Talk Trio - New Player Lore Guide

[triogenix]

Hi. I'm once again reworking the new player lore guide. Learning from previous attempts, this time I want to get more community feedback while the page is still in its rough draft period, as I am a lore writer and will inherently have a different perspective than the person who this page is actually designed for. This topic exists as a place on the forums to give such feedback, recommendations and similar.

Also I'm splitting up the New Player Lore guide into the New Player Lore Guide and a Setting Summary. The goal here is for the new player lore guide to be the BARE MINIMUM of information needed in terms of lore to hop on the server, while the setting summary goes more into depth on the the politics, worldbuilding, and other large-scale parts of the setting, as the latter parts are "opt-in" lore that can be considered functionally irrelevant to a new player. I'm still working on the setting summary page, so for now, here's just the refurbished new player lore guide page to give feedback on.

https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php/Sandbox-Scarcity:NewPlayerPublic

 

[Mr.Popper]

Thanks for the sneak peek! I like the idea of the Setting Summary as a "reference book" for the aspiring new player and I look forward to reading it as well. With that in mind, I'm going into this with the idea that the new player guide should be as condensed as possible, though of course everyone has a different metric for that.

I'll try to be broad with these to highlight the thought process behind the things I like: 

• The megacorp profiles are good and informative. I remember when I was a new player I was overwhelmed by all the options and tried to default to either NanoTrasen or independent for simplicity, but these descriptions would have given me a good idea of each faction's vibe. My only suggestion would be including something about Orion Express' grueling work culture; right now it gives a good idea of what the corp is, but not how it is.
• I appreciate all the OOC info, it's encouraging and down to earth.
• I'm not used to seeing real life allusions in Aurora and yet I found the Phoron-silicon analogy insightful even after ~2 years of playing. Grounded explanations like that really help someone getting into the lore.

All of these are important, but to keep the guide as brief as possible these are things I would cut:

• Miranda isn't worth more than an offhand mention when explaining the lore to a new player; if anything someone like Frost or Torvald is more immediately relevant, but I wouldn't include them either just to keep things simple. I would limit her info to the portrait infobox near the bottom and maybe a mention of the Trasens in the NanoTrasen or SCC section.
• Violet Dawn is only really important to Solarian characters. It could be removed from the phoron scarcity section or possibly moved to a new area I will suggest later in this post. The picture is cool, though; maybe leave it and let that caption be the only explanation of VD, supporting the idea in the main text that everyone is after phoron without going into detail.
• The CCIA section. I'm conflicted, because while this is really good info about a confusing topic I don't feel it's fitting for a lore guide. Not saying to delete it because what you've got is good, just maybe move it to a different new player page? I'm not sure which would be most appropriate.

Things I would change:

• While I like the recommended origins section, I feel the ones on offer are a little too similar. I might get a hoard of Callistean football hooligans on me for saying this but all 3 are democratic, varyingly multicultural Earth-like planets. That makes them easy to play, but I don't think they would capture the imagination of a new player as well as some other combinations. Keeping the faction variety, another set could be Callisto (easy), Himeo (medium), and Moroz (hard). Dominia might be too hard for a new player, but I hope you get what I'm suggesting; more contrasting origins, still different nations (so no triple Solarian origins for example).
• This is just visual stuff and I'm sure you aren't done on that front, but little logos for the corporations would be a nice way to break up the text. Maybe for extra flare put some matching flags by the recommended planets.

Things I would add:

• A very brief overview of the human nations, ideally no more than a sentence each, just to give a vibe like the megacorp section. The ones in the current guide are a good basis but very outdated. I would move most Violet Dawn info here if it's still needed.
• If you want to include alien lore, I would group them by species and describe them from a human perspective to keep things simple. So for instance one blurb about Tajara and how they tend to be impoverished instead of going into all 3 countries. The average human (and new player) doesn't need to know about the political machinations of the Tajaran cold war, or what the Golden Deep is, or the three Vaurcaesian hives.
• Maybe a small intro to whatever the current arc is? It could be too much for this guide though, maybe a different new player page would be better.

[triogenix]

On 19/10/2025 at 18:43, Mr.Popper said:

....

Thank you for the feedback! I think the biggest thing for me, and why I made some of the choices I did is that I do not intend for this to be an introduction to, or an attempt to tackle the wider setting; it will have a tight focus on only containing lore that is extremely relevant to the Horizon in the day to day, to the exclusion of all else.

While relevancy is somewhat subjective - I believe given our setting, there's very little that meets the criteria above - something that is problematic on the whole but in this particular case a boon, as it lets us keep things incredibly short, how I determine relevancy is complicated to explain, and in the interest of brevity, I won't get into it here. In general, my rule of thumb is that if a piece of lore is not inherently important to every character aboard the Horizon because they are aboard the Horizon, then it is not relevant to the Horizon. The Scarcity (including Violet Dawn), Miranda, CCIA, and the megacorporations all fit this criteria; things like nationstates, their leaders, and similar do not. Such things are better suited for the setting summary instead.

A very brief example to showcase my reasoning behind this thought process: if the head of the SCC changed, that would have massive implications for the Horizon, whereas the President of Biesel did change, and for all intents and purposes, it was irrelevant to the Horizon.

I might add a brief overview of alien species similar to the megacorp overview, but IDK for sure right now.

On 19/10/2025 at 18:43, Mr.Popper said:

While I like the recommended origins section, I feel the ones on offer are a little too similar. I might get a hoard of Callistean football hooligans on me for saying this but all 3 are democratic, varyingly multicultural Earth-like planets. That makes them easy to play, but I don't think they would capture the imagination of a new player as well as some other combinations. Keeping the faction variety, another set could be Callisto (easy), Himeo (medium), and Moroz (hard). Dominia might be too hard for a new player, but I hope you get what I'm suggesting; more contrasting origins, still different nations (so no triple Solarian origins for example).

Let me think about this - because I get where you're coming from with the "capture the imagination of a new player" part - there might be planets better suited to be "hooks" into the setting, for lack of a better term.