[DS] Lore presentation and lore layers.

This many-worded, long-suffering post is finished thanks to Saker Tarsos (https://tarsostheorem.blogspot.com/) who said he'd be interested to read it.

Lore presentation:

It is a good rule of thumb that if DM wants some information to reach the players but doesn't want to dump exposition, such information should be introduced three times* – not necessary entirely the same information, not necessary in the same way, but enough of it for players to start noticing and connecting its various bits; in a way such triple introduction is redundancy for the sake of making sure that at least something is getting noticed. For example, one piece is of information is a marketplace rumour about a black knight wandering around, the second is people finding a brigand's body, nailed to the tree with a black lance with a such force it takes three men to pull the blade out, third is travelling monk mentioning that he noticed fresh roses on forsaken grave of False Saint Anri as he was passing by. If players miss the marketplace rumour, they still might have a strange lance to inspect and the tomb of False Saint Anri-now-with-roses to visit to start in the mystery of black knight.

But for tabletop game such information is easy to create: jot some notes, think of some connections, white some evocative lines. Big video games, in contrast, require a lot more effort by a lot more people. In many videogames, therefore, there is 'fear' of designers that players are going to miss much-laboured content, which is why in so many games we have cutscenes, unavoidable exposition, handholding UI, quest checkpoints (one cannot progress if they don't speak to Wise Sage), railroading and signposting world design – sometimes so much that 'secrets' are impossible to miss.  

By the contrast, in the original Dark Souls game it is quite possible to miss almost all of lore and all of secret areas. Sadly, the item description pops up on the loading screen, but aside of it, (skippable) initial cutscene and (probably non-mandatory) talk to Frampt/Kaathe, while being in-game itself it is entirely possible to go through the whole game fully blind to the whole underlay of what is going on. Refreshingly, the player doesn't have to talk or even rescue people, or read item description, or watch few cutscenes in order to progress. Even a firekeeper is not required for leveling, unlike in all other games.

But although DS developers intentionally made the lore fragmented, obscured and missable, they also know their players and their game. They knew what kind of players DS-like gameplay will attract and, most importantly, retain.

Look at DS gameplay: aggressive enemies, high vulnerability for PC, highly maze-like and often vertical environments with precarious footing, absence of save-at-will, slow combat where each movement is uncancelleable and thus requires a precision, difficult combat against crowds, rarity of safe bonfires, exploration that rewards resources for later survival in oppressive environment. Even if Demon Souls didn't already exist, and people absolutely didn't know what to expect from Dark Souls, all of that still ensures that, at least for the first time, the player will go through the game slowly and carefully, often looking around, and this encourages methodical, inquisitive, observant mindset.**

I will even say that such design solutions filter off people who are not predisposed to such mindset – many people just cannot 'get' Dark Souls or progress far into it. As a consequence, the players who 'get' DS and are able to progress, are more probable to be inquisitive with what games give them, and it spreads to the lore as well: such players will read items descriptions, will look at architecture, will talk to people – not because they made to do so by the game design bludgeoning them into submission, but because this is the part of the game that also appeals to the same mindset as DS combat and exploration.

I'd say that the items of DS is part of exploration by themselves. The game nudges this slightly by giving most of the items strange names: what exactly is 'lighting resin' (why resin)? what is 'Lloyd's talisman' (who is Lloyd and what his talisman is about)? If these items were named '+lighting damage to weapons' and  'no-estus-recovery bomb' it would be a sign of the same fear of player-missing-content that plagues so many other games. Another point for the exploration is that some items also have additional, entirely undocumented uses (such as Lloyd's talisman putting mimics into sleep) which means that first time somebody discovers this use, this is somebody making a genuine discovery.

If to translate this approach back to tabletops, I'd say the about half of the lore should only be mentioned once and the rest just twice. Let players piece it all together if they are so inclined. Let them create headcanons. Don't create lore redundancies. As a DM or a setting creator go with a mindset that absolutely everything might be missed, and players should be able to interact with items in 'unscripted' ways.
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*established by The Alexandrian, here.
**although with experience and practice it is very possible to run through Dark Souls like it is DmC or Supermario game, I highly doubt that the first people who ever played Demon Souls were doing this. Now, when we know of 'FromSoftware style', and people have so much experience with DS and other such games, I think that the veterans will be able to speedrun/DmC their way even in brand-new FromSoftware game thanks to the all previous experience.

Lore layers:

I think there are about four layers of lore for Dark Souls: two in-game and two out-of game.

The most obvious and the major source of in-game lore is item descriptions (and by extension character presets in character generator). Although such descriptions are sometimes vague and almost always very concise, they are abundant, never lie and the only in-game lore that is given to players directly, along with the item, and made available at any time by the press of the button.*** Out of all of the lore layers this one is least missable because it features on the loading screens, although what descriptions are featured on the loading screens expands only after the player got the item or unlocked a higher area. I also place game cutscenes here because even skippable, they are so brief and so few that most people won't skip them, and also because cutscenes truthfully portray the actual state of events. 

The second lore layer to me is the environmental design. How buildings are built, what is engraved on the enemy armour, enemy placement, enemy movements, item placement and appearance, and so on. Some of such lore is obvious but most of it is missable unless the player really, really gets into this inquisitive mindset and runs around with figurative or even literal magnifying glass, looking and thinking about everything. How many people did notice at the first time playthrough that there are shards of Lordvessel in DS2 basement? I know I didn't, and I played DS2 the last of the three in the series, thinking myself lore-hunting veteran by that point.

Because this lore is always silent and visual, it is mostly here to fill – at least in the mind of the viewer – the missing details from the item descriptions. We might know of three Sealers from item description or dialogue but it is Crimson Armour set placement which tells the story of where one of them ended up dying. 

Both of these layers aren't easy to translate to the tabletops straight. Item descriptions could be done through manuals and game books (and I occasionally see this approach, often to the great effect), but what if the player gets a new item that isn't in the manual? Do they get a small paper with the text along with it? If such brief concise description is the result of lore, how can DM prepare to the multitude of questions the player character might be curious about? The environmental design in video games is very visual, but in tabletop it would be a bad form to create paragraph-long read-alongs, describing each nook of Grand Cathedral of Ulm so players might connect it with similar architecture from description of Pits of Ith. It is still possible to do but more, I think, through brief evocative language that conveys similar themes, feelings or impressions that through meticulous details. Another interesting way would be to change the method of description for related items or places (flowery purple prose for everything that connected to remains of baroque Sard Empire, laconic 'beige' prose for nomads of Ferlang, everything that is related to Kingdom of Dareth always references colour in some way, and so on) so players might get the connection through how the prose itself sounds and structured. It won't be easy, though, and in written books this can create a sense of lacking focus, while in an actual game it will a demanding task from DM to have a good improvisational skills or to do a lot of preparation.

Somewhere between first and second layer of in-game lore are NPC monologues and quests. I place them here because like the environment lore they are mostly missable, and also because, unlike item description, NPC can lie or mislead, and their stories might come or not come to fruition. But they are also source of more items (merchants especially), their quests add to the world, and they are so full of other details (look at Lautrec's armour alone) that, as soon as the player interacts with them, in any way, the player gets a wealth of information, as if from the item.

First out-of-game layer of lore are interviews, artbooks and datamining data. It is scarce but might provide some additional details, such as that Oswald used to be Black Knight Commander before becoming a pardoner. It is also vague, of dubious truthfulness, and sometimes creates more questions than it answers (why Oswald isn't burnt out like the rest of the Black Knights? Was he a Silver Knight Commander instead, before they became Black Knights, and the artbook is misleading? Or he survived the Demon War miraculously unburnt? Or he deserted straight from the battle?). I also place on this layer the meta-lore of Dark Souls as a series, such as the fact that Cycle of Fire is ending despite all efforts (which can be deduced by looking at the size of the flame in DS1 and DS3 fire endings), or Filianore's possible connection to Angel's Egg. It is a good place to get headcanon(s) and wild theories.

Second and the deepest out-of-game layer is not available to the player. This is what FromSoftware knows but, wisely, doesn't talk about. I don't know if they have a DS Bible Where Everything Is Explained, or the lore is actually very shallow, with the decisions are driven mostly by real-life mistakes, design limits and occurrences*~, or both. Was Gertrude's lore in Dark Souls 3 so vague because the royal family was suppressing this knowledge, or because the developers didn't have time to add it properly? We get glimpses of this layer in first out-of-game layer but, I think, if we are to see it in full it would be more of disappointment than of catharsis.

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***It is still difficult to explain in-world how Chosen Undead knows all of it. In my headcanon they either have some kind of psychometry, knowledge of absorbed souls or, in Bloodborne, reading the blood 'echo' of the blood-splattered item, which is basically the same thing.

*~Such as Gwyndolin being raised as a girl which happened because one of the game modellers mistakenly made his head a bit too large, and FromSoftware rolled with it.