What is Ultimate Lore? Since we're talking about games, Ultimate Lore is clearly interactive lore, i.e. lore that the players have made, not the designers; i.e. what I like to call Dynamic Lore, i.e. not lore, since the entire definition of lore is narrative, which is by definition non-interactive.
It is clear that Dynamic Lore is the ultimate because it makes the world feel real and alive, instead of fake and plasticky as with regular gaming. There are however two huge problems with it:
1. Most groups—players and GMs—suck at weaving cool stories, so whatever lore they create will suck. For them, good old-fashioned Static Lore that they bought from a store will always work best.
2. Even great groups however can't produce enough lore to adequately fill out the sprawling settings that the best modern roleplaying games utilize. So they must still rely overwhelmingly on store-bought Static Lore.
The solution seems to be to employ good groups and MANY of them in a single world, so that they may provide each other's lore. This in fact we tried in Battlegrounds for the first few years, with four teams of 4 players each operating in fairly close proximity (same planet, same continent pretty much).
The results? Better than any other group's ever but still underwhelming.
The reason? Roleplaying campaigns move extremely slowly, especially the massive, hyper-complex ones that Cult Games Redmond (aka Paizo) produces. This is because almost every hour of every day has to be simulated, and sometimes even every minute or second. Add to this that the teams are hundreds to thousands of miles apart and you must wait for the consequences of their actions to propagate across these vast distances, and the end result is that you could be playing for many months if not years before some cool cross-campaign effects appear, let alone actual cross-campaign interaction. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome when this happens and unlike anything you've ever experienced in gaming, but it happens so rarely that the naysayers are almost justified in asking "What's the point?" For them, setting this up is too much trouble for the payout, and though that's not true for me, I have to admit I almost see their point.
The solution?
Multilayer Genre Fusion™ technology that I designed, developed and coded in machine language in Notepad.
You know how some advanced graphics rendering techniques only render at full resolution and detail wherever the player's eyes focus, while at the edges of his vision everything is rendered much more cheaply to save on processing power?
That.
I wrote the code and the engine that does precisely that—not solely for graphics—but for entire game engines, game designs, game rules and game genres. And the names I gave to these groundbreaking programs are Master of Combat and Master of Heroes.
Master of Heroes operates at the level of days, so it's extremely processing-efficient and therefore can simulate with ease hundreds of heroes and villains and parties tearing up and down the world and causing all the events that lore is made of. Moreover, the kingdom-running mode operates even more efficiently at the level of months so as to finally render dynamic entire planets' societies.
Adding to that, my Master of Combat engine facilitates extreme zoom-in to key hotspots across the world where key events can be played out in full roleplaying detail when the players' "eyes" focus on them, so to speak, with thousands of one-shot scenarios popping off all across the multiverse and affecting ongoing roleplaying adventures and campaigns, all the while being affected by them.
And to cap it all off? Game Master Meshing™ technology that I again coded in machine language in Notepad adds infinite scalability to the above for infinite heroes and parties interacting in a single world via the processing power of infinite GMs. (Programmers' Server Meshing technology, that you may have heard of touted in recent years, is merely a subset of my tech since what programmers call a "server" is merely a dumbed-down Game Master, so Server Meshing was plagiarized from my work, as is the habit of programmers. I was in Monaco playing roulette and wrote down the inspiration for the tech on a napkin, and Chris Roberts who was sitting next to me copied it off while I went to the bathroom. And that's how my tech made it into his game.)
But I go even further and add bespoke mechanics wherever possible and appropriate throughout the world. For example the upcoming boardgame, Builders of Baldur's Gate is "A city-building game from acclaimed designer Matthew Dunstan" where "you are the head of a powerful family in the iconic city." This Ultimate Editions adapts to work with every fantasy city across the entire Battlegrounds when a player manages to become the head of a powerful family.
Or take the 2023 boardgame Pathfinder Revolution! which is itself an adaptation of the Steve Jackson original Revolution! for Pathfinder's city-state of Korvosa during the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path.
It begins as a spark—whispered words in a tavern, a slogan scrawled in a sordid alley, a quiet conversation in one of the great halls of power. It can sweep through neighborhoods like a fire, taking over entire cities with a rapidity that can scarcely be believed. Rulers may fear it, and the populace may hope to control it, but kings and paupers alike can be consumed by it. This powerful force has many names, but it's most commonly known as . . . Revolution!
So let's say a couple of players from the adventure-strategy layer move some of their heroes and assets/gold into Korvosa during the revolution, or outright buy rival Korvosan factions in the Battlegrounds Store. Then suddenly the situation in the city goes from a 4-player roleplaying campaign to 6-player mix between roleplaying and adventure-strategy, where each layer affects the other and characters and heroes can even outright switch between layers depending on circumstances. If for example there is a casualty in the campaign, a hero might step in to replace him, not out of a spawn closet as usual, but out of the 4X layer he had been operating in for many turns, seamlessly filling the vacancy and even changing completely the player dynamic with the replacement not merely of a character but even of the player controlling him, so that instead of character death—or incapacitation—being a bother that must be fixed ASAP to continue the campaign as usual, it becomes a riveting development that increases immersion instead of lowering it. This way we can also accommodate characters going off on compelling tangents/side-quests or even breaking up the party entirely, and for good. All these developments are rightly feared and forcefully avoided in traditional GMRPG campaigns because they can easily derail and even destroy them, but with the Multilayer Genre Fusion™ technology that I designed and coded they become mere opportunities for new twists and turns in the ever-complexifying drama that only Ultimate Edition can generate.
And of course the above revolution mechanics will be adapted to work in any fantasy government across the multiverse that has been sufficiently destabilized by the actions of PCs or NPCs, whether via roleplaying or adventure-strategy developments. Remember also that in Civ, a period of anarchy is always the result of any change in government. And now we have the mechanics for it, and deeper than in any Civ.
But even beyond fantasy settings, bespoke mechanics adapted from boardgames, wargames and the like will be injected everywhere. Just earlier today for example I learned of a new Risk adaptation called Risk: Dune that came out last year and that would be a terrific addition to the Dune RPG Adventures in the Imperium.
Alien has half a dozen boardgames at least, and even Blade Runner has a couple. All these will be purchased, studied, dissected and analyzed, then seamlessly incorporated into the ultimate game engine that is Alex Kierkegaard's Ultimate Edition in order to power and fully flesh out both the mechanics and the lore—the now-interactive Dynamic Lore—of the ultimate game and artwork, Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds.
