Hey all! Today I wanted to talk about a branch off two recent blogs I’ve done: Worldbuilding: What to know and Writing Dialogue. Today’s topic will be Lore Dumping: When & How.
Whether you’re doing novel writing, DMing, or game content writing, there’s bound to be a huge world that you’re just waiting to tell your readers or players about. As soon as they step into your world, open your book, or however they’ll be consuming your brand of media, your world will begin to open up to them. It’s hard not to just throw it all at them right away. And when you start telling it, how should you begin? What things should you keep in mind?
- Keep your lore open-ended (or unfinished). This might make several avid worldbuilders wither inside, but hear me out. If you’re writing Book One and Ryoku visits Harohto, Lysvid, and Syaoto (to name a few), those places should have a fair amount of worldbuilding. It might not always pop up organically, but you can talk worldbuilding in the background easily. A curious main character will notice the aspects of the marketplace, militaristic characters might notice how the military works, etc. However, you might not build these worlds entirely. Not fleshing out the whole history of a place like Lysvid can leave plenty of room to come back to later on, when you’ve no doubt gained more experience as a writer.
If you’ve built the entire history of Harohto, for example, but haven’t included every minor detail about it in what you’ve published so far, then you have plenty of room to change later without having to burn bridges. If you dropped tidbits, it’s still acceptable to maneuver things around to make room for grand plans later. In short, you don’t need to immediately disclose all your notes – it’ll only give you more breathing room later.
2. Start with what they need to know. This can be done different ways in different facets of media. The back of the book, the back of the game (just kidding, those don’t tell anything about the game anymore), or the quick summary of a campaign all lend an initial idea of the exposition, but they don’t answer everything. It’s enough to get away with a few pages while you slowly unpack the necessities of your project. It might be worthwhile to explain what your character’s doing in this world, but you don’t necessarily have to unpack the story of the Big Bad in the first chapter. You should see how the main character will start to proceed, a bit of their motivation, or other important facets of the story, but you don’t have to tell everything.
In Akin Minds Scene One, not too much is immediately explained. I don’t even explain that it’s in the spirit realm yet – the POV is that of a spirit who only knows Defenders are important and from strange lands, but little else. It does paint a clear path for Ryoku, showcases a bit of what he can do, and introduces Will, his newfound and longtime friend. It’s not until the end of the first Act that Ryoku’s motivation is revealed, though he leaves a trail of crumbs to have the reader guessing along the way. By then, we’ve gained a gradual understanding of Sovereign Soul’s world, enough to understand how his mission is even possible.
As a counterpoint, your exposition is when a reader or player is giving your media a chance. You’ve got a certain frame of time to sell them the first grains of your plot and let them decide if they want to continue. If you answer everything in the first few chapters (or not enough), it might stop them from reading on.
3. In dialogue, keep it as a human would say it. I see this one unfold far too often. Ryoku asks the gruff innkeeper to tell him about the surrounding area and he suddenly turns into Siri: “Meribelle is a fine village with a population of around 250,000 villagers. Its prime focuses are farmland and commerce, but living in the shadow of the Silver Mountains casts its people in fear.” It doesn’t sound in character – moreover, it sounds like you copied & pasted a place description into quotations and tried to pass it off as natural dialogue. It’s lacking the typical traits of somebody in organic conversation.
A little better might be: “We’re a busy town. Farmers, merchants, fishermen, miners… we get men of all sorts in here. But, given our location… not many tourists. The odd hero hoping to plunder the Silver Pass and get north to Zuroon, but they don’t attract good attention – nor any results.” The dialogue sounds a bit more like dialogue. It’s a bit more prevalent if you use a story character to tell such points, possibly adding to or sharing details from their backstory. In this case, we’re still seeing details from a local.
This also applies to resources written by other characters. An email, a letter, quotes from characters about locations you’re going to visit. Books may be written in a matter-of-factly way, but a personal letter from one character to the hero might not be so informal.
One of my favorite cardinal sins people do in modern TV, writing, and games is to set up their characters with questions that force generic plotlines out of other characters. One example I actually saw went something like:
Character A: Why are you so upset about this?
Character B: I was a foster child – I saw myself in that child.
Character A: That’s not it – I saw the look in your eyes (from literally nowhere immediately near the character)
Character B: Okay… it was actually because of this …
I don’t even remember what the real reason was because this lame exposition floored me. It’s bad when your characters exist just to force plot or world details out of your other characters. The first two lines are fine, but it begins to get a bit ludicrous when your other characters expel your main’s past as a valid reason they might interact with other characters, or not believe them just to force extra plot out of them.
4. Make the reader (or player) curious. Unfortunately we can’t predict what will grab someone’s attention in the best way. A story we might think is flawless and interesting can have a reader skimming the section or a gamer spamming the A button. D&D players doze off, and readers find themselves skipping lines and lines of exposition. We have no perfect remedy, but for those who are invested, make them want to find out what’s happening. If the bit of worldbuilding you’re excited for doesn’t tell us something significant about the story, readers/players might skim over or completely miss it. If your worldbuilding point is the culmination of what mystery has driven four or five characters (or the whole team) to this point, it’ll be profound and memorable.
Sometimes an abstract way to answer worldbuilding questions is the best way. In Akin Minds, they land in Lysvid, a world of eternal night. Another character immediately curses about the vampires that live here. Ryoku wonders how humans and other species work in such a world. In writing, you could have him just ask the question and one of his allies would surely tell him how it all works – but instead, it plays out better for him to experience it. He can delve into the city and realize the looks vampires give him, and how other vampires treat his company – and, finally, how the werewolves are treated, displayed in a tense fight in the middle of the city. The reader can find out immediately how such creatures are handled in a very memorable scene.
5. Tell it well. Make it memorable in how your worldbuilding happens in the story. There’s ways to make parts of your worldbuilding stand out, but it’s good to pick and choose how you tell the important bits. Characters might drop small pieces in random conversation, but the really cool ones stand out best with proper exposition. Even an amazing world you’ve built can quickly turn dry if you read about it for six straight pages with nothing happening between the lines.
Although hearing bits about it, Ryoku first learns about Harohto Capital’s wall that glows at sunset by seeing it himself atop a plateau in the woods. He learns the extent of the raider problem after learning they hurt his friends. Eventually, after seeing the Capital and meeting the people there, he learns the atrocities the Capital committed in the last war and his – and your – perception of that city changes. Would it have hit the same way if you sold them that information early on?
6. Give history a point of view. Think of our own world and a lesson that good teachers will drill into you: the winners are the history writers. If a war happened in your world and one country won against another, you’ll definitely hear about it. Many ‘facts’ might be doctored by the victors. Horror stories of what the other side did in battle will be told fiercely by historians, kings, nobility, and anyone who’ll listen. But, get a veteran soldier drunk in a bar and you might start to hear other tales. Stories of the things they had to do to assure victory. The horrors their king told them to commit. The screams of the innocent as they were slaughtered needlessly.
Harohto citizens speak often of the Southern War and regale their veterans as heroes, but a one-armed veteran in Bytold talks about a different story. Some see him as a legendary knight, but others see him a coward. Later, upon meeting Ruarc, the truth comes out: the North continent ordered atrocities to be committed against the people of the South. Ruarc was captured and torn from his people, his wife and daughter killed before his eyes. Since he looked ‘human enough,’ the north continent wanted him for their side at any cost. The same was done for hundreds, or thousands, of other men.
7. Answer through questions. This format works 100% better in an interactive environment, whether in game development or D&D, but isn’t entirely ruled out in writing. For game design, this can be easily done by giving the player the chance to ask questions about the world. In many games, after an NPC finishes giving you a quest, you can wait and ask them questions to try and pry out some more info. Many NPCs can tell you more about the world without taking away from the main story, purely by it being your choice to listen.
In writing, this is a little harder. You have a limit to how much worldbuilding you can pack in a single book. You can weave only so much worldbuilding into each chapter without bogging your book down, even utilizing every aspect of tips like this that you can. So how do you replicate the ability to ask? Simple – just look at my website. Making a website of your own, or wiki, or blog, or even just something simple like your Facebook page, can give you a new facet to put your worldbuilding into. Throw a link to it at the end of your book (or your game’s title screen, perhaps) and let people discover information about your world at their leisure. You can easily stray from big plot points and just dive into whatever aspects you like, and just remove things if they become irrelevant to your evolving worldbuilding. Write or design enough, and you’ll find a place for it all.
8. Tell in dedicated segments. Your worldbuilding can have times where a lore dump might be expected. In writing, maybe after a big story event occurs, your main character has had enough and approaches the wise older character, demanding more information. This involves planning, and both your main and your reader should be at the same boiling point: they need answers, now. Even then, you should keep in mind some core writing practices, and spread a lore dump out with proper characterization, spacing, and action beats. Other characters can add points, ask questions, react accordingly to the information at hand.
In games, this can come in other fashions, though the prior example still works. In fact, this can still be derived into writing. Think sidequests. Aside from your main plot, you want to have your character delve a bit into the politics of Harohto. Taking on a sidequest to fetch something for a certain noble can dump a bit of lore when one of the side characters remarks about the noble family, throwing some shade onto the reason why they want what they want. Where you plan to thread the story in a different direction, you can still reveal some of the darkness of Harohto in an aside. Minor plot relevance, and not mandatory for the player to complete.
9. Repeat bits of important information. It’s dreadfully simple, but the best way to drill important info in is repetition. That’s not to say you should repeat 70,000 times the exact crimes North Harohto committed, but repeating important names, settings, and key world points can help relay how important they are – or will be – to the plot. Just follow the previous guidelines when you do repeat clumps of worldbuilding… there are some examples to avoid.
10. Trust your readers/players. There are some smart people out there – I know, they’re rare, but you have to hope they’ll find their way to your media. Jokes aside, if you’re presenting a story in a familiar environment, it’s fair to assume readers know a few basic things and breeze over them. It can be different if your character is alien to the concept, but try not to drill things in. Even if your character has never even heard of elves, blowing their reaction up may be a bit dry to your readers. A light go-over should be fair for many readers.
Elves. Unless your story really reinvents elves, you can sum them up very simply. Instead of focusing on whoa, they have weird ears and believe in light and live in nature, focus on where they live, their impact on your story, their relevant beliefs. If yours differ, how so? Do they face the common misconception of elves?
The same goes for their memory. Trust that your readers might remember some details with a light recall rather than a flashback scene of what happened ten chapters ago. Shows love to do lengthy flashbacks, but the viewers don’t – not unless its a flashback of things we haven’t seen or read yet.
So, that’s about it for now, but definitely not it for worldbuilding. I could write about worldbuilding endlessly, and there’s plenty of other blogs and videos to go off if you’re thirsty to develop your book, game, or campaign further. That being said, I’ll continue this series
Sovereign Soul 