How do I write deep lore? I really want to make a setting with deep and interesting lore, but I don't know how to start

There’s nothing wrong with taking parts of other settings and lore to peice together your own world, it’s why source books are “source” books and damn near every fantasy game is Tolkien in inspiration

Steal. Steal every idea you've ever liked and change it ever so slightly. Act like you're in high school and you've got a 5000 word essay due tomorrow that you've done no work on. Just go online, find someone else's work that's pretty good, and copy that shit down with a few thesaurus swaps. The more places you steal from, the more "you" the writing will feel, and the less likely someone will call you out on it.

Start from the beginning, how was your world made? Who made it? Were divine beings? What did they do? This is of course assuming it's fantasy as sci-fi would accompany a different set of questions

ITT: everyone thinks they're being funny by intentionally giving bad advice.

Pick a theme. Run with it.

There is nothing wrong with taking ideas from other settings so long as you integrate it well enough into the lore

Alternatively start with basic concepts then keep as yourself basic questions like who? What? When? Where? Why?

In all honesty, be meta with your players. Create your world with your players. Prior to building the PC's together as a group (which you should always do) talk about the world and whats in it. Look at Burning Wheel for good examples. This way its everyone's world and everyone is on the same page about the lore and you dont end up with pic related. When you come to some cultural or religious or ethical point in the game you can sit back as GM and players and discuss how whatever it is appears in the setting. Five minds are better than one

Just pin down what you need for the main plot, the locations and the characters. Keep stuff about the rest of the world vague; that's where your players come in.

They're gonna be from such and such town in the land of so and so, take a note of that and place it somewhere in relation to where your story takes place.

And when your players walk into the inn, like they all do, have the barkeep ask them where they're from, how did they get here, and have him go along the lines of "I've never been beyond the mountain/whatever, what's it like over there?"
And just like that you have a player building a foundation for one part of the world for you, while playing his character.

Draw a map of the world. It doesn't have to be good, just complete for continents, islands, oceans, etc.

Populate it with mountains and rivers and shit. Get some topography in there. Again, it doesn't have to be good, just adequate to be a map.

Then, put landmarks on it. I usually just do little dots as a city, special place, or generally any important thing.

After your rudimentary map is done, throw down some political or cultural distinctions between the pieces. A red kingdom, a blue one, an orange tribe of barbs, something like that. Alternatively, you could just have it be kind of nebulous depending on what time period your game is in.

Then, name the kingdoms, the places, the continents, regions, etc. Or more or less than/of those as you see fit. Add gods. Does your world have multiple pantheons, or just one big one that cultures and people grab from? Do some of the gods and peoples hate each other?

Lastly, politics. What kingdoms are at war? Over what? Who have been at war forever, if anyone? Who's a peaceful society? Who's trying to summon their eldritch horror of a god with the blood of dead virgins and mighty heroes?

After all that, you have your campaign. You can fill in the gaps in backstory for any of these things as you see fit.

Incoming pics of GM autism.

What part it looked like for the game.

Absolutely this. A great way to get your players involved is to let them help shape the the lore. That doesn't mean you need to let them create every stupid thing they want, but you know let them create towns, cities, maybe even nations where their characters reside from.

Work with them to come up with things that can branch off from what they want to make, like any socioeconomic problems, history, scandals, enemies, allies. Getting them to think about the setting is so important and having them contribute to the setting helps so much.

*autism intensifies*

I like your map.

*so intense*

wow, that looks and sounds very nice! here, take some pretty art in reward

>I did this to a group.
>they might still resent me for this
Uh, I'm sorry?

Th-thanks user.

Start by cutting down on almonds, they kill ecosystems due to how much water they take to produce 1 almond, (1.1 gallon of water per almond)
Now you know why califorina is always in a drought come summer years...

Download the 5 gig folder called “gurps 4th addition” from the gurps mega.

Read every book pertaining to the genre you are writing. Then, experience some really creative and weird stuff, like JJBA or Yumi Nikki.

Then, write down all you liked and disliked. Let it stir around in your head and vomit it back up.

Then from the ashes, write a city, then a nation then a world.

Unfortunately, i have completely no clue about how mountains are formed or how should the rivers behave and such.... Anyone have some good and comprehensible walls of text for such knowlegde?

This is honest the first thread where anything I've posted from my IRL GM material has been met with approval.

I've tried to make maps for a few fa/tg/uys on occasion, but usually they bail when I ask questions about what they want. I'd love to just make worlds for people and hand them off, but nobody really seems interested in actually doing that.

I actually find that nailing everything down on a map kills your creativity, especially if you actually do it all at once.

I prefer to do it like an age of myths, where the borders are 'somewhere beyond the horizon' and things come into play when they're needed.

At least, that’s how I ended up with my nation of Aztec stand-users that wield khopeshs

Read real world mythologies and smash them together.

which part did you do? some of that is worse than others

To be fair its just a game in the end, I doubt the group actually resents you for it, that'd be petty. I know what it's like when I want to check out some cool lore the GM made and it completely backfires, it ruins interest and feels like punishment.

Mountains are places where two tectonic plates mash together and either push one above another (which is a smaller mountain) or they both try to get higher than the other (making huge peaks).

Rivers always try to flow downwards unless they don't. But I don't know the other reason why

Mountains - Formed by tectonic plates shifting together. They usually form chains, with varying widths and breaks in some places. It depends on how fantasy your world is, but mountains that stand alone are fairly rare as a rule and are usually volcanoes if they're not granite slabs or massive volcanic plugs.

Use wikipedia to help you if you get stuck somewhere. Nature is pretty vast and has a large collection of examples. Wikipedia makes a decent amount of notes of these.

Generally, your mountains will define the shape of your continent. Mountains near the edge of a continent are rare, but still exist, and should be treated as such. There are no hard and fast rules for elevation, but putting all your mountains in a ring around the edge of your continent and having the sea right next to them is probably not the way to do things.

River are pretty simple; they follow the route of least resistance to the lowest elevation possible. Basically, they flow from high to low along whatever path they can find, usually from a mountain to the ocean. A river will never just stop somewhere. In Africa, seasonal flooding rivers form a huge floodplain delta, but they're still small (in comparison), regular rivers the rest of the year. A river can end in a lake or inland sea, but this is also rare. Rivers can merge as they get closer to their endpoint, but it is an extremely rare occurrence for a river to split, so I'd just avoid that if I were you.

Depending on how fantasy your setting is, rivers can do all sorts of crazy shit, like end in a huge sinkhole or something. Or flow backwards. Or into the sky. Fantasy breaks the regular rules. A river that flows into the base of a mountain and end there? Sure. Magic.

Hope this helps.

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How do I write modern fantasy setting without making everything seem dumb?

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>ctrl+f
>No Tolkein

First you have to decide if your have a masquerade or not. That really sets the overall tone and how you have to handle everything else to kee it from being dumb.

>le deep lore
no one gives a shit just let your players fight the monsters and get the gold

That's not the key to creating a setting, that's the key to creating anything. But be careful, don't just copy superficial elements. Know how the copied setting works, why the author did what he did, and how everything interacts with everything else. Know what place something has in your setting, what implications it has for everything else. Always be thinking why or how something works or does what it does or why it is what it is. Alternatively, have things in your setting that just make no sense, then explore the way that everything else sensible in your setting responds to the nonsense.

Start with a simple shallow world with simple rules, place your factions in logical places, have a reason on why they're there, now fast forward decades or hundreds of years, people will move, new factions will rise, old ones may disappear, things will change, keep going until you have a good world.
tl;dr:build a world on top of another world

Steal prodigiously and write disconnected bits and pieces of ideas and connect them later

Some people do care. Do you personally know his players?

I will underscore this with "don't forget to connect them later"

I hate games like this.
"Let's do the same shit we did last week, last month, and last year- kill something, get money. I'd like something to motivate me besides money, but nah... too hard. "

Ugh that’s the worst.

I very much perfer games where I can dodge combat and do my own thing.

I want my character to be able to buy books and own a house and start a lawn gnome business, just combat is boring as sin.

Use prophecies.

Which is the abstract conflict to draw on?
> Darkness vs Light
> Order vs Chaos
> Life vs Death
> Science vs Magic

I'll use all of them

You don't.

You write solid, engaging stories, and if there's any space left over, you add in some background detail afterwards. But *only* if there's space left over. If you can remove the worldbuilding and still have a solid story, you're on the right track. If you can't, burn your setting notes and do some real fucking writing.

Setting lore is not interesting, in and of itself. The audience needs to be emotionally invested in the setting first, before they'll give a shit about who King Bognor is, or where the Fang Mountains are, or how "Soulcasting" works. Characters are how you get audiences invested: characters with clear goals and motives, who do everything in their power to achieve their desires.

If you tell me that the Vagof Swamp is full of man-eating worms, I won't care. If you tell me that Princess Zommoj must flee through the Vagof Swamp to escape the wicked King Xarku, THEN I will care about the swamp's status as a home for man-eating worms. Build the world around your characters, and the story you want to tell.

If you're building a setting for an RPG, scrap the bit about characters, and just focus on creating a world that enables your desired narrative (an oceanic setting for pirate adventure, or a decadent and corrupt city for crime capers, to name a few). Create a striking and interesting "big picture" first, and worry about the fine details later. Trying to do the opposite - starting at the bottom with the settings laws of physics, and then building up from there - will not work.

Those mountain ranges are retarded and that lake has no rivers going to it, what the fuck.

This is fucking stupid and a waste of time.

Do not do this.

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>Chad's rivers
10/10 makes me laugh everytime.

very few stories and settings manage to handle their own end well.
Tsutomu Nihei is IMO the king of this trope: nothing lasts, everything changes at some point, no one remembers anything from most time periods (the very part Netflix forgot about, and told everyone about the setting's main lines in 5 seconds) and very few people survive the brutal changes between eras, etc...
guy went normie-tier with Sidonia but I hope the few theories I have about it are true so it'll change a lot of things.
any other authors that manage this kind of "setting destruction"?

Now dark souls style:
>darkness is only a reflection of light, and both pretty much the same thing but some old guy wants to prove otherwise.
>chaos is pretty much organised into a society and its people were scholars before getting 'freedomed.
>life is death.
>science is magic.

Sometimes I wonder why the fuck I even try to understand that setting, it's still lvl1 philosophy like NGE but it goes too far for a fucking game.

is this how you activate almonds

Everytime I see this I ask myself why the fuck is Luca Turilli and his few friends considered for the Chad? These guys have some of the best ideas for both music and stories, probably because it needs a lot of extrapolation to fully make sense but the fuckton of tropes they used were good.

Focus on interesting, not "deep".

Monomyth and layers.

Pick a narrative template like the Hero's Journey and just tell that story over and over again. Have a set list of conventions, symbols, archetypes and events connected to that narrative and just shove it in everywhere: every myth, every historical episode, every quest.
But also, have some variations. Maybe the mother archetype is good in most stories but evil others.
Maybe in the oral tradition of this one culture, the albatross is a symbol for booms rather than burdens or maybe instead of an albatross, they use a helmet.

Once you have that narrative, apply to each layer of your setting. Local legends, regional history, wars, political struggles, cultural epics, the gods themselves, the creation myth.

That's how you make lore "deep". Setting-up this skeleton gives the appearance that all aspects of your setting are working in tandem towards an overall theme or point on every level.
Making a setting interesting is another matter entirely.

Distrust clean, crystaline, coom water. Chances are, something is wrong with that water. It may be filled with parasites and microbes, it may be full of arsenic etc. If there's nothing alive, something is going on. It is better to drink moosy water as it act as a filter. Undergound water is also generally fine.

Just write what you want, dude. No matter what people are going to bitch "it's not as deep as you think". At the same time, you can sit down and analyze anything. Everything is and isn't 'deep'.

decide on the tone for your world, is it grimdark? high fantasy? once you have whatever philosophical or otherwise themes in place choose write lore that accentuates these themes that bring your world together into a more ideologically consistent piece of fiction. Don't be afraid of allegories and metaphors for certain concepts.

Do like any good dwarf would do.
Strike the earth, and dig.
Sure, at first it'll look shallow and generic, but keep on digging. Expand the world-hole, seek every good vein of idea-ore. Pursue those what-ifs and discard those theories that don't make sense or doesn't really gel with the setting.
Keep on digging.
Pile more stuff into those countries, those creatures, those people in your setting.
Keep on digging.

Bump

Come up with a basic concept, what is the main idea of the world you're trying to create.
From there come up with the major information, establish the logical rules of the world, the races, and the major factions.
Then just keep elaborating, fill in the gaps, think of events that happened in this world, minor factions, etc.

Daydreaming helps

I can confirm, starting with how the world was created sucks. It really does.
Imagining how the world was created after you've got all the characters set feels wierd, but it's the right way to go.

Do like darksouls plus being lazy motherfucker - allude to things that might have happenned before. Interject with "your characters know that X is Y". Introduce weird shit on the go and think of the implications and reasons behind it later, or when explicitly asked. Build the world as you go, that way you create a pretty weird an unique lore without giving yourself a headache.

This.
"Why" is the best tool for early story writers.
Say you have a tower your players are going to go through, looking for X, to give it to Y, and will also stab Z.
Ask: Why is this tower here? Are X and Z here by coincidence, or is there a reason?
Once you ask those questions, ask why again. What circumstances lead up to a tower being built being the correct answer? Why was the tower built here specifically, and not 100 feet to the left? Why was a tower built and not a fort?
Keep asking Why. Not all whys need to be significant. "Why was this tower built here, and not 100 feet to the left" could be answered with "to keep a portal to the elemental plane of fire sealed", or it could just be because it offered the best view of the lake there.
Once you have built up a large chunk of world, look for things to socket together.
An unrelated scenario where the players helped a prince find his way home could get a tweak, with that prince being the nephew of the man who commissioned the tower. From there, you can choose to have as much or as little story between them as you like.

As you get more experienced, you will start to develop a sense for what works and what doesn't. Even at your most experienced though, "Why" is always a great way to start.

This. Never make a complete map of the world. Always have some unknown locations near the edges of the world. Even if you won't really expand on them, the mystery and possibility just make the world feel more interesting

Is this interesting and "deep" lore you mean?
I wrote this piece yesterday just to flesh out the reason why there are so many dwarves in my city-based campaign.
Some names have been upright stolen or inspired by other sources.. It was written in a couple of minutes tops.

>The Fraggkur Dwarves are the Dwarves who inhabit Mount Fragg and are citizens of Astorath.
>105 years ago the Dwarf King Thorgrimm Banebeard defended their capital, Hearth-Home (Karak-kur) upon the Cindersteppes against the combined forces of Orcs, Goblins, Ogres and the dragon Roldroth the Hungry. Thorgrimm was slain during the battle and the dwarves fled. With nowhere to go they went to their nearest ally for aid: Kingdom of Viridis and ultimately its capital, Astorath.
>Thorgrimm, who had been an excellent diplomat, had gained the King’s trust and respect and agreed they could rebuild their home in Mount Fragg if they provided the King with mines.
>Dwarves now make a pretty sizeable part of Astorath. They got their own district in the city called Thorgrimm's Rest after the late King and have built expansive mines in Mount Fragg.
>Thorgrimm’s son, Skovald Banebeard is the current Lord of the Fraggkur and has little political interest of the city. He seeks only one thing: revenge on Roldroth and to retake Karak-kur!

Let me know what you think, if this is cringeworthy or good lore.

>start a lawn gnome business
Imagine doing this in a setting where gnomes are real and like a gnome walks into your store after seeing your shitty display gnomes outside and complains about how fake your lawn gnomes are. So you apologise but they refuse to accept it and demand compensation for the racist portrayal of their species. You begrudgingly agree and tell them to wait
While you get the agreed upon amount out of the safe from the back room. you're gone for awhile and the little gnome starts to get impatient. The little bastard walks past the counter to the backroom door,opens it and walks inside suddenly a net drops on his head and before he can scream you gag him. The little gnome stifles a gagged scream as he finally gets a view of the room. A room filled with gnome corpses. The fake lawngnomes outside were just a lure. Your lawngnome business uses real gnomes petrified and is sold at blackmarket auctions to the highest bidder. You give the gnome a wry smile before you knock him out cold with a cudgel.

dark souls had a story "bible" though, it wasn't written on the fly at all, except maybe the few points in ds2 that weren't supposed to be that important when they tried to connect them with the main serie.

good-looking casual lore, as long as you don't remind people about it every 5 seconds or so and go with the entire plot being "muh revolution!".

About deep lore, I always see it as more than something you just come up with: you need to foreshadow it in a way so vague that nobody will ever expect it by only lending partial hints in general;
it needs to fit into your already-established lore like a missing puzzle piece connecting more than a few dots, or points out facts that evebody knew but no one analyzed that way.

it seems to come up too much ITT but the best about this is the souls serie, where you can't possibly dissociate rules and setting, and people still notice things about it today: for example the first line you ever read after "new game" is "adjust brightness until flame is visible and dragon invisible" which sums up all the fucking story.

Write random shit into your setting. Not lolrundumb, just stuff that would make someone stop and ask "What the hell is that about?" then connect that shit.

Don't connect everything though, leave references to other places/peoples/events that only get a bare minimum explained, just enough so they can ask that same question.

As long as you can get players asking "What's that about?" your lore is deep.

All of these are excellent advice. I'm just going to point something out:
When the grognards talk about all the months of work they put into a setting, they don't mention that it was usually done in the middle of the game. Even Forgotten Realms went through that during its original play testing. There is nothing that can be more stimulating to the mind than your players asking questions, so here's some tips to keep your bullshitting consistent:
>Notes
Always keep notes. Voice recorder is nice too, since you can transcribe it later.
>The Basics
For every initial world element that pops up in the game, keep the following basic notes: one to two sentences of theme/info, internal issue, external issue, and a few traits. For minor things, or the large generic set pieces, just cut it down. A city will have all of the above, the Generic Evil Forest just needs theme, and a few traits.
>Simple
It may seem complicated, but it breaks down to simplicity. Convoluted history only confuses you and the players.
>Improve
Yes, you will be improvising everything. Also, never contradict yourself without creating additional facts to explain the contradiction. But see simplicity above.

Add twists. Example, from a homebrewed Exalted game (First age)
>Sidereal known for prophecies of minor doom/major inconvenience predicts a time when the mighty shall be humbled by simplicity
>6 years later Goddess of Sewing curses all clothing to fall apart, including artifact clothing
>Month later the issue is resolved with no consequences for her.
>Commonly known cause: Twilight Solar created easily made 1 dot artifact that seamlessly fuses and cuts cloth, spreads it everywhere
>This pissed off Goddess of Sewing, since it reduced her domain directly.
Deep cause:
>Twilight was recruited to make the artifact by the God of Tailors as part of political power play in Heaven.
>Resolution saw him become second assistant to the Goddess of Seamstresses
>And all artifact clothing is handsewn during creation
Then the side note:
>First Assistant to the Goddess of Seamstresses is actually more powerful, Goddess of Grandmothers.
>She took the position in addition to her own to help the young dear out.
>takes her sewing into meetings on the state of familial harmony in creation
>sends cookies to the greater incarnae when they get bumped to last place in the games of divinity
>they're almost as good as being in first place

I appreciate your input and your pictures user.

-lurker user

I love the fucking fact that Dues Ex Machina is shamelessly canon. Seriously if you just go with it it's hilarous. Especially Mat.

Mat is best boy.
Nyneave is best girl.