How to make lore engaging in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and TTRPGs

There’s a question that comes up in the Tabletop RPG spaces and seems to never go away. The question being “how do I make my players interact with the lore?” There are many videos and blog posts on the question, but I want to answer it specifically through the lens of playing in pre-existing settings. Specifically- my favorite game *Warhammer fantasy roleplay* Warhammer Old World lore is amazing. I has everything- The Empire, Bretonian knights, chaos daemons, Skaven, LIZARD PEOPLE! Weird things

that live in the forest, desperate people turning to the occult, apocalyptic atmosphere of late-medieval Europe. Warhammer gives the conscious and unconscious fears of the common people a physical form. By the way, this channel will be mostly about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, as I am, kinda, a one-system-guy. If you are not into that- still, stick around. This video and many others on here will be system-neutral, so you will still get something interesting or useful for your games. There’s a wor

d that is used for all of this information in the Warhammer community and beyond - “fluf”. Something written on the sidelines of the rules that provide some atmosphere as well as context for the struggles of the players at the table. All this stuff is really, just fluff. A lot of the people in the Warhammer community do basically ignore all of that. They don’t give a damn about the intricacies of the drama that spans millennia and just want to play a game. I DIDN’T PAY A FUCKING FORTUNE FOR THES

E PLASTIC TOY SOLDIERS TO LISTEN TO YOU RAMBLE ABOUT MAGNUS THE RED NOT BEING TRAITOR! ROLL THE DAMN DICE, ALEX! But what about roleplaying? You can’t really ignore the world, because you are playing in one. Worldbuilding is important to how we play these games in this day and age and why play WFRP if you are not planning to world build? It is impossible! The world and its reality are interwoven into the mechanics of the game - deadly fights, insanity, dangerous magics, ratcatchers, and small do

gs - horrible things. But let me get one thing straight- lore is not writing. Matt Colvile, who is a great DM and a YouTuber that I am pretty sure you are aware of, said a very important thing in one of his videos while discussing worldbuilding. “The reason you are hooked on dming has nothing to do with the reason they are hooked on playing. You may really like the worldbuilding. You may really like the challenge of spending hours at home drawing maps and coming up with names and an NPCs and ord

ers of knights and the history of the world. You may love that. But that has nothing to do with the thing the players have shown up for. The players want to roll dice and push led. The players want to kick down doors and kill orks. So the tick is, and this is the subject of this video - how to take all that nonsense that you come up with. I think anybody anybody can come up with a nonsense. The trick is then presenting it from the players in a dramatic way.” Well, what does it mean and how do I

do that, you may ask? Make lore serve your purposes as a GM or a player and not the other way around. Don’t try sticking as close to the books as if it is some sort of sacred script. Find things that you think is cool and put it in your game. Don’t bombard players with stories - make them play through those stories. Make the players stumble into a cult that worships a strange and bloodthirsty god, or get down into the sewers to avoid the city guard and make them face the horrors that lurk in the

shadows. There’s enough there in the Old World that you and your friends will find cool, so go ahead and have fun - these are your toys. But there’s another thing that you can do with the lore. It is to remind players through the game that this world is real. The mere existence of that huge wiki gives you, as a GM a weapon - legitimacy. You are able to present your adventure as something that exists in time and space. That village that you are in can be found on the map, that language that you

all speak is spoken by a specific nation, the perils that the heroes are facing has context in the wider world. The world you are playing in is real. How does one give context to everyday adventuring? Well, try Draw from the history of the world- the Great War against Chaos, the crusades, old emperors and their deeds or the events that are ongoing- like the invasion of Archaon to provide a perspective on the actions of players. The work of the GM is not to create worlds and genealogies of noble

houses and hope players will start asking questions- it is to put the players right in the middle of it all and give them an adventure. In my games, there’s usually one-two people in the group that go and read stuff on their own, but the drama and the context usually engage everyone at the table all the same. I wanted to tell my players a story of Marienburg. A giant trading cosmopolitan port that is run not by blood rite, but by trading families. For the context, it was my Norska game, where th

e players are 3 literal Vikings and one Kurgan Shaman. So what did I do? I made it about a story about a man - Johanan Pust. A man who was involved in shady dealings, not in any important way, but as a pawn in a greater game, that goes far up to one of the richest families of the City - members of the Directorate. But he was found out. And people, who are interested in getting the family out of the council and taking their place, wanted the man alive to question, forge documents and stir the pot

enough to make the family the man worked for too exposed and either leave or pressure the rest of the Directors make them leave. My players worked for people who were working with him before, but he disappeared without a trace, so they were hunting down Johanan Pust for two sessions all over the city, meeting all sorts of characters while finally getting to the man himself. But their fight was ultimately pointless. They got what they were asking for and the deal was kept, but poor Johanan was a

rrested, framed for a bunch of crimes on a false pretense and was hanged in a public square with people cheering this on. After the players learned what was going on behind the scenes people felt different things - one of the players, Vera, said that it is a shame that it happened like that, while another, Max, responded by saying “We should not to fiddle with the politics of Marienburg. Their business is their business. We got what we were here after, and that is what is important” Do you see w

hat happened then? Not only I succeeded in making Vera pity Johanan, but I also made the setting work for storytelling purposes. The other Player responded with lore- universe- infused motivation - I don’t want to play Marienburger’s games! PCs were aliens in this world - barbarians in the city. Outsiders that bumped into a political game that was unraveling in front of their eyes. And each reacted - engaged - in a different way. This is when I knew I succeeded in doing what I set out to do. The

shaman player, by the way, had more fun making friends with Beaky, a resident pelican at Pelican Perch Tavern. And that’s cool! By the way, Beaky and Pelican Perch is also in the lore! The tavern is even mentioned in Felix and Gotrek! And my player engaged with the lore by feeding Beaky and sharing a drink with him! Yeah.. that is also canon. Beaky is, like, ver yinto drinking beers that are left unattended and, like, shaman basically shared a drink with a pelican. Don’t think it is very health

y for a bird. Don't get you a birds beers. But yeah that's canon. Look it up. It's pretty cool. In conclusion-Use lore to set the scene, use lore to give context, use lore to create drama, use lore. Don’t let the lore use you. Thank you very much for checking out this video. I will be producing more stuff O will be talking a lot more about lore. I have a lot of stuff planned for the future. This is my first attempt at this so I'd appreciate some feedback and support share this video, leave a lik

e, subscribe to the channel, press the bell for notifications and by the way to make the deal a bit more sweet - know that I'm basically sitting on the giant stash of like Warhammer fantasy role-play materials. It's tons and tons of PDFs and I'm willing to share them with you so I am including a link to PDF that I used as a resource book for my Marienburg games. It's a giant PDF that is impossible to read as an actual Book. It is basically all sorts of locations and characters that were mentione

d by official sources after the release of the first source book. It is just basically a compendium of characters and cool places and all sorts of different stuff. So to give you some cool stuff from the get go - I love the character Hasan. I use him in almost every game in Marienburg. But I sort of expanded him, making him like a fixer and if you need something in the city, if you need something to buy or to get rid of something- you must find Hasan. He has connections all over the Old World. S

o check out the PDF and DM me if you find it usefull if you enjoyed it. So follow me on Twitter and Instagram @emlEugene on everywhere. Have a nice one! Bye- Bye!