One of the projects I spent the summer months working on was Elysium, a procedurally-generated dungeon crawl set in a post-apocalyptic world. It's all about religious faith and body horror, a dungeon crawl of sheer endurance in which the unfortunate explorers delve deeper and deeper into the Elysium Vault. I love it. I only really worked on it in the manner of layout and wrote very minimal actual content, only providing maybe one page for one of the characters (that being Markus), as well as some ideas for monsters and mechanics. My role was in setting out all the work Kenny had written into its final layout.
This gave me a different view on the project, being more so a 'tester' than a 'developer', that being the role I usually slot myself in to. I was not writing the lore or mechanics, and was more so observing - perhaps adding or suggesting a little bit here and there - and as such the world develop autonomous of me.
I really, really like Elysium's worldbuilding. The religious horror, the grotesque monsters, the slow unravelling of the company that made them all told through vague descriptions of the Elysium Vault's timeline. It creates a different feeling, I think: for the world of Elysium exists only in the dungeon.
The Elysium Vault - the 'dungeon' - is the driving force behind all of Elysium. It is what the game exists for, its ultimate setting and ultimate purpose. The village of Aruykeri (in which the explorers may rest and pray) is only dedicated a single double-page spread of the project's 40 pages. The world of Elysium is the dungeon, as the dungeon pushes forward its gameplay, mechanics and lore. The mechanics tied to the lore, such as the prayer-answering Tabernacles, the Wires and the importance of Faith, exist to perpetuate the exploration of the dungeon: to interact with these mechanics is to interact with the lore of the game, and that - I think - is what makes it effective. The lore is tied directly to the dungeon, and the dungeon is all there is.
What exposition there is remains to be modular, and I think this is a positive: there is a whole story for Elysium, one that details the timeline of events and degredation of the facility and its occupants. It gives further descriptions of the monsters in a vague catalogue-like manner, explaining how they came to be. Every layer of the megadungeon has its own set of documents that can be discovered and read to uncover what occured to the facility. Each is maybe two sentences long at most.
The documents also serve to be a currency: take them back to Aruykeri and you can get patched up and exchange them for medicine. It's up to the players for as to how much or how little they actually interact with this lore; when I was testing the game with friends, not knowing much about the setting or the history, I was always on the lookout for them. I was curious to know what happened here, but at the same time, the storytelling vector of the documents is entirely modular: if someone didn't care for reading them, they can be disregarded, used only as currency.
I suppose my take-away from Elysium is the relationship in which the lore of the world has with the mechanics and gameable setting. I'm never a fan of pages upon pages of lore and history to read, particularly when it's just interjected as paragraphs of disorganised text in the midst of whatever book I'm reading. That isn't to say I hate worldbuilding or lore; quite the contrary. I love having exposition and history and something interesting to think about, but I hate - as Josh McCrowell calls it - 'homework' that should dictate how I play the game. It's just not my style: I don't want to read paragraphs of history to know how to play my character. I want to play my character because I find their design or theming interesting: I want to jump into the world and not have to worry about conventions or traintracks to follow; I find that suffocating, not envigorating.
The lore of Elysium is in opposition to this, not only in its brevity and interpretability but in its connection to the wider setting and mechanics of the game. Elysium is a dungeoncrawl that knows it is a dungeoncrawl. To interact with and learn about its lore is directly beneficial in the gameplay of the dungeoncrawl. Not only do I find this rewarding in a gameplay sense, but I also found that it helped to increase my interest in the world itself, localised as it was to the single location of the dungeon.
-Francis.
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