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draft intro to RS lore

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AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

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Concluding Thoughts

By restricting myself to the end of the 5th age with the first official map of RuneScape 2, I’ve barely ventured beyond the lore as it stood at the transition from RuneScape Classic. There were 50 quests then, which more or less presented players with three stages of achievement: gaining access to the Champions’ Guild, the Heroes’ Guild, and the Legends’ Guild. I think there’s value to introducing the lore by focusing on the largely local situations and problems addressed by these quests: It provides an interesting and mostly unchanging foundation from which to make sense of what comes next.

One can expand upon this foundation by many routes: First, by expanding one’s geographic scope to include new lands and their accompanying races and stories and characters and gods. This was more or less the arc of RuneScape 2. We got Morytania, Fremennik Lands, Troll Lands, Tirannwn, lots more desert and islands, Daemonheim, etc. And we got longer storylines, and global problems. In my opinion, the Mahjarrat storyline is chief among these - maybe the most interesting achievement of RuneScape.

One can spend so much time simply exploring the characters found on a list of Mahjarrat, or a list of gods, or by exploring a list of races or elder artifacts - I think this is a lot of what lorehounds did for many years.

08-Jun-2020 16:35:25 - Last edited on 08-Jun-2020 17:06:09 by AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

Posts: 1,792 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Next, one can expand upon the foregoing further by moving to interplanar stories and conflicts: the cosmology of the elder goddesses and Guthix’s efforts to keep them sleeping; the creations of Mah and the mystery of her health; the stories of gods and of the dragonkin; lists of worlds and the characters and stories that accompany them; and most prominently the events of the 6th age and new efforts to prevent the next Revision. This is more or less the arc of RuneScape 3.

Certainly, RuneScape 1, 2, and 3 were not intended as periods of lore-development, but I think this three-fold division works. In each, roughly, our character addresses problems on a different scale: local vs global vs interplanar/universal. Personally, I find storytelling at the widest scale exhausting, and I’d like to see a new phase of focus on deepening the existing lore, tying it up with new elegance. But I think all of it is fun, and can serve as a foundation for many more years of interesting lore.

08-Jun-2020 16:37:02

Jaekob Caed
Apr Member 2011

Jaekob Caed

Posts: 7,173 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
Cool idea! While the game does a pretty great job of establishing the lore even from the start, there are some people that still get confused by it so this could help! ~
Jaekob Caed
: Scribe, Scholar and Prince of the Kingdom of Heaven ~
The Jagex I once loved is dead... A THREAD

11-Jun-2020 01:11:22

A Mighty

A Mighty

Posts: 2,337 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile
This is a good start, like you said. However, it does need to be expanded before it can be considered a proper guide. But you seem to know exactly how to go about this, so I have faith you'll write an amazing guide! :D

One small typo: It's Varrock, not Varrok.
To those cursed by war and pest, Come into the light of Armadyl and rest. This is the law of Armadyl.

12-Jun-2020 22:09:03

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