Lore is the accumulated background knowledge of a fictional world: its histories, myths, cosmologies, genealogies, natural laws, and cultural details that are not necessarily foregrounded in any single narrative but provide depth and coherence to the world as a whole. Lore is what a world knows about itself, whether or not any particular story tells it.
The term is most commonly used in fantasy literature and game design, where it denotes the body of established facts about a setting that participants are expected to treat as given. Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings, the codex entries in a video game, the background material in a tabletop role-playing game sourcebook—all are lore.
Lore stands in a specific relationship to canon and continuity. Canon determines which lore is authoritative. Continuity determines whether the lore is internally consistent. Lore itself is the substance—the material that canon and continuity operate on.
In the Relational Worlding Grammar, lore is treated with deliberate suspicion: “Don’t hide worldbuilding in lore. Surface it in trace.” This reflects a design stance in which a world’s depth should emerge from the behavior of its systems and the residue of its events, rather than from a repository of background facts to be consulted. The Reproducible Paracosm framework is agnostic about this distinction: lore, if it constrains the world’s models, is part of the paracosmic sketch’s constraint set .