Lore
Lore is everything that could be known — secrets, rumors, legends, history made discoverable. It’s the layer that makes the world feel deep rather than shallow, and earned rather than arbitrary.
In engine terms, Lore is the opposite face of Quests. Lore without actionability is flavor; a quest without meaning is a fetch quest. The two layers make each other matter. Every quest node needs at least one lore post that gives it stakes — and every lore node is most valuable when it connects to something players can pursue.
History is the Lore layer viewed temporally. Settlement development events, Microscope scenes, Chronicle events — these all populate the Lore layer. They generate two things simultaneously: edges (the reasons connections between nodes exist) and lore nodes (the discoverable questions those events leave behind). The timeline is the GM’s map; lore nodes are what players actually find.
In This Folder
| File | What It Covers |
|---|---|
| Seeded Discovery Pool | How the GM seeds discoverable content tied to player goals |
| Lore Delivery | How lore reaches players — people, ruins, travel, faction activity |
The Key Principle
Content exists because player goals made it exist. There is no herb garden unless someone at the table cares about herbs. The GM reviews the active roster’s goals before each session and seeds discoverable content in response. This isn’t random — it’s targeted. The world shapes itself around who is playing in it.
Lore vs. Canon
All lore starts as provisional — real in the Shadow Horizon, unobserved by players. The moment a player hears a rumor from a trusted source, reads a document, or otherwise engages with a lore node, it becomes pinned. Hard canon. From that point forward, the engine cannot regenerate it.
This is what makes investigation satisfying: players aren’t finding content the GM invented on the spot. They’re surfacing content that was always there, waiting to be found.
Where This Connects
Lore nodes are seeded by settlement history (Ex Novo development events), deep history (Microscope, Chronicle), player backstory, and faction goal advancement. They’re delivered through people (NPCs who know things), geography (ruins, waypoints, discoveries during travel), and the bulletin board (faction clock consequences surfaced as rumors). Actionable lore becomes a quest node.