Void's Lorebook Types

---

Enjoy this rambling notation of mine trying to make sense of different core setups for Lorebooks. At least I found differentiating like that worthwhile. For now this guide doesn't really provide a "how to basic" guide on how to Lorebook real good. It does provide you with some ideas to think about how you use them. Or how you could use them, really. I find myself sticking to basic LBs for anything but actually serious play sessions for storylines I am invested in.

Here's a quick overview of the distinctions I make.

What is a Lorebook?

A Lorebook (LB) lets you slap information into context without messing up the visual flow of your story and (most of the time) without you actively having to choose to insert them at any given moment.

Sounds like Memory or Author's Note with extra steps, right?

Yeah, basically.

A more accurate way of putting it would be that Memory and Author's Note are "VIP" Lorebooks: they are directly in the right-hand sidebar, can't be deleted and are always active, no matter what. They're the lite-version of what you can do with Lorebooks.

So what's a Lorebook made up of?

Glad I asked. See the following class diagram for a basic list of the attributes a LB and how you can get at them in the UI (they're hidden behind a collapsible sidebar in the Lorebook popup)

Here's how it looks in the UI itself.

Not counting tags a Lorebook gives you 14 options you can mess with, that have varying degrees of interplay depending on their state. Some work in unison, others change interpretation and some just overrule the rest. For the types listed here only 4 settings really matter.

• Enabled
• Search Range
• Force Activation
• Cascading Activation

These options influence when and why a given Lorebook is activated. All other 10 options focus on how the LB's contents get inserted into the context of your story. I personally have not experimented with them long and seriously enough to make any reasonable distinctions here. For all I care right now these settings don't matter for sorting LBs into types. The only point I can make is that some types of LB may benefit more from certain extra fiddling than others.

But Key-Relative insertion is in-between Force Activation and Cascading Activation, why doesn't it matter to you?

Because it doesn't mess with activation in any way whatsoever. It's all about insertion, which I'm not concerned with here, 'cause it gets inserted either way.

Anyway, on to the types!

The actual types

Basic Lorebooks (LB / BLB)

These Lorebooks are running on pure defaults. It's the most "intuitive" way to use them, since you slap information in, add a tag and you're basically "good" to go.

A use case for this would be a comprehensive rundown of a character, activated by the character's name(s). A basic LB only really remains a basic LB while you keep all settings vanilla. Most changes turn it into one of the below types.

Activated by

• Story

Force-Activated Lorebook (FAL)

This is just memory with extra steps. The only real difference (without extra edits) is that this can be turned off, meaning you don't have to delete any info.

Activated by

• Itself

Cascading / Tree-like Lorebook (CLB/TreeLB)

From one LB sprout a dozen others, who may or may not sprout more. It starts at one and grows like cancer.

Activated by

• Story
• Memory
• Author's Note
• Activated Lorebooks

Specialized Lorebook (SpecL / SLB)

These take some more explaining, since they don't seem intuitive from the get go. For V1 of this I'll just say the idea is compartmentalization. You link specific details you find important for your story to specific triggers, phrases and RegEx patterns, ensuring activation only occurs when "needed".

Activated by

• Story
• Memory (with cascading activation)
• Author's Note (with cascading activation)
• Activated Lorebooks (with cascading activation)

Inverse Cascading Lorebook (ICL)

You can call them Reverse Cascading Lorebooks if you like. The core idea behind the name is that, unlike regular, "intuitive" CLB-Types this type of Lorebook moves from a bunch of Lorebooks that trigger at the front, followed by cascading activations that coalesce into one or very few Lorebooks that serve as a kind of "anchor". A term that keeps coming into my mind here is "chaining", which is also why the below image suggests zeroing out the search range for some of these inputs. These 0 search range ICLs can't activate unless a Lorebook (or Memory / Author's Note) containing one of its trigger terms is active.
I'll drop a sample prompt here using this style once I got something fairly broad set up.

Activated by

• Story
• Memory
• Author's Note
• Activated Lorebooks

Fin

And that's it, really.