In the past, I’ve made it clear that I love learning from other mediums when it comes to things like world building and story telling in tabletop RPGs. There’s a lot of great crossover between the needs of videogames, anime, movies, and TV shows in terms of communication with the same needs at the table. And recently, two anime, Bofuri and Shangri-La Frontier, made me realize that we’re all making lore and the game worlds we create harder to interact with. Let’s dive into it!
WARNING: Mild spoilers ahead for Bofuri and Shangri-La Frontier.
Background
Bofuri and Shangri-La Frontier are both “isekai-esque” anime, in that the primary focus of the main characters is playing a “full dive VRMMO”, but that they’re also leading their normal lives. They’re both shows about being nerds and having fun in a virtual world without being trapped/reincarnated/transported into it. For anyone familiar with real world MMORPGs, it’s all going to be very familiar. Both shows, and more accurately, their games, share something in common though. Deep world building. We’re talking “events in lost and all but forgotten ages still affecting our world today” level deep world building. The kind that drives stories and explains why things are the way they are. But no one is interacting with it.
The Reveals
In Shangri-La Frontier, the reveals are subtle at the start. It’s the conventional addition of some technological aspects and class builds to show it’s on the fantasy end of the science fantasy spectrum. Then things get more obvious when Sunraku, the main character, gets involved in a unique event. While among the rabbitfolk in Rabituza, he has to battle an Aberrant Woodmage; it’s revealed that it was “One of those dummies from long, long, long ago who tried to fuse with a tree to gain longer life.” However, the Aberrant Woodmage is wearing a tattered lab coat, a choice that clashes with the wizard staff and hat it uses. When investigating a powerful member of the Seven Colossi, Wethermon the Tombguard, more is revealed about an era known commonly as Divinity by Setsuna of Faraway Days. She appears to be a ghost, but is dressed in sci-fi style clothing and uses anachronistic terms like “program” instead of “magic”. She hints at deeper knowledge about the Seven Colossi, but it’s not revealed as of the current episode of the anime. Wethermon the Tombguard appears to be a machine when seen, but the leader of the rabbitfolk reveals he is actually undead when he says “He’s an awkward one, you see. Serious to a fault, never knows when to let up… He lost his wife to a lousy little lie, and ended up with that undying body of his. He’s a living corpse, unable to even put himself to rest.” More is implied when he states “I made up my mind not to interfere with “them”…”
Over in Bofuri, there’s a whole lot happening on the Third Floor. Unlike the more conventional planet build of Shangri-La Frontier, NewWorld Online is a more gamified world build, with distinctive layers that can be travelled between by defeating specific dungeons. The third layer is a pseudo-post apocalypse feeling industrial machine world, more towards the sci-fi end of the science fantasy spectrum. An interaction with an elderly NPC reveals that the place used to be full of “normal machines” whom he refers to as “The First”, who goes on to say “In the center of this city towers a grand building. That is where the machine god lives. He’s the one who created our flying machines and such. Not a single person understands how any of his machines work. People have torn them apart to learn, but there’s nothing at all inside. Not a single screw, gear, or spring to speak of. The real story starts now. You see, the Second Generation is the one here now. Yeah. This city was once brimming with normal machines. To us, who knew nothing of machines, the First bestowed us hopes and dreams. But one day, something happened while I was out of town. When I saw a pale light erupting from the city, I hurried back at once. But the city was filled with all-new machines, and everyone had completely forgotten about the First. What’s more, the old machines were nowhere to be found. That’s the end of my story.” That’s a fairly serious lore dump, and it’s followed by an encounter with the Machine God. Maple, the main character, uses an ability that temporarily restores the mind of the Machine God, who says “In this moment, my thoughts are mine… I bestow you this, brave soul… Using my power, defeat he… who I… once was. Put me… to… sleep.” Before whatever it is that’s controlling him snaps back into control and they battle it out.
So… What?
This is where it hit me. There’s a whole level of content in each game that the players aren’t interacting with. Content that actively informs the world and its story, as shown in both games by dev side images/displays, showing that there’s been 0% story progression in them. Even when they do interact with it, it’s not on purpose and they don’t dive any deeper into it. So I started wondering why. Then it hit me again.
Both games are played by users as sandboxes. They’re “make your own fun” games; sure there’s quests and dungeons and all that, but they haven’t advertised that there’s an actual story line or plot. They’ve hidden their lore in unique events that the players can’t recognize as being important because they’re only distinguishable by the content of their unique dialogue, which many players will skip or not really grasp in the rush of the event before moving on to “normal” activities.
In Bofuri, the whole Machine God and The First thing is gone and forgotten moments later as the next event starts and the Fourth Floor comes available. The entire mystery is lost because the normalized gameplay has conditioned the players to move past anything that’s not right in front of them. They’re professionally incurious about the world or what was just hinted at, and there’s a new floor to head to.
Sunraku in Shangri-La Frontier at least recognizes that there’s something deeper happening, but looking at the other players, you see that they’re interacting with the content more by accident than by intention. They simply see creatures like the Seven Colossi and Setsuna of Faraway Days as challenges to overcome as gamers, not as ways to find out more about the world they’re in or why things are the way they are.
They’re Having Fun Though!
This is 100% true and accurate, and this isn’t about trying to make games less fun. They’re having a great time, but they’re also struggling more than they probably have to because they’ve already decided what the world is, as opposed to trying to find out what the world is.
The Exploration Pillar
Exploration is one of the hardest pillars of gaming to work with and is usually seen in its most conventional formats: moving around. Hexcrawling, dungeoncrawling, map percentage cleared… we all know that’s exploration, right? Not quite. Lore is a core component of the exploration pillar as well. Lore is more than history. It lays a foundational baseline that, in concert with the game’s mechanics, define reality in the world. Why is magic the way it is? Why does technology exist? What forces are at work that shape the world? That’s all lore.
The challenge comes from “I know what [insert game genre(s) here] is, therefore I don’t need to know the lore”. This is especially true in the fantasy genre, where both these anime examples exist. The players “know” what the game is, “know” what’s important, and “know” how it works. Except they don’t. They know how to play (in the sense of character creation, battles, items etc…) and what the broad consensus narrative is about a fantasy world. They don’t know why there are Seven Colossi, or a Machine God. And in not knowing, in not exploring it, they’re missing out not just on game content, but also on potential hints on how to defeat these creatures, or to greater or more interesting treasures. In Bofuri, Maple is deeply confused about the mecha suit she gains from the Machine God, but then never investigates it further, meaning its potential is left unknown.
What to do?
The first thing to do is have a really solid Session Zero process. I’ve talked about how I like to have a Session 0.5, and where we all do collective character creation and a test run to make sure everything is clicking. There’s an extra you can add to this one, and that’s a World Brief. So coming into Session 0.5, preferably before it by a week or so, you send your players a World Brief, a collection of common facts, information, and history about the world and some stuff specific to where you’ll be starting the game. Emphasize important points and information. This lays out a baseline for them to work from.
Next is emphasis in Session 0.5 that investigation and exploration will yield in game rewards. Additional quests/jobs, unique treasures, ways to enhance items, new ancestries… Don’t just make it an XP thing. XP is one tool of many to motivate players and not always a good one, especially in systems that struggle with non-combat XP. So make it clear to the players that interacting with the lore will unlock more of the world and more options for them than if they just go battle to battle and call it a day.
Mix lore into everything. NPC lore drops are the classic tool, but adding books, notes, journal entries, and so on, especially if they’re collectable and seen as valuable in game? That’s gold. Sometimes literally. Make famous explorers and historical characters figures of common discussion or knowledge in the game, and then make their knowledge valuable. Literally valuable. Like, cults and guilds and universities and rivals and descendants all vying for control or access to it valuable. Not only does this add potential patrons, antagonists, and NPCs to the game, it also increases immersion because the world is interacting with the players as much as they’re interacting with it.
Things not to do?
Don’t lock lore up behind unique encounters and then make those encounters super random. A spirit who appears when the moons are full? Good, predictable, and workable. A spirit who appears after the players collect an old broach with no remarkable features, talk to an NPC they wouldn’t normally interact with, and then go to the right place and roll 20 or higher? No. Don’t make accessing lore, or at least the start of it, a Rube-Goldberg Machine operation. Make things reasonably accessible, and make the benefits clear. Once the players are in the groove, then add complexity and mysterious benefits. Players who are stonewalled or confounded early are less likely to want to interact with things later.
Final Thoughts
Lore sells. Unfortunately, lore is also seldom used to its fullest extent. Too often it’s either ignored completely as everyone “knows” how the game and story work, or it’s treated like garnish; nice to look at but not a substantial part of a meal. So it’s on us as creators, GMs, and players to make lore more relevant to enhance our own fun at the table. Whether you’re using extant lore, or making your own as you go, the needs are the same. On the creator side, we need to make lore applicable and not just fluff. As GMs, we need to use lore better and make it more valued to the players. And as Players, we need to recognize that we don’t necessarily “know” the world, how it works, or what it’s offering; we need to explore the world, not just be in it.
Read the follow-up article here!
