Putting the Lore together

[Moontayle]

Faille wrote this as a response in the Wiki thread:

for lore writing, we want to identify in the zone designs what sort of quests are needed, ie kill 20 wolves, and then it will be up to the lore writers to write the dialogue and give some logical reason for it and really flesh it out.

In terms of great lore for the whole world, that's a little trickier. I don't mind people working on it, as long as they're not contradicting other people, but the important thing is to try and work out how to implement those stories into the actual game. There's only so much you can do with quests, and having long dialogs with npcs to deliver it may not be the best option.

If anyon have other ways to do it, I'm all ears.

I figured it probably deserved its own thread. Here's my take:

The overall backstory should most likely be loosely laid out by the community as a whole, with the Lore guys filling in the details. Sort of like handing a 3-page treatment to a script doctor and telling him to go to town. In order to prevent Lore contradictions, things should be compartmentalized as much as possible. Such as significant events which created Dungeon_01 but which pretty much ends there, explaining the reason for the dungeon and its impact on the region. Local Legends, if you will.

On the case of Worldwide stuff, I would say the community chooses 3 Lore writers to work on that in tandem. Of the 3, 1 would write a section, with the other 2 serving as input/editor, with unanimous approval between the 3 (along with appropriate compromises) about what's being written. Next section would switch up writers. This way you get a small variety of writing styles and a quasi-community approach to creating the backstory of the world.

The big problem will be connecting the "little lore" with the "big lore" without fucking up the end product. So there would definitely have to be almost constant communication between the Lore writers, not to mention the designers of the content itself.

And as a final note, there should be something of an approval system involved. Writers write, but what they write isn't always right, which is why editors exist.

Just some things that came off the top of my head.

[Faille]

Sounds like a good place to start. The whole idea of the project is to try and work out what works, and do to that we need to try stuff. Or something like that.

Let us know what you need to make it easier on you to work together and liase with the other departments in the project.

FYI, the project 1 has a very basic backstory thats written up on wiki, so use that as a starting point, but go wild from there.

I wouldn't mind being able to contribute to the lore writing, but so far haven't had the time to do half the things that I need to have done, so I might just try and help out with the editing / feedback side of it.

[Moontayle]

Here's what I came up wtih for the village:

The village of Silversage rests at the edge of Lord Fohst's lands, and was recently built for the sole purpose of making use of a nearby silver mine. However, the scouting report which prompted this was very badly worded because the so-called "minor local conflict" was, in fact, nearly a full scale war. On one side you have a tribe of orcs and goblins which control the silver mine and call the surrounding area home. On the other side you have a newly arrived army of undead and other creatures of the night being lead by a priest of somewhat speakable evil. The latter seeks only to destroy the tribe so that his army will grow from the remains of their dead, while the former fight this seemingly endless war using weapons made of silver, which is their only means of damaging the priest's minions. Silversage is largely unable to cope with the situation, with only a small handful of guards that are used mainly to fend off attacks on the village itself. It is because of this that the local magistrate has put out a call for adventurers to help them fight off both the tribe and the priest's army so that Silversage can lay sole claim to the mine.

[Faille]

Nice start, gives a bit more substance to the world. Not what what somewhat speakable evil is though 8)


The real trick is how we convery this lore to the players, without throwing a paragraph of text at them. This bit can probably be done with newbie quests to visit the magistrate, who explains bits of the call for adventurers. perhaps speaking to guards in order to learn more about what you face, etc etc.

[Moontayle]

Originally Posted by Faille

Nice start, gives a bit more substance to the world. Not what what somewhat speakable evil is though 8)

I didn't want to fall into the cliche of him being 'unspeakably evil', especially since you're probably going to off him when you're level 10. So, I placed tongue firmly in cheek and called it something else.

[Moontayle]

Magistrate - "Ah, another adventurer eh? Well then, listen closely because I'm only going to say this once. We have greenies on one side and undead on the other, with a silver mine that we need access to in the middle. You're going to help us get it. Now go see Captain Syrax and find out what you can do for us. Dismissed."

[Fattyfat]

moon i like it, report to IRC.

Personally, I think people who only want to write lore should just write it up and submit it. Worst case we don't use it...

I'd really like to see the backstory confirmed and ready to go. I think this will help zone design and drive a lot of the content we need. As faille said, we have a very basic setting on the wiki which can change as much as we want. Nothing is final.

[Faille]

I'd really like the people interested in writing Lore to at least look over the tutorial on quests.

Here's a link for you!

DialogQuests - MMOWorkshop - Trac

Don't worry so much about the code and stuff, but the structure of the dialog, so what you write can easily be inserted by someone else. Basically writing the different dialogs depending on player choices, success, fail, not completed yet, etc.

[Moontayle]

Looks like I'm SOL on accessing the IRC channel from work. I found a web IRC client but it's blocked. Coupled with the fact that messenger programs are blocked it looks like I'll be largely out of touch during the time when I can work on this the most. But that's ok, because I can still do some work. I'll see about fleshing out the town a bit.

[Faille]

Originally Posted by Moontayle

Looks like I'm SOL on accessing the IRC channel from work. I found a web IRC client but it's blocked. Coupled with the fact that messenger programs are blocked it looks like I'll be largely out of touch during the time when I can work on this the most. But that's ok, because I can still do some work. I'll see about fleshing out the town a bit.

That sucks, you still able to access the wiki though?
You could edit on that and then just send PM's to people to look over it.

[Moontayle]

Yeah, no problems accessing the Wiki at all, so it shouldn't be a big deal. Just can't get instant feedback.

[Moontayle]

Added a bit of backstory to the Magistrate (as well as a name), plus the two NPCs that he hangs out with.

Newbie World - Village - UberWorlds Development Wiki

[Faille]

Here's what I sent to Moon in regards to writing Lore. It's a basic idea of what I'm looking for as far as lore writing goes.


"It's looking good, and helps give some personality to the NPC's. It does seem to suffer a little from similar problems you get in movie scripts, in that stuff needs to be shown not told.

It's hard to imagine how we can convey the information to the players, without using blocks of text or contrived descriptions. It probably needs to be done through 3rd part, ie, you speak to the normal guard to find out the info about captain Rodkim.

So what you've written works better as background, and might be better to expand it to show what sort of personality they use when talking. ie, they are arrogant, use fancy words, etc. So that when you, or anyone else, is writing dialog, they can quickly see how they should be speaking.


Of course, I could be totally wrong, and making things far too complicated then they need to be 8)"