No more lore gore

Making lore easy to use and versatile.

No one likes lore gore. Well, DMs do, but players don’t care. When they’re facing down a pack of likho, they don’t care what curse created them 10,000 years ago.

I say DMs like lore gore, and that’s true to a point. There was a time when I’d buy those dense tomes and pore over them to understand every corner of Faerûn.

Those days are over, though.

Lore needs to be quick to learn and versatile at the table. In a word, lore needs to function like a rumor. Based in truth, warped by time and distance, and ultimately push the fiction (and the players) forward.

The best kind of lore is that which needs no explanation because it’s baked into the world.

• In Middle-earth, Ulmo is never mentioned but governs all its many waters. Like his domain, he’s entirely substantial.

• In Westeros, no one knows or cares why winter might last a dozen years. It just does.

• In The First Law, we know the Shanka are bad, and they live in The North, which is very bad.

The Likho, playful cannibals

These aren’t rules or lore gore (though Tolkien is not absolved of that). Instead, they’re settings with history so deep, the folks living there forget it exists because they live it. These are all concepts so intrinsic to the world, that we take it for granted, and dismiss naive travelers with “it’s always been this way” — even if that’s false.

For the Wenderweald, I wanted the same thing. The history here is mostly true, somewhat embellished, and way worse than you might think or will ever know.

To do that, I made rules for the lore.

• No more than one sentence. Rumors need to be spit and mumbled. They’re something you can divulge half awake and mostly drunk.

• Personalized ramifications. The lore affects the NPCs personally. They‘re not distant or buried in tomes. It happened to their cattle just last week.

• Unreliable narrators. Well, it happened to their cousin’s cattle, technically. The lore comes from folks who might not have it all right or else have an incentive to share it somewhat wrong.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the lore.

In elder days, Hernogrir the Formless Dread fell upon our lands.

No one agrees on what Hernogrir was. Some say a god and others a living hex. Scholars suggest it was a black stone that fell from the sky that poisoned the world, but that is ridiculous, of course.

Some Elders claim they remember it, and others say it was before time was reckoned. But always the story is the same: the forests grew from the wound it left. The first swamps were born from its corpse.

Its divinity rots here still, befouling the waters and woods

The rivers are unclean but clear. The animals drink from them, our crops are watered well, and we drink deep. But it carries a curse like a pathogen that twists flesh into witchery. For some, it never happens at all. Others are cursed for a generation.

Some pools reflect things that are not present. Some streams carry voices that do not belong to the living. The deeper you go, the less certain you are that water is only water. Some say it’s the cieling of another, darker place beneath us.

The deep, still tarns in the uplands suggest as much.

Pilgrims once tried to cleanse those waters, but no one is fool enough to try anymore.

Now we mark contaminated springs instead. Our Gothi builds shrines around places where the water burns the skin. We teach the children which streams to drink from and which to make sacrifices to.

III. That legacy twists our children in the womb into witches.

Some children arrive wrong in ways that cannot be explained without invoking older, forbidden words. Eyes that see under flesh and beyond the dark. Thoughts that arrive before speech. Dreams that feel inherited rather than imagined.

The midwives know the signs, and they guard such newborns carefully lest the witch hunters find them first.

Some call it a “gift” but all fear it, for witchery spreads like a contagion in the Wenderweald.

Here’s the twist:

When you’re playing Witches of the Wenderweald, you can decide what these “truths” mean for yourself.

These are just my interpretations. You’ll have your own that’ll be far better (or worse, if you’re a Stag Knight) than what I’ve come up with.

Don’t believe me — this is only what the Xanthic Coven has revealed, and they are known liars.

Get your free copy on June 30!

I’m nearly finished with this, and committed to releasing Witches of the Wenderweald core rules on June 30.

It’ll be 100% free on itch.io

Until then, join me on Discord to get the latest updates.

Watch for the Wenderweald watching.

—Odinson