Too Much Lore: Star Wars Worldbuilding

Description

In this special "Too Much Lore" installment of No Plot, Only Lore, Josh and Chris take a thermal detonator to the concept of over-explanation. What starts as a debate over the "Star Wars Canon Reset" quickly turns into a passionate critique of how "lore dumps" can actually kill the imagination of a franchise.

The DMs dive deep into:

• The Mystery of the Force: Why "The Force" is the perfect name for a magic system and how George Lucas’s introduction of Midi-chlorians sapped the wonder out of the galaxy.

• The Scale of Power: A breakdown of "lore creep"—from Yoda struggling with an X-wing to Starkiller pulling Star Destroyers out of the sky.

• Wasted Opportunities: Why the Book of Boba Fett should have been a Coruscant-based "bounty hunter procedural" instead of a desert-bound story about mobility scooters.

• The "Kermit" Problem: A heated discussion on Yoda’s prequel fight style. Was the "flying gerbil" combat a neat moment, or did it diminish the character’s status as a masterful teacher?

• Relatable Villains vs. Uber-Sith: Comparing the tragic, slow-burn fall of Jacen Solo (Expanded Universe) to the "somehow, Palpatine returned" storytelling of the sequel trilogy.

From "Hut Jedi" to why Tatooine needs to burn in hell, this episode explores the fine line between building a world and burying it under too much detail.

Transcript

you're listening to No plot only lore a

podcast about games and the tables we play them at your DMs tonight and every night are Josh and Chris you can find us

on all podcast platforms or check us out at no ploton lord.com if you like what

you hear today please rate and review the show and share it with everyone you've ever

met welcome back to no plot only lore a show supposedly about D and D that

continues to devolve into me arguing about Star Wars every single week

yeah it's it's space I'm gonna have to change the branding I'm G have to change the branding I'm gonna have to put

lightsabers on the website um you know one one of our top

performing videos on YouTube has a thumbnail that has a lightsaber in it

and I think that's a sign yeah it is a sign from from the medoran

so this is a continuation of last week's yeah yeah so we we wanted to keep going

on this idea of more lore not being good um which is probably the easiest

argument I will ever make um I uh Star Wars caught me young uh I remember I

wrote a book report uh Slash I don't know we'll call it a novelization of

something some sort in uh the fourth grade um about Star Wars uh yeah uh

and I called them lights saers uh

and I thought they were life savers for the longest time like I I was really confused why the candies were around

yeah yeah I thought they were Life Savers it got me it got me good and I've

never looked back um a large portion of my life right now is dedicated to uh

Star Wars as a card game uh and uh you

know this show every other week somehow devolves into me defending George

Lucas's shitty magnumopus um part of that comes down to me being

incredibly irreverent about Star Wars that's yeah despite despite the fact

that this is a series that I do love I I do have

a very strong attachment to a lot of Star

Wars I have so little affection for the extended

Universe stuff that whenever that starts to bleed into the conversation I start turning

into a bit of a dickpig I've noticed and that's where like we really initially diverge um so I

you know I didn't read a ton of

the novelizations but I read enough that

like I appreciated what some authors added and

obviously now we're seeing some of that effort being rewarded by being added

into like official Cannon and stuff you know like um there was the semi-official

stuff where you know general or Admiral thraw was was added um when they first

started adding him in in the Clone Wars cartoon stuff now he's officially in

Ahsoka um and Star Wars has been sort of

officially merged into one Cannon as opposed to like different tiers of Cannon um so it's nice sort of yeah that

that's still kind of confusing because like they they did that Canon reset yeah right like they decided to do that Canon

reset and then they were like okay this is the stuff that isn't Canon and then they've been slowly reintroducing stuff

from that to the Canon right well but what I what I mean is that like you had

this problem before where there was like movie Cannon and then there was like comics and books and you know TV shows

and now Disney's official position is that like if it's an official Disney show it's Canon right like the the

movies don't supersede anything we do on TV um right no that's fair um I think one

of the other big differences between the way that we approach Star Wars is I have never read a Star Wars right and that's

too bad because you're really do not yeah I'm big into reading I love

reading well and and there's so much there for you I mean like whether it's the new Jedi stuff the uh air to the

Empire stuff with thrawn um you know the stuff about like Luke's Mara Jade

romance and uh the solo kids um the

stuff that Karen Travis WR especially when regards to like mandalorians which is always really interesting like

there's there's I can understand why they wanted to differentiate some of

the uh Canon teers because there is like so much there that was experimental like

they really did let them MH try out cool things um well in contradictory too

right because you had writers who were writing books simultaneously that weren't Consulting with one another and

they contradict another on facts and so you had to be like okay well which one of these are we going to go with what every one is closest to the movies I

guess right yeah yeah which is like yeah

I I appreciate that they gave people the flexibility to be wrong

you and they were so so often yeah yeah yeah I there's there's been a lot of

walk you in particular mentioned a few things that had like managed to trickle down even to your limited expanded

universe knowledge well yeah and I mean I I did do a quick Google search for the worst

things that have ever happened in the Star Wars expanded universe so we're going to touch on some of those yeah um

because yeah the again when you've got a whole lot of people putting together one

thing is it gets messy and I think this is actually kind of the opposite problem

that we were looking at with ceden Cambria where ceden Cambria is claudo

Sanchez's brain baby right right like everything that's happening in there is

something that he created and so so much of his personality so much of his history so much of his way of viewing

the world is going to be infused in that in the way that it is with any aour

right but for Star Wars you just got a stew pot right like you got so so many

people who are putting stuff into this universe and it is a mix so it's funny

that you phrase it like that because I think Star Wars actually wound up with both problems where oh okay where he

made the original trilogy and frankly he really only made one of the one of the

the movies right like better people than he uh put together you know uh Empire

Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi you can see he being George Lucas yes yes

yes for clarity sorry yeah um and then you can see that

like the the writing got away from him a little bit in in the two subsequent

movies for I think a good reason and then they started letting a bunch of

people will try it and then it really got out of hand and so then the prequels came out and he tried to wrestle it back

under his vision right right um and that's where I think it

got some of its wonkiest because it started getting to be like officially wonky like we mentioned midi chlorians

and Jedi are now like yeah Jedi are now AIC monks who AIC Warrior monks you know

um he that's such a strange Choice he had

this like I'm I'm going to call it like a a mission

to clarify uh a lot of stuff that didn't

need clarifying we don't need to know where the force comes from no we super don't

truly don't like like I said before the mystery behind the force is one of its

strongest points because then it could be anything right it could even be a boat even just the name like the name is very evocative I

have spent a stupid amount of time trying to think of a better name for a

magic system than the force right and I don't think there is one no because one

like it's very clearly understood what it is almost immediately our universe is

full of forces and this is like the pend Ultimate Force like this is the force

and then it's also only thing that I think has come even close is Robert Jordan's uh the one power sure right the

one power very evocative similar way that comes from the source right which

you know evokes the force already yeah so like but that that I think is the

only thing that has ever come even a little bit close in Magic systems to just like evocation yeah and so like you

get an idea of like roughly what it is and what it can do without it being like explained in such detail that it leaves

no room for imagination and that I think is a theme that we're going to come back to again and again when we're talking

about like too much lore is that it sucks

imagination out of uh out of your world and out of uh your readers or or

participants Minds by just like yeah overe explaining things because then the

problem with the problem with overe explaining things and getting too into the weeds and too specific is that once

you do that once you start establishing hard and fast rules then things have to

obey rules and yeah you get a a dissonance that happens when you know

something doesn't fit into that rigid rule set if your rule set's Loosey Goosey and your rules of your Universe

are just kind of like magic can happen then you're never like in trouble for

doing it kind of wrong you know Brandon Sanderson talks about this quite a bit

um he he recently put out a a new um series of videos he he does lectures at

Brigham Young University yeah um like not every year but I think it's like every couple of years he ends up doing

like a a course there and then the whole thing goes online so you can watch it and one of the things that he kind of

comes back to quite a bit is that like when you're looking at the rules for your magic system yeah you are allowed

to break those rules as long as you've established like a good reason for that

prior to the breaking of the rules right right like you you can set up a way that you can break the rules as long as the

rule has been set and the expectation has been set that this is something that might live A little bit outside right

and then the rules themselves have to exist to reinforce your story right

right like again going back to Robert Jordan the fact that the one power cannot raise

the dead yeah right is a hard and fast Rule and I actually honestly expected

that to be broken yeah by the end of the series like uh the the direction that Nev's character was going in um strongly

suggested to me that she was going to figure out a way to cure death yeah um

never did yep she found a a way to kind of skirt around it I guess spoiler alert for a series that's been done for 15

years um that started a 100 years ago yeah yeah but never actually broke the

rule so like if you if you have those rules then not only do you need to follow those rules but those rules have

to be reinforced by the story itself yes and the they have to inform the story

and the more information that you have coming into the story the less flexibility you have right in the telling of that story yeah and I think

it's like super super handy to have the ability to break a rule for sure for

like narrative purposes but again the impact of breaking that rule is like the reason to break the

rule right like you don't just break it because you haven't defined it you break it because you need to to further some

other element um well and then especially in a shared Universe like Star Wars now that rule is broken for

everyone yeah yeah right so if there is a way to break that rule now you have to

recontextualize that rule within the universe itself yeah and that means that anybody can do it and if anybody can do

it what are the repercussions of that right right the second you allow one person to do it then okay everyone can do this and then if anyone can do this

why haven't they been doing it from the start yeah if 9 Eve can raise the dead

and she doesn't she's a dick yeah so there has to be a good reason

for her not to be able to do that if she's able to do it even once yeah right so no that that absolutely makes

sense and I think that like specificity can be a good thing yeah

when it's in service to your story yeah when it's in service to your characters and when it's in service to like creating good and impactful moments but

again when when you're dealing with such a a huge shared world like Star Wars as

soon as Luke Skywalker can and like I

don't know was it beat somebody to death with a planet yeah um you've changed the

scale yeah well and and so this this comes up to the thing I mentioned

earlier um one of the characters that I find most annoying as an introduction to

this whole thing is Vader's secret Apprentice Star Killer because they

spend the entire series telling you who just how incredible this guy is for like

really no good reason and then you see him pull a star destroyer out of the sky and you're like wait he can do that but

Yoda could barely move an X-Wing what is happening um right and then it's like

well if he can do it he's not even like the chosen one for this universe why

could why didn't Vader ever do that why didn't Luke do that you know why didn't mace do that one of the most powerful

force users of all time like why did they imagine if they went back and they

made that the scale the whole time though right right like how how different would the original trilogy be

it would be hilarious yeah like Yoda shows up and he

just like beats some people to death with buildings yeah just picks the whole

[ __ ] building up smashes them into a person until that person is a bloody pulp oh the the whole separatist Rebellion is just like completely

nullified by the fact that Yoda can take their drop ships and beat their army to death with them

not even Yoda you have two Jedi on the planet yeah right like you've got

Obi-Wan and Quon on the planet of nabo they just push all the droids back into

their ships yeah because that's the scale that we're working with and then they push those ships into into the sun

yeah no 100% 100% like there was no reason for them to go and negotiate any

sort of agreement they're just like I'm going to put your droids back up your your own [ __ ] um and then I'm

leaving again though imagine how different the series would be if

that were the case though right right like if if the if the Jedi are the nuclear deterrent yeah right that

changes the whole fck I kind of want to write this now yeah it's the walking talking super weapons that are also

weird religious monks yeah well no I would turn them into like Samurai uh

right Musketeers but yeah because that's what they should have been in the first place but yeah anyway at any rate yeah

so I mean let's see things that talking too much about it has ruined for Star Wars

the Force um Boba Fett Boba Fett Boba Fett Boba oh let's okay we're going to

divert for a second to talk about Boba Fett Boba Fett was cool because he was

mysterious and then someone got in their minds that like we need more of the character that everyone loves and so

they brought him back from the dead and then made him like a

weenie I don't yeah I don't understand the Instinct and and then he went and found

some uh Power Rangers flavored young toughs to be his motorcycle gang on

mobility scooters yep no the the the entire book of that was a

disaster um but once again it didn't have to be but again it's it's talking

about the thing too much makes it not cool like his lack of lines and the fact

that he like died in such this like in glorious way was like part of what made

the character great and then they're like ah but money what if we had

money see if I were going to do that if I if I were going to do a book of Boba

Fett I would probably just bring it back to like first couple of episodes the

Mandalorian where you're flying to a planet doing a job and then do it like monster of the week job of the week

right keep it very serial sorry not serial but very like

um H what do they call that [ __ ] when you had like a series that needed to be

able to syndication keep it very like syndication it always goes back to your like um your

status quo you don't have to worry about like huge amounts of plot development every once in a while you'll get like a plot development episode but most of it

is just going to be like he shows up on a planet he's got to take somebody in here's the stuff that stands in the way between him and taking that person in

sure I can I can get down with that right that would have been

fine that would have been that would have been fine that would have been like you could do the first couple of episodes of him like escaping the zlac

bed or whatever yeah and then first of all get the [ __ ] off of Tatooine oh so fast get far away from Tatooine that

planet needs to burn in hell I understand like the draw like oh

man remember Luke Skywalker but like get away get away yep it's a desert

Wasteland for a reason stop set stop setting your show in the least interesting places possible like the

thing that was great about I I didn't love the Mandalorian season 3 but like

all the time that they spent on corusant yeah absolutely that place is

interesting as hell and it's super developed the fact that like the only part of the actual Planet surface left

is this little like Pebble in the middle of town and then you realize like oh that's like the top of a massive

mountain is awesome Yep and like imagine a bounty

hunter procedure Ro in corusant Imagine right that would be a great show

i' watch [ __ ] out of that yeah yeah like talk about your unexplored great areas

as like corant Bounty Hunters underworld stuff like even the little bit that they

got where it's like oh you realize like the the this weird sect of mandalorians is hiding underground and is hidden in

like sewer systems right like guess what corusant is probably full of CD

underground sewer systems mhm and a bunch of like [ __ ] weirdos who are

taking advant of people in weird places and for weird reasons yeah but no let's go back to the bright desert with

nothing going on but moisture farming and the

the people with the the sticks that do the fighting Tusk Raiders the tusken

Raiders those guys like they introduced the the Pikes who are there's tons of

potential there for a cool antagonist but then you put the Pikes in a terrible terrible setting and yeah they're

boring well and they also introduced like the the dust trade yep and was it

dust or spice spice trade spice um and you can't tread too terribly heavy on

the toes of Dune yeah but yeah like using spice as a drug in

corusant would be [ __ ] great yeah now you have like the the policing corusant

can't like deal with this on their level so they go to bounty hunters to try and like even the playing field get Boba

Fett somehow emotionally invested in that in like some of his contacts from back in his bounty hunting days and you

got a [ __ ] a show yeah it it like I don't I don't love this phrase but it

does just kind of write itself and then they wrote it in the

weirdest Direction possible yes they wrote it away from everything

that is like like easily done I don't know if we just want to rebuild Jabba's

like Palace that's all we want we just want to rebuild Jabba's Palace and have Boba Fett sit in the chair I I

understand the urge to like have that cool moment of like this is the Dao but also like why did you have to call him a

Dao like oh never mind it's yeah it's dumb it's needlessly dumb

and it's frustrating that like it just it comes from a place of like squandered

opportunity you know speaking of the fets do you remember the the fat

Jedi the fat Jedi is like the coolest [ __ ] thing they ever did it's so it's

so dumb but like I I love it yeah yeah s the Hut Jedi yeah just the idea of this

gargantuan idiot space slug who also like could be insanely Nimble is very

funny to me um I mean that's funny but like again that kind of comes back to my whole

thing about like Yoda's fight style right right like if if I was a giant

space slug my fight style would be the force yeah it has to

be you're your arms aren't long enough to be a swordsman no I would stab myself much

more often than I would stab my opponents yeah and not like by a little margin by like a lot

no yeah so like having independent lightsabers swinging

around me doing my bidding would be my fighting style of choice for that I wouldn't be doing a lot of jumping

around or flipping or anything like that and see that's that's like they

they I don't want to say they ruined Yoda but they did diminish Yoda

by you know part of Again part of Yoda's strength was his mystery

right and that moment when this like weirdo little troll suddenly pulls an

X-Wing out of the goddamn swamp and you're like what is happening who is this guy actually there's a whole other

story to him that we don't know how powerful is he gets completely ripped away when

they're like yeah also like he fights like a Geral on on [ __ ] ad like it's h it's so dumb

also he was a general and a master in the council yes and like if if I was

going to pick a role for Yoda in the like prequel trilogy he would have just

been the Younglings teacher right right right like he he would have taught New Jedi how to use the force that would

have been his main role and I still would have had him fight uh Palpatine yeah but not as a flying around Kermit

the Frog floppy puppet no just again yeah two lightsabers swinging around him

in unison you know utilizing the force in other ways while he's doing that yeah well and you know just to show off like

how flexible he is with the force how like masterful his use of the force is how accurate his use of the force yeah I

was going to say the other thing that would have been a nice ju deposition is like when mace went to confront

Palpatine um you saw what should have been three

top tier generals get cut down right and they went in with fairly traditional

saber Styles right um you know kid Fisto was no SL slou when it came to

lightsaber combat um and he died almost instantly

so seeing like seeing Yoda then like it's not just

like oh by the way he's also an excellent swordsman it's like no he uses a type of fighting that one suits his

character and two you know allows him to take on a traditional

swordsman with unorthodox techniques and just you know further enhances the lore

of this Ultra powerful little green goober yep it was I mean I was in a

theater when I saw that moment for the first time and I will admit that there was cheering in the theater when Yoda

down there's always cheering for dumb [ __ ] from dumb people right like there's people who do don't love Star Wars as

much as I love Star Wars and they want to sit there and um you know they just

want to be like obviously at the end of day we all want to be entertained but they just want to be like you know

dazzled by neat moments and they don't

consider the Brad effects of those neat moments on you know the universe as a

whole um as a you know a semi living

thing speaking of neat moments you remember that time that uh Luke Skywalker turned to the dark side and

then the uh the emperor's ghost um took over his body okay so there are

independent parts of that storyline that like have potential

right the idea that like maybe Luke could be ultimately corrupted um through

like frustration or whatever it you know happened to be uh but the idea that like

and they keep going back to this even in like the sequel Trilogy that like somehow this one guy the emperor is just

like the Uber Sith and no one can ever you know hope to compete with his a

inations is just so infuriating because it discounts other great Sith characters

like Darth Revan and Darth pagus and you know um they they allude to them in other

media and they're just unimportant right because again it's always just comes

back to like well but the emperor the bestest Sith who lives forever and

somehow returns at the most in convenient times it's just so like shortsighted

from a story perspective one of the things that I always thought was interesting and like

the only thing that made me almost crack open a Star Wars expanded universe book MH was descriptions that I'd heard about

the fall of Jason solo right where Jason didn't just jump into the dark

side because it seemed like fun and like the better more powerful version of the

force but because he was continually presented situations where

the dark side answer seemed like the right one right and every time he made one of

those decisions he was one step closer to normalizing that and that being the

way that he does things and becoming a dark side user right well I mean that

and that was the the big like you know tragedy of of Anakin Skywalker

was that like his turn to the dark side was not out of like a lust for power or

greed or whatever it was like fear and like you know wanting to save someone he

loved like it it's it was good storytelling because it was relatable

and understandable it was bad storytelling because the writing was bad

the writing was bad but the idea was there you know like you can't well and I

mean you can you can deconstruct it where like he's just lost his mother

violently and took violent action against the the people that hurt her and

now he is in a position where the only other person who has had a position of

that much Import in his life MH is going to be taken from him violently

and the only options that he has to to fix that are to follow the weird old guy who tells him strange stories in the

opera house yeah um hey you have a problem I have a solution it's the only

solution no one else will tell you the truth blah blah blah yeah and again said

to a child who has spent his entire life being brainwashed and before that being a like

a literal slave yeah it's yeah no you think maybe he's got some dad

issues it follows like I I see where that plot line comes from and could be

very interesting it was just written so po poorly that it's really hard to try and like sift that out of I don't like

sand um it's of [Laughter]

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