it should be examined rather than not.

 

[Lanefan]

True. But that doesn’t make oral tradition unreliable.

While the culture still exists, perhaps not.

Once the culture's gone and nobody's keeping up that oral tradition, however, it's all lost.

 

[zakael19]

True. But that doesn’t make oral tradition unreliable. Again, in the West the cultural bias towards writing is strong. Like most biases it should be examined rather than not.

My wife was just noting that geological studies in the PNW have confirmed various extant tribal stories about the last major earthquake (1700ish), passed down as legends and similar tales. We used to think that oral histories degraded after a few generations, but that's now understood to be much less accurate of an assumption (although given enough time context can be lost). Recent archeological finds in Canada and coastal Australia may match oral histories/songs passed down thousands of years.

Written history may still exist if a culture dies, but you better hope you have access to some weird/convenient reality piercing magic or a Rosetta Stone or else you're in the Hrappen Valley language territory (or hieroglyphs themselves which the Egyptian cultures had lost memory of until said stone and other fragments were found).

Edit: and back to the topic, Stonetop has various mostly "dead" languages - but there are ways for the players to have access: fictional permissions via the Seeker (scholar/pursuer of ancient and forbidden lore) playbook, making a plan to find sages who may know or writings with translations (a la said Stone), or certain beings who may help. By picking a Seeker or highlighting the Makers as a topic of interest in Session 0, a player is indicating they care about this lore and are going to want to uncover more. So you give them the tantalizing tidbits up front and see what grabs.

Here's the way the (really freaking excellent) Setting Overview presents the Makers to new players:

The Makers are long gone, but their ruins (many sized for giants) remain. Stonetop is built on Maker-ruins: an ancient cistern, the
crumbling Old Wall, some old foundations. The Ruined Tower is about a day from town. The West Road stretches from Stonetop to
Gordin’s Delve. The Highway crosses the West Road a few miles from town, stretching from Barrier Pass to Marshedge and beyond.

Concise tidbits, and of course "hey, your village is built on ruins of these people, let's talk about that" is part of session 0. It's relevant because it's the player's home, and they know about it.