Lore Delivery
Lore doesn’t announce itself. It reaches players through specific channels — each one diegetic, each one requiring player engagement to surface the content.
People
NPCs are the primary lore delivery mechanism. Every significant person node has lore posts — things they know, things they’re hiding, things they’d tell the right person under the right circumstances.
The key design principle: lore delivery through people requires a reason to talk. The apothecary shares knowledge about local plants because that’s her role. The retired soldier knows what happened at the battle because he was there. The faction dissenter knows the guild’s secret because she used to be inside it.
When building NPCs, ask: what lore does this person carry? What would make them share it? This is what turns a person node into an investigation lead rather than just a name with a location.
Ruins and Past Buildings
Spades buildings — abandoned districts, sealed vaults, collapsed structures — are physical lore nodes. They don’t deliver lore through conversation; they deliver it through exploration. What’s buried here? What happened? Who sealed this and why?
Every historical event that destroyed or abandoned a settlement node left lore behind. The ruins are the archive. Players who explore them are doing archaeology — surfacing the edges that history wrote into the graph.
These also connect directly to the Quests layer. A ruin is a potential dungeon site, a physical location for a quest node, and a cluster of lore waiting to be discovered.
The Bulletin Board
As faction clocks advance between sessions, consequences surface as rumors on the Guild bulletin board. This is lore delivery at the faction scale:
- A faction reaches a milestone: a rumor appears (“The Merchant’s Guild has been buying up property in the harbor district”)
- A faction takes an action that affects geography: a discovery appears (“Travelers report the eastern road is being patrolled by unfamiliar soldiers”)
- A faction goal completes: a world event occurs that players can investigate
The bulletin board is an information marketplace, not a hook board. Players choose which threads to pull.
Travel
During geography traversal, the seeded discovery pool delivers lore through what parties find along the way. See Seeded Discovery Pool for the full procedure.
The key distinction from random encounters: travel discoveries are targeted. They connect to specific player goals. A party traveling to the ruins might pass through a hex seeded with a clue about those ruins — not because the GM decided to place a hint, but because the player’s goal made that content exist.
The Investigation Loop
Lore delivery feeds into a cycle:
- Player has a goal
- GM seeds lore related to that goal into people, geography, and the bulletin board
- Player engages with a lore node (talks to NPC, explores ruin, reads a rumor)
- Lore node pins — becomes hard canon
- Pinned lore often reveals another lore node or becomes an actionable quest lead
- Player posts intent based on what they’ve learned
- GM generates content for the declared destination
The world doesn’t dump information on players. It rewards engagement with depth.