What setting unironically has the deepest lore?

I played Oblivion for countless hours and can't for the life of me remember Chorrol and I had forgotten that the eastern part of Cyrodiil was so sparsely populated.

Please don't bully, but I sincerely believe wh40k just for the underlying concept of "Everything is a lie"

Glorantha, probably.

He said deepest, not most.

I'm gonna say... probably The Simpson's. It's one small town, but the entire roster of characters are so developed in their history thanks to 27 seasons that it's pretty dense. Not to mention that it parallels our own history.

Either that or Pokemon. The pokedex and the side games lend themselves to this huge ecological mess of an Archaeo-zoological study.

That and you have an enormous variety of mediums to pick from.

old warhammer fantasy

Honestly, the comic itself is pretty mediocre to bad.

But Sburb is a fucking top tier setting idea that I'd love to run a game in.

Greyhawk

40k

Bionicles

Middle-Earth.

I still shiver when I think about it. All those islands were actually parts of the giant messiah robot sent to gather experience for planet-saving mission. With specific islands and entities on those having the particular purpose in the robot's performance, "Reboot" style.

That's not deep at all, merely the logical consequence of having decades of edition revisions piling on mutually contradictory lore.

Maid RPG.

>He said deepest, not most.
He said deepest, not best. A setting where you know the king's cousin's step daughter's favourite type of bagel has deeper lore than a good setting.

What the fuck is deep about a bagel? Having a lot of defined lore is meaningless with regards to depth, that's breadth.

Anything with 30 years or more of writing behind it - 40k, Traveler, Forgotten Realms (but its trash) etc.

Monster Rancher has some surprisingly deep lore

Bionicles

Ravenloft. There's a million different dreadlords and adventures about them.

>It's a shitty lore about less than 20 gods fighting over dead bodies

It really is one of the least appreciated setting. I'm glad it's getting popular again.

Forgotten Realms, I suppose. It's the posterchild of LORE.

Even if you hate the lore it's hard to argue that it's not deep. Not only are there numerous campaign/adventure books filled with lore on it but there's also a huge amount of novels filling it out further.

This is assuming you meant Veeky Forums settings and not all settings.

In depth lore is deeply explored. If you know the favourite type of bagel of a minor character it indicates that even unimportant characters are deeply explored and thus the lore is deep. Once again deep =/= good.

>Once again deep =/= good.
Well, yeah. Depth == meaningful. So bagel flavors only matter if it might come up. Something can be deep but also stupid when you actually get into it (like Shadowrun) or it can be deep and remain interesting the more you know (Glorantha) but just having lots of content doesn't make it deep, and having some of that content be trivial definitely doesn't make it deep.

Basically this.

Then Forgotten Realms is still within the depth category, mostly because of the way a lot of the AD&D books are written they have great deals of history sections and sections on how the politics/religion have shaped different areas and cultures. Greenwood's writings on candlekeep and for a few old magazine articles back in the day often further push the concepts of ecology and cultural dynamics, while then certain sets that were also published back in the AD&D day introduced something I wish more tabletop settings had, obviously biased narrators.

In that there were a set of books (and booklets) published where they were all shown to be coming from the perspective of an in realms person, giving you a further idea of how someone from their background might see things, and how the world interacts with them.

The Dark Eye/Realms of Arkania

LOTR

Its not the most but definitely the deepest. It has its own working languages and alphabets. Plus the lore is comprehensive and he pioneered the genre while everyone else has taken influence from him

...

this is beyond incest

TES has a lot of "deep lore", although it tends to get shoved to the side because Zenimax loves to sell games.

This. It's one of the oldest settings to be continually developed over it's runtime without suffering massively from 40k's revision syndrom. And it's still being developed. Since TDE only ever had one published setting that all the effort went into and is still going into, there is a massive amount of lore both in depth and in width for it.

I once saw a shop in Germany that had a "small selection" of published adventures and sourcebooks and it fucking filled shelve after shelve after shelve. And most of that stuff wasn't even duplicate.

Most of the lore is just for one damn continent. They have been developing one damn continent since 1984.

And the thing is that the setting is one with a continual story, a bit like 40k. There is a main story with main story adventures for legendary parties that come out from time to time, though not as frequently anymore, that can really change a lot of stuff in the setting. There is a network of a continually advancing main stories around the continent that keeps changing it.

Edge Chronicles

Have to agree with this.

Amazing how they managed to build it up so well over many years.

These faggots know what's up.

Middle Earth and glorantha both reach autistic levels of setting depth.
It's awesome.

Nah that's just GW who can't be bothered to declare one thing true Canon because it would hurt their sales of little plastic figures.

40k is basically your 90s Sunday morning cartoon, which is just really elaborate advertisement for plastic toys.

I have a bit of an issue with a continuously developing storyline especially with central main characters. I might as well read them as a novel and not a game system.

I dont like the idea that cononically my campaign may be invalidated or contradicted by the developing story. Or that anything my characters do will be overshadowed by the “real protagonists”.

I felt this way with Dragonlance. No matter when or where you placed the campaign, you just knew too much of the world’s fate already. Which is why I feel Dragonlance was a better fantasy novel setting than a game setting.

So Ill throw Dragonlance as a setting with a lot of breadth and depth just due to the sheer number of novels, stories, and novellas set in the world that could be interacted with as a game through D&D supplements.

8 more years

He ripped off a bunch of awesome Norse mythological creatures and lore and then turned them into a lame ass Catholic parable in his extended universe. Tolkien was a good author, but he didn't pioneer shit. The only person more over attributed than him is Friedrich Nietzsche.

True

Real Life.

Ins’t Lunar Empire more cultural marxist that buddhist?

I can't believe nobody has mentioned Harn.

Black Tokyo

Elder Scrolls, Warhammer fantasy, Warhammer 40k, Lord of the Rings and Witcher are the deepest to me

>one day, a particularly creative tribe of monkeys feels pressured to start talking, planning and organizing in order to survive
>que people being dicks to each other for millions of years

Riveting stuff, indeed

>Elder Scrolls
>Deep
>Warhammer Fantasy
>Deep
>Warhammer 40k
>Deep
>Witcher
>Deep

The closest you get to deep lore there is LoTR which is still pretty shallow.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

>the brave monkeys journey all around the world and have amazing adventures
>suddenly Toba

Real life.

I like Warframe's lore

Aren't you a Snowflake

>have amazing adventures
>never stop looking for things to exploit or people to harass

Okay, that's life, but adding the ability to communicate and plan ahead is like cheating at survival.

It's not my fault your idea of "deep" lore is fucking Elder Scrolls.

Pls give examples of truly deep settings

>Hurr Durr you know nothing of deepeness I am a certified deep thinking individual I have a PhD in deepeness you can't comprehend deep even if it was standing in front of you

Can you stop the /b/ant and actually say to the op what's deep to you instead of complaining about people's opinions?

>Mad Max but you ride on bison and other cool animals
Where can I read more about this part of Glorantha?

No its very budhist

The greatest timetravelling madman

Pavis - Gateway to Adventure has a section on Prax and the various riders therein, from the pygmies who ride impalas to the Challenger 2 tank of the steppe, the Rhinoceros Rider tribe.

Thank you user.

Destiny

The lore was made, trashed, recycled.
No one is sure what is canon and what doesn’t matter anymore. Truths are lies, facts mean nothing, and we care about the traveler for only the first part of the games

Bionicle

I came here to say this:.
It is awful, I don't like it, but jesus fucking christ, you can have entire campaigns without leaving one single town, and they will always be different because of so many shit there is available to use.

Bahrak swarm was my shit as a kid. Demon robot hivebugs scared me

>Aztecs who want to kill the sun and make a cooler one.
What possible reason would that serve?

>Cheating at survival.
No such thing. In nature, where we have creatures with venom, stealth, and sheer ruthlessness, such rules are non existent.
Nothing is prohibited, all is permitted.

I honestly think that most settings could learn something from Destiny.

All of the lore is written from the perspective of actual characters in the world. They're not afraid to contradict each other. They have opinions and contradictory beliefs. Lore entries written by the Vex present a fundamentally different worldview than lore written by humans. There's no objective truths, everything we know about the world is seen through the lenses of different people.

Most game lore reads a physics textbook. Destiny lore is more like a collection of sacred texts. The world of Destiny feels deeply mystical in a way that most other worlds don't.

Plenty of settings do that though. At least TES does since Morrowind

Well, that place ain't called the Kingdom of Ignorance for no reason. Short version: the locals received a prophecy that one day something called the Black Sun would come. It came, but it was at the head of a horde of trolls. So the trolls became their new overlords. Then someone invented the Aztec style heart sacrifice, and now they have a sun that is normally invisible but appears when people have their hearts ripped out. This sun also drips blood from the sky.

It's Glorantha, the place where the arsehole God Learners once swapped the aspects of two different love goddesses and thoroughly fucked up two nations in the name of SCIENCE.

define "deep".

If we're just talking sheer amount of stuff that happens, forgotten realms wins by a mile. I can think of many other series that have the sheer amount of books, rpg material, games, and ancillary content.

In terms of interesting ideas, I'd say China Meiville's Bas-Lag Cycle. Few books have ever grabbed me with the details and world building like perdido street station.

>All of the lore is written from the perspective of actual characters in the world. They're not afraid to contradict each other. They have opinions and contradictory beliefs

Glorantha fits the bill as well, and if you LARP hard enough, you get to witness these beliefs first hand.

Is there a difference between deep lore, and simple amount of lore?

Alright, now you have me interested. Any books from this setting you recommend?
>God learners
Particularly about these guys, they sound like a fun group to read about.

Cactuar, Roach Blibdoolpoolp, a shadow from Persona, grippli on steroids, kenku, Victorian bum, the man who took tribal tattoos too far...

> jesus fucking christ, you can have entire campaigns without leaving one single town, and they will always be different because of so many shit there is available to use.

I see your point, but what is it that we're actually talking about here? because it seems like we're just talking about amount of content. Is that actually a good metric? Because i've never found FR to be that interesting or cohesive. Bits of it are neat, but I never felt like the formative lore was good or made sense when all of ti was put together.

Dark sun I think...

The handlinger isn't the bum.

can't not can*

read the books man. They're the best fantasy i've read.

This desu, there's a lot to learn over the course of the hundreds of quests.

I just don't like how they handled the return gods.
>hey we're progressing the plotline in a major way, looks like the God Wars are back on!
>gods you've only heard a little about over the years of playing are fucking duking it out in the open
>give us a few events letting the playerbase decide which god wins or loses, make quests dealing with the fallout of player decisions, like when Bandos got rekt by based Armadyl
>everything is nice
>whoops this is taking too long better turn this shit into a linear questline that really doesn't impact Gilenor much and has an awful ending to what was supposed to be the most important questline ever
>haha status quo now buy more bonds

Everything else was on point though. I really wanna check back and see if they made another Elemental Workshop, that was a cool questline.

The Guide to Glorantha, volumes 1 and 2 are fantastic and fully recommend them. Regarding the God Learners... I can't remember where they were described, but there is a lot about their mythology in The Stafford Library 6 (Revealed Mysteries). But to describe God Learners in six words: they created a fucking robot god.

And hell, , I forgot to say that in addition to Pavis - GTA, there's even more Prax in Borderlands and Beyond.

I'd rather consider depth as a metric for the degree of interconnectedness of content rather than the amount of detail in the setting. Shit happening halfway around the world, in the past, affecting something right here, right now. Broad historical movements around the world. Cultural intermingling etc.

I do admit that 90% of that won't be useful at game time though. I just like reading about settings.

Forgotten Realms is everything you said: it is boring, generic, filled with snowflaked characters, several things make no sense, there are two many deities for no good reason, and 90% of all stories will be on the Sword Coast, which is everything I said with a vengeance.
I was talking about content, the content about Forgotten Realms overshadows most things, there is just to much of it.

Didn't know the pre-Christian Norse were fantasy fans.

>The closest you get to deep lore there is LoTR which is still pretty shallow.

This is how this is bound to go. No matter how much lore you have or how complex it is, there will always be autists who think it isn't deep enough because they equate "depth" with "liking the thing."

I really wish the Destiny games weren't such garbage, because I really like the art design and the lore seems interesting. If only the games themselves weren't such boring drivel I feel like I could really get into the universe.

The better Destiny.

Seems as though when actually called to participate in the discussion he has nothing to say

No they have strong buddhist tones.
But they put the phrase "one is all" on its head and fuck up.
Badly