Let’s Talk About Lore

Greetings everybody! As teased at the end of my last blog post, it’s time to take a closer look at the setting of Innkeep, the world of Cirrhul. More specifically, we’re going to show off our gorgeous new map!

I’m also going to take this opportunity to talk about LORE. And not just in relation to some of the details of the setting, but about lore in general, and about why Innkeep has quite a lot of it.

But before moving on, feast your eyes…

…on this!

This beautiful map was created for us by master fantasy cartographer Fernando Salvaterra. It centers on a place known as the Divine Empire of Cirrhul, which is comprised of six provinces. These provinces surround a central mountainous location known as the Valley of the Incarnates. It is in this valley that our game takes place, within the isolated Weary Pilgrim inn. I’ll take a closer look at some of the locations shown in this map as we go, while also dropping some micro-doses of lore. But let’s start by talking about one of the big problems with lore…

The Pitfalls of Writing Fantasy Lore

It’s been pointed out that amateur writers in a fantasy genre (like myself!) love writing lore because it is relatively easy. You can make up some place names, invent some regional factions, create a bunch of history, what have you, and (because you are interested in your own creation) it feels cool and productive. It is far harder to write engaging characters in dramatic situations that advance an interesting plot. As we tend to gravitate towards what is easier, we can avoid the struggle of developing our skill as a writer by focusing on this comfortable and fun lore stuff. This risks holding back our development as writers, and it will also likely bore our audience. After all, they just don’t have the emotional connection to all this lore that we do! (At least, not unless mediated by characters that they care about.)

Nevertheless, the world of Innkeep has its own myths, religions, regional cultures, politics, and history (official, and secret). There are pages and pages of this stuff in my design documents. And this is despite Innkeep being a game where the player spends their time in a fixed place (the Weary Pilgrim inn), going effectively nowhere else.

So why have I taken the step of creating a detailed setting for the game? Partially, because it really is a fun thing to do! On top of this, it’s kind of the done thing for fantasy settings since Tolkien. It feels like a very important step in creating a world, which is after all one of the things modern fantasy is about.

But on top of this, there are three important reasons:

• To help justify the immediate game situation.
• To support the broader story.
• To inform the gameplay itself.

For the rest of this blog post I’d like to break these down for you, while showing off more of the map.

The Valley of the Incarnates is home to the tombs of six gods (the Cynnae), who once walked among the people as mortals. Each of the Empire’s six provinces has one of these gods as their patron.

How Lore Helps Justify the Immediate Game Situation

When I first started working on the concept of Innkeep, I knew that something helpful about using a fantasy world inn as a setting was that you could minimise the amount of work spent on creating different locations. You could have the interior of the inn, maybe a bit of the immediate exterior… and that was it. But the player could still enjoy the richness of an RPG world by way of the guests who came to visit. In a way, a whole world could come to you. This felt like a nice compromise that would preserve some of that old-school epic fantasy scope, while at the same time maintaining a narrow focus more suitable for a (at the time) solo-developer. 

Another thing I knew from early on was that I wanted to bring in a sense of resource scarcity, particularly at the beginning of the game. The player was not a cheerful, honest fellow, running a bustling inn, located in a prosperous town, which they had inherited from their dead uncle or some such. Rather, they were somewhat desperate, struggling to make ends meet, and willing to steal from (some) of their guests in order to survive. Not necessarily because they were role-playing as a villain, but because they had to make some hard choices in a difficult situation (and maybe because some of their guests deserve to be robbed!) Finally, I knew that I wanted the game to be driven by an interesting narrative, with player choices impacting on how things unfold, rather than a sandbox, purely systems-based management simulator type game (I think this was a good decision, as quite a few tavern / inn-based management simulator sandbox games have appeared over the years since I started work on Innkeep).

The lowland provinces of the south-east boast both rich agricultural land, as well as an extensive urban dwelling burgher class. In the bustling port city of Brymm, upper class Avenorians compete socially via ostentatious fashion and intellectual sparring.

This basic situation poses a narrative problem: we need to be able to answer why the inn is experiencing a state of resource scarcity. In terms of immediate inspiration, I drew upon the TV show Deadwood,  based on a real-life historical town in the United States, and its depiction of a gold rush. This kind scenario provides a situation where there was a sudden increase of people in an area (an abundance of people with money you could cheat or steal from), and yet supplies had to be brought in from the outside, at some expense and difficulty. What it needed was just a bit of a twist, to adapt the situation in a way that would make it feel more suitable to a fantasy setting. What if, instead of a rush for gold or silver, we had a rush for the robbing of tombs?

A road within the Valley of the Incarnates, leading towards the Weary Pilgrim inn.

Let me now paint a picture of the narrative setting of Innkeep, building on the above. In our fantasy world, an old empire has traditionally entombed its noble dead in a certain valley – The Valley of the Incarnates – which remained uninhabited by decree. The Weary Pilgrim inn is located inside this valley, a place where pilgrims could rest when visiting the Great Tombs of the incarnates to pay homage. Shortly before the events of Innkeep, the empire entered a period of civil strife and discord. The imperial guard was disbanded, and the provinces began to split into competing factions. As a result, the Valley of the Incarnates is now unprotected. The Great Tombs, filled with treasure (and traps!) are waiting for somebody to loot them. The Weary Pilgrim is no longer a place for pilgrims to come and rest, but a stopping point for tomb robbers. This setting of a fantasy world gold rush would explain a diverse cast of shady strangers, many of whom are hiding their identities. It would also help explain resource scarcity brought on by remoteness, and danger. Furthermore, this is an unstable situation: How long will it go on for? Would a nearby province come and secure the tombs for themselves? Is it possible that war might break out? Is there anything that might stop it? We can see how this setting could help feed into the broader narrative arc of the game quite nicely.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about this more immediate setting for the game, I wrote about it previously here.

The highland provinces adhere fiercely to old customs and virtues. Orhustians follow strict interpretations of the laws established by the incarnates, while the Rhyndians pride themselves on their martial prowess.

How Lore Helps Support the Broader Story

This brings us to how lore supports the narrative. Without spoiling the plot of the game, the Divine Empire has a dark secret, tied to the lore of the world: i.e. to its history, to its geography, to its myth, magic, religion and politics. This is a secret that the player with gradually reveal alongside their six found friends: a group of outcasts who have been rendered marginal for different (yet ultimately connected) reasons that shed light on the nature of the caste-based society they live in.

This means that the lore of the world is therefore not extraneous to who these characters are, and what they are doing over the course of the game. To learn who a character is, what they have personally gone through, and how it has shaped them, often involves incidentally learning about lore. Or it is to learn a secret that impacts the player and their friends, and their ability to live together in peace. This means that (ideally!) playing through the story of Innkeep is to engage quite deeply with the lore of the world via the narrative, rather than lore functioning merely as background set dressing.

In the north-east, the guild halls of Duron create the finest weapons and armour in the empire. Periodic trade with the nearby Dwarrum clans has also led to cultural interchange.

How Lore Helps Inform the Gameplay Itself

The third purpose of lore in Innkeep is to support the gameplay. One of the primary actions that players will undertake in Innkeep is interacting with guests that are visiting from the six different provinces of the Divine Empire. Each guest is a unique character, with their own background, personality, their own likes and dislikes. The player needs to make these guests feel at home in order to help extract useful information from them. From a gameplay point of view, this means not only serving food and drink but observing and eavesdropping on your guests, before charming them with your wit. Learning about which region, class and caste a guest is from will go a long way towards helping you know how to approach charming them.

Different provinces of the empire have their own regional characters, which influence what kinds of speech acts they enjoy more. For example, the southern people of Buccolia are quite fond of a good joke, while northern Rhyndians are more serious. (These regional characters are in turn connected to their economies, to the political structure of the empire, and to its history, myth, and patron gods.)

In the south-west, the people of Wyrenach harvest fine wood, herbs and fungi for trade. They have many skilled healers, and are lovers of the musical arts.

Some final thoughts…

From the above we can see that lore is quite important to the overall Innkeep experience. The idea is for the lore to help lend a degree of cohesiveness to the setting, to inform the background of characters, as well as key plot moments. However by no means will it be necessary for players to have to wade through chunks of lore in order to play and enjoy the game! We want to be judicious about how much is dolled out at any one time, with many of the details hidden among little observations and asides by our guests.

The Divine Empire of Cirrhul is coming apart. Should you try to prevent this from happening? Or perhaps hasten its end?

Furthermore, one design ideal for Innkeep is that there is always something concealed, something hidden, which we cannot know of. We can only partially reveal truths. So too will it be the case for world lore. Working out much of the larger whole makes it easier provide fragments which look like they fit together into something greater. Some of the parts left unrevealed can then be investigated further by those players who care enough to know more (for example, possibly via in-game books and optional conversations), or speculated about online. Meanwhile, those who are happy to let this extra lore remain in the background can pass over it without harming their enjoyment of the game.

I hope this discussion about Innkeep‘s setting (and revelation of our gorgeous map!) has further piqued your curiosity. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to wishlist the game on Steam!

Until next time…