Lost lore you just couldn't fit in.

[Leonotis]

Do any of you have lore you’ve built(worldbuilding, history, or secret character details) that you just haven’t been able to fit into your story?

Like… the kind of thing that’s too good to delete, but every time you try to weave it in, it just doesn’t fit the flow of the narrative?

For me I have an entire secret war between Mermaids and the surface world that I swore would be pivotal but now I'm almost 200,000 words into my story and it still hasn't come up.

 

[ThisAdamGuy]

In The Gray Ranger, the dominant religion worships a deity who came down from heaven to reinstate the natural order when chaos was on the verge of destroying the world, so they put a lot of emphasis on keeping things orderly, everything being exactly where and how it should be, etc. I never got the chance to mention it, but their biggest holiday involves the whole family getting together to clean their house. Imagine entire towns being decorated, families making long trips to visit each other, huge meals being cooked, and kids being too excited to sleep the night before, all for the equivalent of spring cleaning.

Yeah, it was a pretty boring religion.

 

[AnEmberOfSundown]

Magic users known as Shadow Singers, or Duvcanái, are the central focus of my series. They have an intrinsic connection to primordial entropic forces and experience them as constant, low-level background “screaming”.

Sensory deprivation is torture to them. Without normal sensory input, the “Shadows” come through even stronger.

 

[Enkiari]

There is a whole ass advanced Empire I created with a bunch of Summoned Heroes that... won't come up in the story at all since the kingdom the events take place in doesn't border it... The best I could do was insert a rumor or two.

 

[AnEmberOfSundown]

In The Gray Ranger, the dominant religion worships a deity who came down from heaven to reinstate the natural order when chaos was on the verge of destroying the world, so they put a lot of emphasis on keeping things orderly, everything being exactly where and how it should be, etc. I never got the chance to mention it, but their biggest holiday involves the whole family getting together to clean their house. Imagine entire towns being decorated, families making long trips to visit each other, huge meals being cooked, and kids being too excited to sleep the night before, all for the equivalent of spring cleaning.

Yeah, it was a pretty boring religion.

I feel like that would make a great anticlimax after an extended setup. Like the MC talks to their unknowing friends about their memories of this great holiday and they all visit one yer and get handed...brooms.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Lots of it. 40+ years worth. The world has been destroyed and rebuilt at least once. went from zero to one to two to three back to one moon (with reasons for all of these changes).

 

[Eldoria]

If I were to connect your two threads that you created at the same time, I'd guess that your story isn't achieving the lore you want because you're constantly focusing on honing the 'weak MC' through rigorous training just to defeat a boss in 200k words. If you remove the 'training' element, you can cut that cost and narrate the lore you want to write. So, write a clear conflict, don't keep writing a plot of rigorous training just to defeat a boss that makes readers yawn.

 

[Elmir_Arch-Ham_of_Omega]

Ex-Villainess Philia's post-isekai flashbacks where she's pulling a Hannibal Lecter on annoying schoolmates/faculty, Considering it's a world of demihumans, she uses the appropriate recipes i.e. hamburgers from minotaurs, prosciutto for orcs, sahuagin ceviche, bird-folk teriyaki, etc.

 

[MFontana]

That depends heavily on what classifies as "Lost Lore" in a shared universe; because what happens in one story in the universe isn't necessarily relevant to the others; and by which perspective the lore is considered "lost".

But if I were to try and narrow things down, I'd probably have to go with the war against the last Demon King (who literally was an Archfiend, not the usual Isekai use of the term).

A small group of heroes (whose names are lost to history) were able to defeat him in a desperate battle to save the world. (One of my TTRPG campaigns).
The descendants of those heroes went on to form seven of the nations that are presently part of the world (Elaria) on the continent of Caelthera.

None of this will make it into the story I'm currently writing, but is a part of the world's history.

 

[Leonotis]

If I were to connect your two threads that you created at the same time, I'd guess that your story isn't achieving the lore you want because you're constantly focusing on honing the 'weak MC' through rigorous training just to defeat a boss in 200k words. If you remove the 'training' element, you can cut that cost and narrate the lore you want to write. So, write a clear conflict, don't keep writing a plot of rigorous training just to defeat a boss that makes readers yawn.

No my story doesn't have a training arc or weak MC. I just have a lot of lore I created that doesn't fit in the story I'm telling. I'm actually brainstorming writing another story just to incorporate some of lost lore I have.