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Caspus  ·  3216 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What game's lore fascinates you and what about it interests you so much?

The Elder Scrolls.

Don't even get me started. This game series has captivated me for thousands upon thousands of hours between the gameplay, story, modding, apocrypha, and chatting with developers. But the lore and world building done by Bethesda? I have yet to encounter a video game world more richly detailed, inspired, and beautiful than that found in the Aurbis.

The entire world is the creation of a sleeping god, whose Dream begets further Dreams born of murder and marriage. Inside we have the conceptualization of the subgradiation of the divine "spheres" and the importance placed on mortality (the "letter written in uncertainty"), the notion of waking dreamers and erasure of those who realize the truth of their existence, the clash between order and chaos and their place in the "prison" of the Arena.

It's Aladdin caves levels of nonsense that is just so wonderful to see and simultaneously frustrating to not see more emphasis placed on. I always find it difficult to explain my captivation with this series without coming off as a hyperventilating lunatic. You have the inversion of Tolkein's 4th Era with the decline of Man in place of the Elves, you have the concept of emulation of divinity leading to divine power ("walk like the gods until they walk like you"), you have the great tragedy of the pantheon both old and new (from Magnus' lost daughter to the hubris of the Tribunal). You're living in a world where a prostitute becomes advisor to a warchief and uses a divine understanding of the universe to rewrite hir history to the point where a hermaphroditic bug god gave birth to itself in the shell of a dwarven similacrum of his mother and created a bible with actual magic written into it. You have dancing apes breaking time to tear a god in half, to cats that can climb to the moons, to a nation of black imperialists who had a sword technique so potent it could split an atom and sink a continent.

It's weird and vulgar and strange and brutal and wonderful and poetic and mundane all at once and I love it with every fiber of my being.