The Holy Texts: Worldbuilding through in universe literature

The Elder Scrolls series is one of the most popular franchises in gaming today, with the fifth game: Skyrim, being universally acclaimed by both gaming and mainstream media. A lot of people will talk about all the things you can do: archery, hunting, magic, fighting, blowing cows and animals off of cliffs through the forceful power of your magical Shouts. But in all intents and purposes, you're playing a cypher. Your character is riding a series of rails that, in the grand scope, will end with you victorious and ultimately nothing changing to them. The player interacts with the environment, and it's the environment that is the star.

The main attraction is the realm of Skyrim, a Nordic culture at war with itself. Each area has it's own history and foibles, and scattered throughout the country are various texts that flavor the history and attitudes of the land. 820 books to be exact, all of them containing text that was written by the studio that developed the game.

Let's put that into perspective. Someone wrote 820 books (okay, exerpts of, but still) for a fictional world? Each one in it's own format, with it's own voice and perspective. That makes the world all the more real to me.

The same thing happens in a lot of the novels I read. Frank Herbert's Dune has, at the beginning of every chapter, an excerpt from one of Princess Irulan's many books on Muad'dib giving us an after-the-fact perspective on the story we're looking at. The Kingskiller Chronicle has the various stories, songs and legends both oral, sung and written about the world and how the fit into the world as it might be. Newsflesh features the blogs of the main characters reflecting publically and privately some of the information we see in the narration. We're seeing the difference between the experience and the news being put out. Daniel Wallace wrote three books for Star Wars, illustrating the inner workings of the Jedi, Sith and Bounty Hunters by writing them as in-universe textbooks (of which I use religiously, because duh)

Written media is different than most others because, for the most part, all visual aspects are parts of the imagination, you're filling in the blanks and pictures. So now you're reading a book in another book, or video game. It's a risk, because you're adding depth. So to make the main media you're dealing with believable, you need to make the in-game book credible. The ultimate reason to use this is to add depth and also to give background information in a way that doesn't require characters to give an information dump that they otherwise wouldn't give. It also, sometimes, adds importance to the words inside the book. And this is why some of them I call the Holy Texts.

When I first started playing Vampire the Requiem, I played a member of the Ordo Dracul. The Ordo was founded by Vampirism's biggest bad boy, Vlad Tepes aka Dracula. In the universe of Requiem, Dracula awoke as a Vampire, with no known Embrace. He had become a vampire by unknown means, and in the course of his existence, learned how to transcend his nature and his experience with the aid of his Three Wives. Together, the form of them founded the Ordo Dracul in the attempt to explore and experiment with the vampiric condition.

We know this information from the textbook writings of the corebook. We know this in further depth by the book known as the Rites of the Dragon. In universe, it's the 'holy text' of the Ordo Dracul. It's the first thing sworn members read when they join (membership is permanent. You leave when you die, and die when you leave). It is written by Dracula himself, chronicling his journey. In the Real World, the Rites of the Dragon exists, written by White Wolf. There are players who bought Rites of the Dragon and brought their copies with them to stay in character, to maintain the sense that this text is important to us as characters.

Things like this add another layer of a world, a sense that people existed. Here, we have proof that someone's thoughts have been written on a page and has stood the test of time. They don't have to be actual 'holy texts' (hello Book of Eli, I'm looking at you) but they can be diaries, journals, letters, recordings. Cloud Atlas basically takes this concept

As I develop materials for Kensei, and developing the backstory of the world and the various martial arts schools, I realize that for me to put the point across, I would need to write the (albeit truncated) documents of the various schools, corporations and other materials. That's a lot of depth, and some games don't even bother with that. But I prefer the method as it gives in coming players an in depth attitude to what exactly it means to be in this thing.

This is all a part of what draws me in to games lately: Immersion. I'm more likely to be able to immerse myself if I am able to have in-universe information before, during and after my character begins play. The more information helps me as a player make my decisions about how my character would react to that. How would he have interpreted the Rites of the Dragon? Would he have dismissed them as a fabrication of some enterprising young Acolyte? What if he wrote his response to that book, what if he made his own book depending on the information. Going that deep in allows for a lot more indepth discussion both IC and OOC and allows for some interesting conversations/arguments that may have long lasting repercussions on the other characters and the game as well.

Do your games have in-universe texts? How indepth are they? Do you prefer an FOIG (Find Out In Game) method, where your PC is basically walking in blind? Is your character writing one? I'd love to hear examples.