Lore — Overview
The Lore layer contains rumors, secrets, legends, prophecies, and discoverable knowledge. Everything that could be known — but hasn’t necessarily been observed yet — lives here.
Lore nodes are the Shadow Horizon made explicit. They’re the most provisional layer: until a player observes a piece of lore (hears a rumor, finds a document, talks to someone who knows), lore nodes can regenerate freely. Once observed, they’re pinned like anything else.
Opposite Face: Quests
Lore without actionability is flavor. The Quests layer is the opposite face — lore becomes meaningful when it connects to something players can do. A legend about a buried temple (lore) becomes a quest when it posts to the geography node where the temple is and the faction that sealed it.
The constraint axiom: every quest node needs at least one lore post. Every lore node is more valuable when it has at least one quest post.
History Is the Lore Layer
This is worth stating directly: settlement history is lore generation. The settlement history procedure and the collaborative history games (Microscope, Chronicle, Ex Novo) are all doing the same thing — populating the Lore layer with content that players can discover.
History operates on two levels simultaneously:
- Edges — historical events create the reasons connections between nodes exist. Microscope and Chronicle generate edges at civilizational scale; Ex Novo development events generate them at settlement scale.
- Lore nodes — every historical event surfaces discoverable questions. What caused the accident? Who knows what’s inside? Is the seal still intact? These questions become lore nodes — invisible until players ask the right questions of the right people.
History is not a separate layer. It’s the Lore layer viewed temporally — the same content, described from the past looking forward rather than from the present looking back.
Procedural Counterpart
The procedures for lore delivery live in Sections — Lore:
- Seeded Discovery Pool — how the GM seeds discoverable content tied to player goals
- Lore Delivery — how lore reaches players through people, ruins, travel, and faction activity
Node Types
(To be formalized — rumor types, secret types, legend structures, how lore spreads through the people layer)
Key Relationships
- Posts to Quests — what lore makes actionable
- Posts to People — who knows this, who’s hiding it
- Posts to Factions — what factions guard or seek this knowledge
- Posts to Settlement — what buildings or landmarks embody this lore
- Posts to Geography — what locations this lore is about