Dungeon Merlin
The following is just a write-up of a thing Quinns said during his Stonetop review. I think it’s an idea that deserves to be linkable directly, because as Quinns says in the video, it’s widely applicable.
In some games, asking your players questions about a monster, place, or any other element of the world can be a nice way to involve them in the worldbuilding. And if you pose them in the right way, it’s a good opportunity to teach them about already established facts as well.1
In his Stonetop review, Quinns describes this as letting the players colour inside the lines to show them where the lines are.
It doesn’t have to be so prescriptive if you take issue with authority. Instead, view it as efficient—uploading lore into the brains of the players in a way where they naturally engage with it and are therefore more likely to remember, while also establishing new, fun facts about the world in a collaborative way.
To do that, you’ll need to take established facts about a thing and then derive from it a detail your players can define.
Here’s the example from Stonetop that Quinns highlights in his video:
Worked Example in Another System
I’ll try my hand at it now with a randomly chosen example from Cairn’s bestiary: the Blink Dog.
The Blink Dog has two abilities, each of which can be used to construct a Lore Upload. If I were to build questions from these, they would probably be something like:
- How did they come into the service of their master?
- When they phase out of reality, where do they find themselves?
- Why are melee attacks impaired by their phase, but ranged attacks are not?
Each of these anchors an important part of the Blink Dog’s lore, while giving the players the ability to come up with things about their background that are almost guaranteed to come up again and again during play, further cementing the previously established facts in the process.
Also, these questions shouldn’t lead to too many potentially game- or campaign-breaking inventions, if that’s something you’re worried about.
In addition, you can incorporate whatever facts are true about Blink Dogs in your campaign, of course. If you place them near a settlement, for example, you can let the two interact in these questions, like Stonetop does with the Crinwin above. This will lead to more interesting and interconnected questions than the ones I came up with above.