What franchise has the deepest lore?

Ah I heard about Das Schwarze Auge, I wonder how much material is there? Is it a novel/sourcebook material bloat like FR?

I've seen people say Harnworld is crazy in depth, but I don't like that much background in my stuff.

I agree.

Spbp

There aren’t as many novels, I think. But there are a lot of source books.
>bloat
How would you define bloat? Are unique descriptions of dress codes for every aventurian academy and tax rates / tolls for every region bloat?

Anyway, it’s 01:21 over here and I have to get up at 05:00, so bye.

Depends, by bloat I mean low quality stuff I think for FR's case there was a desire to sell as many shit as possible, therefore there was quite a bit amount of novels and sourcebooks that were not up the the standard iirc.
Sleep tight germanbro.

I'd imagine it would have to be Star Trek, since it has the unfair advantage of being able to draw not only from established RPG books but several series, movies, video games, as well as nigh endless books and comics too.

The sheer amount of star trek lore available has to dwarf pretty much anything else in terms of quantity.

>it was created by game designerEd Greenwoodaround 1967
you schould.learn to read

A good choice but not the true choice.

Endless stuff has the unfortunate issue wherein we have a lot of background details but the nature of games kinda constraints learning concrete stuff about the factions.

They're still really fun games and the ES2 quest system sheds some great insight(Zelevas is best boy, prove me wrong), but running a game in it would require a lot of leg work to GM.

Star Wars and Doctor Who are at that level too

Well can you tell us more about since I don't speak German?

>Adventuria
Seriously?

Yeah, it's pretty on the nose.

Dwarf Fortress. Hundreds of thousands of years of civilizations generated upon each game. That and there's also stuff about the god ermor and stuff.

>papyrus

Gloranth-
>Franchise
Oh. Star Wars probably.

Came for Bionicle and was not disappointed.

From last time this thread was posted, Runescape
It's surprisingly in depth and the way you learn about it is really well executed, even the smallest of things like the lore of some random dude's house or an old mine have a story to them and help feel like it's a living world

Bionicle

Fight me, you know it's right!

Kek

Dominions the video game has some deep lore. All the nations sort of exist historically, and a lot of them interact with one another or are shaped by similar forces and crises. The roman empires stand in(called ermor), for example, gets fascinated by the lizard necromancy of the egyptian stand in nation and tries their hand at it. They get super obsessed, and the priesthood and the mages convince everyone to split off from ermor and do their own thing, which causes a civil war, which ends with ermor unleashing the ultimate death magic and turning themselves into a kingdom of the dead. In order to stop them, the holy paladin nation turns to blood magic, one split off chunk of ermor tries to do necromancy on them which ends with that kingdom being turned into a kingdom of ghosts, and a whole bunch of other shit happens. Pretty much all of that comes from the unit descriptions or nation-specific spells that change through the eras and a paragraph or two of information on the nation's lore when you decide who to play as.
is 100% right, though.

>Kakshazastan
I know it sounds like kaks-hatsa-stan in german, but that seems mostly like a copy and paste of Khazakstan. And I'm not good enough at german to read the books for this, so I'll second the requests for a run down.

That's not the official map, BTW. But if you want to explore the continents in all (known) detail and have Google Earth installed, you can grab a KMZ file to overlay our world with "Dere" maps:

dereglobus.orkenspalter.de/public/DereGlobus.kmz

^

Wait really?

Mario

Malazan. All the books.

>still haven't figured out the cataclysm that Man and the Sidhe nations are talking about
>Mekone and Phelgra and their failed war against the gods
>R'lyth and their crazy time hopping and space jumping
>Therodos and Arcoscaphlae
>etc etc
>not even going in to what all the lore behind the pretenders and how fucking huge the ascension wars were in the time of the previous patakrator

Real life

tfw you will never turn your gurps campaign into a series of epic fantasy novels

he gets it

Attached: axonn.png (713x802, 421K)

Glorantha probably qualifies for franchiseship.

The only true answer.

>Lore for the sake of Lore is boring
...I've read dozens of oWoD books and never played a single game

>prove me wrong

Attached: 1521484610716.jpg (193x285, 17K)

Pity most of it is so... 'discordant' is probably the nicest way I can phrase it

>the franchise with the greatest actual lore depth to expected lore depth ratio is
Mortal Kombat. Think about how many other fighting games pay even the slightest attention to actual lore building.

Neverhood

SoulCalibur has more lore at higher quality.

>SoulCalibur has more lore at higher quality.
>oh look here's Darth Vader

Middle-earth. It's deep, but not particularly broad.

ASoIaF. Broad but not particularly deep.

Harry Potter. Neither deep nor broad.

Any long-term, multi-contributor franchise are usually the only ones able to be both deep and broad (Marvel, for example).

>using guest characters as a metric of lore quality
Even if you wanna go that route, II tied every single one of the guest characters to the story one way or another. Link accidentally ocarina'd there, Heihachi wanted more power. I never read Spawn's but I'd imagine they didn't shit the bed on it.

Real life.

>posts a deformed Horatio

It's like you're not even trying.

...

It's not that deep.

It all goes back to the campy 80s and Ulrich Kiesows own take on Fantasy. The intro text to the very first description of Aventuria translates to something like "Behind the mountains of Boredom and across the desert of monoty lies the land of Aventuria".

The setting is still rather campy at times, but has managed to free itself from some of the wild youth stories such as the very famous case of one of the worlds most prolific BBEG mages being in control of an alien Spaceship.

TDE loves its lore and "living world" aspect, in parts I would even say a bit too much. There's been an ongoing model-UN type mailgame and a bimonthly (iirc) semi-ingame newspaper for a very long time developing some major political and social shifts within the world.

As far as material goes, more recent editions have focused on having a few core books with rules (One main book, an arsenal of some sort, a flora/fauna book including monsters and specific books for additional options for magic, holy and warrior "classes") and many many books on regions - with almost every region having an edition independent (but obviously not timeline-independent) release there.

Building a character is pure bureaucracy too, just as a good german would love. You pick Race, Culture and Profession, but all of these come with sometimes dozens of variations and "Professions" doesn't just mean fighter, Rogue or mage but also things like Barber, Farmer, Courtesan or Tattoo artist.

Officially fucking massive amounts of lore:
>Star Wars
>Star Trek
>40k
>Doctor Who
>Battletech
>Orion's Arm
>Warcraft
>Second Apocalypse

Personal favourite lore:
>Everything pre-Korra in Avatar
>Blindsight/Echopraxia/third book he's writing at the moment to wrap it up

Attached: diego_rivera__man_a_528770a.jpg (3020x1260, 3.95M)

Meanwhile Mortal Kombat has Freddy Krugger.

Solid answer, but I propose another three:

Drakengard/Nier
The Elder Scrolls
Metal Gear

It's pretty nuts. There's also the one Aboleth hero from MA r'lyeh that sort of implies that the aboleths took over the mindflayers and have been behind everything going on in the seas, which I'm a big fan of. The idea that these alien monsters came on down in a massive meteor and got mind controlled by the local psychic ancient fish gods into clearing the oceans of all life is just fantastic to me.

As someone who never got into Bionicle as a kid, can someone explain this one to me? Not even asking for a spoon feed of the lore, I just don’t even know this had lore.

Boku no Pico.

>blindsight
my nigga, his vampire thing is legit great

The lore depth in MGS has become very popular knowledge at this point. And I can't even call its lore that great, considering that it seems like every damn game is trying to do its own thing and crazily weaves together plot threads.

Mithtada ofc

Attached: 4FdWvdQ-1.png (6987x5000, 1.03M)

I mean, if you're looking for fighting games with actual lore, you probably have to shift more towards some of the weeb-ier games. Blazblue's got a ton, with its story being given more focus and development in-game, while also having stuff like the visual novels.

Each generation, or set of toys that were released yearly had a storyline. Bionicle came out during the rise of the internet and made good use of it during its lifespan. In short order, there was:
>flash games
>comics
>books
>Video games
>movies
>Short stories

If you grew up during the early 00’s you had a toy series that just got better all the time.

You already posted it

This guy's right too tho.

The lore of bionicle was really smart right from the begining. Looking at it from end to beginning, it's a good sci-fi plot, but it's covered with layer after layer of science-fantasy. This was all planned out, though, and from the beginning these lays were slowly removed over time, exposing more of the lore. It was actually really good storytelling.

Malebolgia sent Spawn back in time to get Soul Edge for him.

Amazing how each of those franchises also happen to become less interesting the more of their lore you get your hand on.

Dune ofc.

Doctor Who gets better and then immediately plummets into being awful once you come across Larry Miles' crap

Are any of his books physically for sale in the US? I check whenever I pass by a bookstore and haven't found shit.

Attached: 1521132604668.jpg (1243x1093, 597K)

>prove me wrong

Get out of here with your garbage 40k ripoff. /ourguy/ has been with us since the start.

Attached: OPBOT.jpg (1200x648, 118K)

Sonichu isn't a franchise, or it'd win, hands down.
I really wish I could say Homestuck, but I'm too disappointed to nominate it. And "complex" isn't the same as "deep" anyway.

Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, ASOIAF, Hellboy, or some other massive series.

Homestuck actually has extremely little lore. It has an absolutely fucking retarded amount of PLOT, but the story doesn't elaborate much on the actual setting very much at all.

Fallen London/Sunless Sea is very much centered around deepest lore.

LotR. The lore was built first by some linguist autist who only then created the stories to retcon a reason for the lore to exist. Nearly all other universe are to sell a story/some commercial product and are tailored to the stories.

Quantity is not depth.

If the only lore that exists is the one that would be immediately known to the characters that's lazy.

Knowing there's an unseen basis for whats going on can boost immersion.

If we go weeb, Melty blood is deep lore a plenty. Nasuverse is built on a premise that's hinted by characters once every 70k words, or hurried in art books.

Metal Gear doesn't have deep lore, it has a deep and complex story. The lore (as in, stuff that happened before the events of the game and shape the characters/world we interact with) is actually very simple and straightforward. It's just the real world, but with the Philosophers existing. Everything else, including the creation of Metal Gears and the historical divergence from irl resulting from them, happens in-game or in-between games.
Drakengard/Nier and Elder Scrolls are right, though.

>The Black Eye
Interesting name.

This, it's the ability to go autistically deeper into the setting in order get a vastly more complex and thourough understanding of the world is the entire appeal of DEEP LORE.

On top of great characters and (mostly) amazing writing.

Attached: Legacy of Kain.jpg (640x754, 92K)

Cheating: Dorf Fortress since lore is infinite.

Ar Tonelico

Attached: Ar Tonelico First_Tower.jpg (523x3500, 359K)

Define deep

My Little Pony

Far more extensive and comprehensive than it needs to be.

Shall I get the pasta?

Attached: Tomaru.jpg (1158x1356, 183K)

/thread

Attached: 1520302944788.jpg (415x312, 42K)

bullshit they shit the bed with sophitas family so hard there doing a semi soft reboot. and yeah mk also rebooted bgt that was because of behind the scenes actions otherwise they would never have gone with an end of the world plot. not to mention sc can lean way harder on real world history then mk or any other fighting game can

Fuck, now I have the linkin park ad stuck in my head.

That's still lore m8

Eh, you are right, although I would still count SC higher due to Patroklos being contained in a single game.

What would count as surprising deep lore:
>Algol is the king that has been mentioned in the manual as meaningless filler since the very first game
>Soul Calibur being evil due to one initially non-canon ending, where SC was trapped in Inferno's realm plus containing the spirit of Algol
>Raphael becoming the new Nightmare, and all that surrounds it (Nightmare taking on some characteristics of his possessed body, him experiementing with his ability to use others fighting styles)

Hell, Even Groh, the new weeb character, as outlandish as he appears to be, may have actually have some deeper meaning behind him

>his weapon is called Aerondight Replica, Lancelots weapon
>One of his quotes references "The Ill-Made Knight", which has Lancelot as his protagonist, who looked exceptionally outlandish
>the organisation he is part of is called Aval(on)

The implication being that Groh may be a remnant of King Arthur's Knights who may as well had been another famous wielder of Soul Calibur (which ties back into the originals devs idea to give each sequel a different title based on other swords).