Hey guys I'm kind of new to the whole "lore" thing, and it is something I'm very interested in. I read the pinned topic but I was wondering if anyone had someone in depth tips and other places where a can try and master lore. It would be very helpful, and I would appreciate it a lot.

http://www.imperial-library.info/ is a good place to start, and the Lore Forums where you're in now is great, too.

Ask questions here and make us link to the sources we're talking about.

You've read the pinned topic, so now its up to you, Search http://www.imperial-library.info/ for what ever your interested in(Dwemer, The Princes ect), the http://www.uesp.net/ can be less reliable lore wise, but its useful for quick reference. Other than that, read in game books, and get involved in a lore forum of your choosing. Don't spam topics, search carefully for one thast already there, ask questions ect.

Thanks guys I appreciate it. Can anyone tell me what a Dragon Break is?

A chaotic period where Akatosh loses control of time, and time becomes nonlinear. When he restores control, different conflicting timelines and events are mashed back together in a bewildering way. It's happened a few times, always when new gods suddenly appear on the scene (Numidium, the Tribunal).

Akatosh is Aedroth. He is time. Before he existed, if-then had a hard time of sorting itself out, and spirits and worlds and ideas were transitory, chaotic messes at best. Once he took form, linear plot (metaphysically speaking) could come about. The other spirits then had an easier time forming (his giant If made room for a hellaton of Thens), and when one particularly powerful spirit (perhaps equal even to Big Daddy Dragon himself), called Lorkhan, came up with an idea, Akatosh agreed to lend a measure of his strength to the endeavor. A whole world built around if-thens, where NO Thens would ever happen without an If... unless the portion of him that was contained therein should become damaged (or "broken", if you will). Whenever that happens, that major rule/Earth Bone/Aedroth Chunk is violated, causality is thrown out the window and dudes go around giving birth to their grandparents... or become gods. Then it's up to the Jills, handy little dragon-angels, to come out of the woodwork and do their best to straighten the scales that have been knocked out of place as best they can.



(That's how I've usually understood it to work out, anyways. Akatosh is more integral than just "in control of time", was my point)

Seeker's description is definitely on the money, and an example of the most important thing you can learn if you're new to lore: Tamriel is Weird with a capital "W." But then, as a wise Khajiit once said, "Weird is relative."

The Elder Scrolls games take place in a universe shaped by mythopoeia. "Mythopoeia" is a word famously used by Tolkien and other scholars of his time to describe the human propensity for creating these strange little stories about their world, their gods, and themselves. In Tamriel, it is also the central force of Creation. All myths are true, even (or especially) the ones that contradict each other; the gods not only exist, but exist so absolutely that they can be said to exist more fully than the mortals, although this is a big disingenuous, as everything in existence is really only the fever dream of a schizophrenic Godhead -- but now we're getting into the juicy bits, and anyway those are to some extent up to you to discover.

But the point is that myth isn't a static thing. You can tell one story, and I can tell another. If your grandfather told one story, and you don't like it, you can change it. Except that in Tamriel, this is an act with literally cosmic consequences. If you continue on your quest for knowledge of lore, you'll come across stories of those who have tried to change the myths of creation. Some, like Talos and Vivec, succeed so thoroughly that they become beings of immense power (or is that immense existence?), such that they can honestly utter the statement "I ARE ALL WE." Others, like Kagrenac, fail and are destroyed, with horrifying consequences. And then there are those, like the Marukhati, who have changed the myths with such thoroughness that we are still trying to decide whether they succeeded or failed thousands of years later because the consequences are still playing out.

Through it all, we the observers are faced with a question, one that's rarely acknowledged: what is our role in any of this? We are, after all, just readers, when you get down to it. Readers in a world of fictions, indeed, a world that is nothing but fictions. If TES is a game, and lore is a meta-game, what is our role as the Player? (I would argue that this is indelibly connected to what the in-universe Elder Scrolls actually are, but that's neither here nor there.) Do we have a stake in it? What is it that we get, exactly, by telling and retelling and examining and deconstructing all these stories, these stories-within-stories, these mythologies and paleonumerologies? What on Tamriel, what on earth are we up to, exactly?

These, and many others no one has the time to get into in one post, are the mysteries of TES lore. I hope you join us in the fun of unraveling them.