Ominous Lorevomit

"Show don't tell" to keep the lore in your TTRPG

The titanic temple of Akkai, demon lord of Kal-Arath…a new comic panel from the current Kickstarter.

My game Kal-Arath relies heavily on random tables, as any of you who have played it know.

However, those random tables themselves are far from random themselves. Each one of them is a curated easter egg hunt through the guts of my game’s lore, one little sentence at a time.

Here’s a look at one:

You can see several even in this short list that connect with each other, and affect each other - places and encounters interlinked that allow PCs to explore layers of the game world.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “show, don’t tell” if you’re a writer of any stripe, and random tables in your TTRPG can fill that gap. Lots of players or readers get easily exhausted with non-stop lore-drops, and it can leave them cold.

However, if you deliver the feel, texture, history, and overall vibe of your world in these bite sized pieces, you can get a lot across without having to explain the whole thing.

In a similar way as the old Magic the Gathering cards used to have those little “flavor texts” on them, where you could get a feel for the story without necessarily ever being told the whole story, you can use this sort of thing in your own game or at your table.

With my Tarvannion setting, I even have a mechanical method for this: lore is given to players in a single line or two: “The carving on the wall of the ruined fortress, barely visible and obscured by thick moss, tells the story of the last stand of Dyfed on the walls of the city of Narul…” and then I hand them a one-time use mechanical benefit for their character learning it.

For example, next time they’re outnumbered by more than 2-1, they add a d6 to all attack rolls. They write down the little scrap of lore on their character sheet, and keep it, even after they’ve expended its “inspiration.”

This is a cool way to hand out little bits at a time and have players care about finding the neat secrets you’ve scattered about for them.

Speaking of show, don’t tell, I also want to show you a few of the comic panels I’ve been working on for the new Kal-Arath Kickstarter.

You can now purchase your own 9x12’’ signed bristol board of one of these comic pages as an add-on.

It’s a chance to own a piece of Kal-Arath, and maybe, after my own untimely demise, it might earn you enough to buy a Slurpie or a new set of dice or something.

Like Belloq says to Indie in Last Crusade, “who knows, in a thousand years, even you may be worth something!”

Here’s a look at a few panels from the full pages in the works:

And another:

Check out the new Kickstarter, and keep your blades sharp!

- CG