Help Players Care About Your Lore

This month, I had my first Campaign Headquarters livestream on the channel, and it got off to a rocky start. I had some technical issues with the stream, and the video kept dropping out. But thanks to all of you who were in the chat live, I was able to adjust and restart with better success. So I want to start this blog entry by saying thank you to everyone who helped.

The topic we covered was one I hear often: what do you do when players don’t care about your lore?

As game masters, we love worldbuilding. We create pantheons, factions, histories, and maps. But players only connect when those details affect their characters and the choices they make in play.

Here are a few practical ways to bring lore into the game:

• NPC goals. Let history emerge in conversations. A monarch, mentor, or rival drops a name or reference. Call for a check so someone at the table can recognize it.
• Present consequences. An old feud blocks a road. A relic stirs in the wrong hands. Make history matter today.
• Backstories. Use a simple Character Prologue with prompts for homeland, family, ally, rival, and faction tie. Update it between campaigns so the world feels alive.
• Props and notes. A safehouse logbook with short entries from other adventurers makes lore tangible without lectures.

In my first long-form campaign, Relics of the Ancients, I tied lore to player backstories mid-campaign. In my current one, The Freelancers, I dropped the party into the past for a session. They walked the streets of a fallen empire and returned knowing secrets few others hold. Both approaches worked because the lore was playable.

Big takeaway: lore belongs at the table. Keep it brief, tie it to action, and let your players reshape it as the story unfolds.

If you want the full breakdown, including my time-travel setup and the recap workflow I use to track living lore, check out the edited video from the livestream.

Cheers,
Brian