The Voice of Authority? Lore Management Strategies in Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Jakub Majewski's paper examines how the historical role-playing game Kingdom Come: Deliverance (2018) delivers "lore," the background and historical knowledge underpinning its fictional world, and contrasts this with the approach of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). The central argument is that Kingdom Come deliberately projects historical authority, presenting its content as established fact and rarely signalling uncertainty, while Skyrim conveys lore in a more playful, nuanced manner that acknowledges the limits of historical knowledge. The paper treats the game's setting, 15th-century Bohemia, as a functional storyworld whose lore comprises both the historical elements included in the game and the fictional additions made during production.

The analysis focuses on lore delivery rather than the accuracy of the setting itself. It identifies enacted dialogue and embedded narrative, particularly in-game books, as the core delivery tools, and argues that Kingdom Come's relatively small number of books, shaped by its medieval setting before the printing press, led developers to rely on an extradiegetic encyclopaedia called the Codex. Written in neutral, academic language and largely unsigned and unreferenced, the Codex presents contested interpretations as definite. Examples include claims about the motivations of nobles in the 1400s and medieval Church attitudes toward bathing. The paper notes that the Codex occasionally admits departures from history, such as the Inquisition procedure, but omits others, such as the alchemy gameplay mechanics.

The author concludes that this authoritative stance was a deliberate choice, since realism was the game's principal selling point during its difficult search for a publisher and its crowdfunding campaign. The study draws on the Codex's text, the developers' marketing, and scholarship on world-building and medievalism, rather than on player surveys, and it explicitly leaves aside broader debates about nationalist interpretation and historical accuracy.