I wish it was more common to have books that are just like, fictional history books or fictional encyclopedias or other non-narrative fiction books. because I’m not really interested in storytelling for a variety of reasons, but I fucking love worldbuilding. TTRPG books can be great for this but honestly a lot of TTRPG books, like Shadowrun’s Body Shop, are very very mechanics-heavy with very little attention given to the worldbuilding aspect :/

Eclipse Phase’s 2e book is my absolute favorite TTRPG book in terms of worldbuilding though, by far

I also tried getting a big physical book that contains a bunch of lorebooks from Skyrim but unfortunately all of the lorebooks are written in such a way that they don’t really tell you anything concrete about the world for one reason or another. they’re generally either written:

• with deliberately unclear wording so that they have multiple possible interpretations to the point that they often just read like gibberish (like the Monomyth book)

• or they give multiple possible versions of the lore that may or may not be true

• or they’re straightforward stories that aren’t actually true so they don’t really tell you anything about the lore (like Azura and the Box, which btw is also very carefully written so that you can interpret it in multiple ways which… just fuck off)

• or they give a single, straightforward account of something that happened in the lore but it turns out that there are multiple other books that contradict it

I don’t think those books answered a single question that I had about the lore - they just left me even more confused. so I found that experience very frustrating lol

@kasdeya

If you want a historic book with strange world building, try finding a copy of Raymond Roussel's "Locus Solus" from 1914. In my memory there is very little plot other than one person explaining their very weird inventions to a group of visitors. It is a classic of surrealist literature. Not sure how good the English translation is, I read it in German. The original is French, but other translations exist as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Solus

@OskarImKeller oohh - thank you for the recommendation! I might give this a read tbh; it sounds really interesting. surrealism is definitely something that I can get into, depending on how it’s approached