So much lore

Coming up with lore for your story can be hard. Right now I'm in the process of writing an entirely new section for the The Paladin which necessitates the making of a few key decisions. At the moment I'm trying to put together my antagonist, their desires, their values, their motivations. I'm having a bit of trouble because the path I've chosen to take them down hasn't been fleshed out yet; I need more lore.

When you're fleshing out your lore, deciding if dragons breathe fire or if elves are immortal, you have a lot of decisions to make. One of the biggest, in my opinion, is what bits of popular lore to take as your own. There's more than enough established lore from popular stories and myths, and a good chunk of them contradict one another. Really, you have a smorgasbord of details to choose from, but that might actually be a bit much, at least for me. What should I go with? Which decisions benefit my story the most? Every decision about a species or race means that any character from that race is going to be affected. The vampire that dies in sunlight is going to treat it far differently from the one that sparkles in it.

How close do I need to keep to common lore for the audience to accept that my werewolves are werewolves? How far can I stray before my demons aren't demons? And which depiction of a witch is the right one to draw from?! So many questions and so few answers. I can hear my alternate self condescendingly answering from across the veil: "Whatever makes the most sense for your story. Whatever gives you the best experience to share with your reader." Man... alternate Matias is a pretentious jerk. None of that helps me figure out which one to use!

So that's where I am at the moment: lost in the stacks of established and contradictory lore about a myriad of characters. All because I know my antagonist needs to have a clear path before I can design their character. Yeesh. Well, once this is figured out, the fun part begins. Until then, I guess I have more YouTube videos to watch and Wikipedia pages to read.

​Be Excellent to Each Other