Mirror Your Audience

In many stores, especially fantasy, there is a token character who follows the plot around asking questions everyone in-world should already know the answers to, but since thee audience won't know it; and we can't expect them to pick up on intricate details or political positions before some characters are introduced (it also is used often to add foreboding to a nemesis or antagonist, they'd seem a bit underwhelming if they only appeared at the end with no explanation as to that they were an evil villain who controls small island nations).

In The Lord of the Rings this duty was filled by the Hobbits, small folk who didn't adventure or get much news from beyond their borders, they needed to have all the customs and history explained to them, you may have noticed that the hobbits were all split up and got sent to all the different major countries Rohan, Gondor and Mordor, this while helping the plot, allowed Tolkin to give as much back-story to those countries as he wanted, because the Hobbits were inquisitive and knew very little.

A more recent and somewhat glaring version of this is in Guild Wars 2 (yes again, more Guild Wars, it's just really good an example OK), where one of the playable races is this trope. The developers of Guild Wars 2, Arenanet, set their second game 250 years after the events of the first four campaigns (six campaigns if you count the Beyond content for Prophecies and Factions), and that's a lot of lore and story details that new players are going to be missing, some of which is need to know stuff, so how do they explain all this story and lore to the player without it seeming like a history lesson? Easy: have a group of people who ask questions and are generally inquisitive. Enter the Sylvari. A race of plant people who are born fully grown out of a tree and upon awakening have only a general feeling that there is trouble in the world and they kinda need to help fix it. Inquisitive and child-like, the Sylvari are the perfect tool for explaining to the player any need to know lore or history.

But that's not the only way of telling story and lore surreptitiously to an audience, again in Guild Wars 2, we have the Norn, a race of essentially: Super Vikings, who's favourite past time as a whole is telling stories of their great battles and challenges. What better way to tell the player about a rather difficult foe than have a ten foot wall of muscle tell them how he battled with the creature for hours, fighting tooth and claw, and eventually ended the fight in a draw. You might have second thoughts about wandering the wilderness with such a fierce beastie on the prowl. To add extra atmosphere you could add some warning signs about the foe or some tracks, claw marks on trees, it's all about reinforcing an idea.

Guild Wars 2 comes out in a few days now, let's see if it stands up to the level of story telling I expect of it.