'Emergent Lore' in collaborative world-building
Epiphany, collaborative world-building, and that classic question, "What is the 'Elden Ring' of RPGs?"

I see the question is asked all of the time: Is there a game like Elden Ring, but for TTRPGs? We get this around every pop-cultural phenomenon — “Is there a game for like the show/game/movie I just watched/played/saw?” but the Elden Ring question comes up a lot, and I think is often answered poorly.
I believe there is an answer to this question. It’s obvious to me: It’s Trophy Gold, or rather any of the Trophy games.
I’m not even talking about the aesthetics and genre; the moldy, haunting grandiosity, the crumbling Celt-ish creepiness that normally draws the comparison between Elden Ring and Trophy, what with its starlight serpents, babbling grafted god prophets, gallows hills, and Old Lost Kalduhr. Similar vibes, but still, you can’t capture Elden Ring through a Pinterest board or proper nouns.
And also, I don’t think that when people are looking for an “RPG like Elden Ring,” they’re looking for an analog to the “player skill” aspect of Elden Ring, wherein you learn a series of timed moves and ripostes to bring down a challenging foe with practice. Brad Kerr of Between 2 Cairns once said, I believe correctly, that Elden Ring has more in common here with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater than anything like a “roleplaying game.” The impolite truth is often that roleplaying games are just a very poor medium to chase this particular high, in the same way that a roleplaying game will never be a platformer or a rhythm game.
What I think most folks want out of the Elden Ring game is the mysterious encounter that curious players have with the lore, dripped out in diegetic fragments, hidden away in pieces of poetry and item descriptions. Exploring Elden Ring feels like bathing in a landscape whose mysteries are too time-worn to neatly index, and whose scale is too grand to take in at once. In lieu of wikis or the experience-annihilating deluge of lore videos, players are only left to discover luminous fragments and create a mosaic of their own devising.
This, my fellow TTRPG sickos, is something we can accomplish. Let’s call this particular experience…
Emergent Lore
Emergent Lore is fiction from our game world that begins as disparate, seemingly-unconnected bits of information that, through accumulation, imagination, and intuition, begins to coalesce into canon.
Emergent Lore thrives in game practices like collaborative world-building or anti-canon worlds, wherein we don’t refer to a hard body of lore for our games, but attempt to mold one together. There is an important difference. Emergent lore isn’t simply the “Yes, and” compilation of additional parts, but a natural way fragments of fiction begin to form a complete picture, sometimes in a way that feels out of our ability to control or manipulate.
This brings us a new, important ingredient of emergent lore: epiphanic discovery. The epiphanic discovery is a moment of dawning mutual realization among players that certain disparate elements must be connected.
So: The players find a bunch of old tomes on dead languages during their heist — oh, that must mean the library’s owner has been studying the old ruins outside of town! Or, a murder victim had a paternity test in her purse when the body was discovered. Oh, she must be the secret daughter of that one dowager, which explains the empty photo frames in the old lady’s house! That must be it!
Emergent lore has a mysterious and exciting quality, and it is one of the best ways a TTRPG can give players a feeling of exploration and discovery outside of a GM simply handing out trivia from a pre-written sourcebook. Emergent lore has a noetic quality that insists on its own realness beyond our own agreement. Once it is said, you can’t stop seeing it. It takes a life of its own.
There is plenty of mutual world-building that does not rely on emergent lore. Ben Robbins’ games, Microscope being the most famous, is a game that is a “Yes, and” game, or a “Yes, but” game that asks players not to over-collaborate, but rather to take turns building unilaterally. Jason Cordova, perhaps the great high priest of emergent lore games, has tools like Paint-the-Scene questions that mutually build an imaginary space without expecting contributions to take on an emergent life of their own.
Let’s bring it back to Trophy to see how a game can build this right in.
In the Trophy games, backgrounds and adventures are regularly throwing evocative characters or locations at you, gently telegraphing their meaning, but never taking the final say from the players. You might generate a character whose goal is to “Seize absolute control of Kormoran’s Wheel.” What the hell is Kormoran’s Wheel? It will emerge.
Here is the guidance from both Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold, referencing terms buried throughout the character creation process:
What is a Beastbitten or a Faeborn? Is a Snake a smooth-talking charlatan, or a literal serpent-person? What happens at Countess Shima’s Forbidden Festival? Who is Cyrus, and why do you need to take their place at the Earthen Council? What even is the Earthen Council? A player who selects one of these options should feel free to make up an explanation for them, either during character creation or during the course of the game. […]
It’s much more important to make something memorable and immediately useful at the table—that everyone is invested in the story and feels able to expand on it during the game.
At first, it might seem that this lore is just “made up by the player.” But to hear the testimony of players at my table, emergent lore takes on the quality of revealed truth — something that “couldn’t” have been any other way.
Another example: A group of mine was using The Perilous Void last week to build a setting for some sci-fi games. One player generated a species of giant mollusks that are great technological innovators. Another player generated a group of octopus people. Someone said “Oh, maybe they’re from the same planet as the mollusks. Maybe they work together!” Suddenly another person said, “Yeah, the mollusk people are like the brains of the operation, the octopi are the diplomats and translators!”
If you’ve ever seen this sort of collaboration take on a life of its own, you can see it in the face and the body. Players lean forward, their backs straighten, and their eyes grow bright. Yes, of course. That must be it.
My first exposure to emergent lore, personally, came from solo play, specifically the work of Shawn Tomkin of Ironsworn and Starforged fame. Without the GM, the emergent lore experience generated by oracles and keywords is the best opportunity you have for enlivening the imagination.
There will be some who respond that emergent lore can never replace the feeling granted by “hard” lore, a fully indexed and taxonomized reality, represented by either words on a page or good ol’ GM say-so. In this view, mysteries are simply an agglomeration of withheld data. It’s just some stuff you don’t know.
To those who believe they can only find what I often heard as “satisfaction” in exploring these predetermined canons, I say: There is another land, with firm terrain and mossy, worn-down, toppled stones, scattered with fragments. An entirely mythic landscape. Legends will animate before your eyes. There is no guidebook to that place! It is only for those who journey there.
Some games that encourage emergent lore:
Trophy Dark, Trophy Gold
Carved From Brindlewood games, specifically the way they resolve mysteries.
Collaborative world-building games like Ben Robbins’ games, or Dialect.
Some Forged in the Dark games like Bump in the Dark.
Games with either life-path or bonds-based character creation processes, wherein it’s often the case that players, as they develop bonds with each other, have sudden mutual realizations about relationships between characters.
Solo games that use oracles, such as Mythic GME, Ironsworn/Starforged, the Strider supplement to The One Ring.
I’m sure there are others. Please share you experience with emergent lore and epiphanic discovery in the comments!
I'm interested to see the discussion around this post, though I suppose I can predict some of that and what's more important about the post is if pick up these games and try them.
Good article