Are questions about Elder Scrolls lore on-topic?

Question

Elder Scrolls Online has a bustling online community of roleplayers. I found myself recently playing the game that way for quite a bit, and I've found a great amount of joy getting together with my guildmates and doing stuff while in-character - be it dodging bosses in dungeons or just sitting around in a tavern in Daggerfall.

So far, I've playing with a rather "generic fantasy" character. It worked fine so far, but this last weekend I decided to take the dive and make a proper, more lore-abiding character with proper hooks and ties to that setting.

I had already fired up Word and began typing out the background for my Breton Sorcerer when I came to realization that I actually know very little of that lore.

My first impulse was to come here and ask a couple of lore-related questions in the Elder Scrolls setting, but I'm not sure if this is the proper place to ask those questions.

On one hand, ESO is an online videogame. It isn't a traditional tabletop RPG by any means.

On the other hand, it has a vast roleplaying community, a very dense lore, and even an unofficial adaptation for a true tabletop game.

Lore questions about Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, and other settings appear to be on-topic. We have a few of those around the site already. A few of them follow below.

• Is giving a kobold a weapon considered a marriage proposal?

• Do dragons smell of lilacs?

• What do Unicorns want?

• Whose portrait is printed on the Waterdhavian gold coin?

• How common is homosexuality in the Forgotten Realms?

Now, say, by analogy - Would a question about how common is homosexuality in Tamriel during the ESO timeline, or what is the marriage protocol of the Altmer, for example - while in the scope of either writing a character or a campaign for a RPG on that setting- on topic?

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There seems to be a consensus that any form of roleplaying is on-topic, whatever the platform may be. That said, I feel there is a difference between, say - player relationships, which certainly is always on topic, and lore, that may or may not be depending on the context.

I'll wait a few days before going ahead in any direction or dumping the idea to see what the community has to say.

Answer 1

I don't think so

While the game is fantasy related, it is not a tabletop role playing game or a freeform roleplaying game. I don't think we can become a repository of all fantasy-related lore and asking these questions on the arqade or another stack would both be more relevant to their stack and give you access to more users who have deeper and direct knowledge.

There may be those of us who do have the knowledge here, but questions about pure videogames don't really belong here, whether they are about lore or game mechanics.

Answer 2

While a general question about the lore might be off-topic, there are questions about off-topic lore that are none-the-less on topic for this stack. For example:

In an [otherwise off-topic lore] context, I want to create a character backstory that has the potential to accomplish [stated goals that most frequently arise in tabletop RPG-specific contexts, e.g. cause low party/player conflict with other similarly well-developed characters that would normally be expected to be at odds]. How best can I accomplish this?

Or if you were a GM running (for example) an Elder Scrolls D&D game, you might ask:

How can I best fit [otherwise off-topic lore] to work best in my (tabletop RPG) context?

It is worth thinking carefully and clearly about what exact question you want answered; different stacks may be better suited to answering subtly different questions, or contexts.