Your Campaign Needs No External Lore
Playing The Game Provides All The Context Needed In Real Games
The regeneration of the hobby turns around the recovery of Braunstein as a fundamental pillar of the hobby. Since Jeffro Johnson brought it back from the Memory Hole, it’s been refined into the forms explained in BROZER. The end result is that the hobby is now understood to be a fractal form of Braunstein, which BDubs (and others) refer to as “Total Non-Stop Braunstein”.
Because a lot of people are still catching up, I’ve taken the effort to specify how this fractal structure works and what it looks like. I’ve also emphasized that those catching up need to read the After Action Reports—the piles of receipts—because reading these reports reveals a pattern over time, and it doesn’t take a long time to notice that pattern: these reports read like the lore articles written for commercial settings (or sound like their audio counterparts).
In short, you don’t need Reams Of Lore No One Reads Or Cares About for there to be a compelling campaign play experience. You need to let the players, through their mans, do the things that otherwise are relegated to those very lore articles. This is how I have come to identify the source of the biggest error in the hobby, which is the insistance on this being a Narrative medium.
You do not tell stories. You create histories. History is the record of the deeds of men of agency recorded after the resolutions of their actions, operating in conflict, conducted under a Fog of War.
That is what setting lore is: a fictional history for a time and place that never existed. It is no surprise that the simulation of the real thing is also governed by the same principles as the real thing, and therefore those who object to the real thing always end up objecting to its simulation.
There is a reverse side of this coin: the hobbyist can reframe setting lore as the records of a real campaign, played in the proper manner of Total Non-Stop Braunstein, and thereby learn from those players how to better maneuver to win against their opponents- and it is also through this reframing that you can discern what products aimed at the hobby are actual Hobbyist products and which are not.
When real historians can apply everything they learned in their discipline to create lore documentaries like this, and it still has all the qualities of real historical works of that sort, you can guess that there is sufficient substance there to do a successful reframing and thus learn useful things from engaging with it.1
Don’t make lore.2 Have a premise you can express as an elevator pitch, at most, and then let the players playing game do the work. If that game is unable to do this, it’s not a game worth playing. Your “lore” is nothing more or less than the results of the actions that players, via their mans, have on the campaign. Because they did those things, they own those things—skin in the game—and thus care about what comes of those things and how they are reported to observers.
Yes, you can learn all of this by reading and watching, but you won’t master it.
There is still no substitute for first-hand experience: you have to play the game to master it, and far too many who claim to be hobbyists do not.3 That does not fly in the Clubhouse. You need to play. You need to lose. You need to reroll, and reroll, and reroll, learning from your errors as you go, until it starts making sense and you figure out how to win. Then you can start winning.
There is more to be said about real world information disciplines and fictional lore, but that’s for another publication- or me after a few beers, some brats, and a warm fire as we transition into Autumn.
Oh, and for you military professionals and veterans reading this, be prepared for casualty rates in that BattleTech video that will have you wondering what the hell was either the players or the writers thinking. Sheer madness.
Lore is for readers—those who engage passively—not players. Players have agency; observers do not, and this is a hobby all about the Fantasy of Agency. Publishers have long forgotten this fact, which is why so many products on the shelves are unfit for purpose.
Yards Of Books and They Don’t Play. Too many instances of both. Lifestyle consumerist behavior is the bane of this hobby.