Lore is another way of describing the accumulated knowledge of the past that a group of people possess. There is a degree of lore in most stories, except the most absolutely minimalist. Even Robinson Crusoe has lore, though most of the book features only a single character. Some people call it backstory, but backstory is simply more story that happened before, which we’re not going to really get into in this story, and lore is something that is built into each character, built over years of their own “lives,” which you don’t see but allude to and which permeates the story.
Worldbuilding sounds at first shake like a synonym of Lore. But worldbuilding is the construction of the world in which the action takes place. To a degree, only fictional stories care much about worldbuilding, and the more complex the story is, the more worldbuilding is required. There is a degree of worldbuilding, for instance, in Star Wars, but significantly more in a work like Dune. When an author does worldbuilding, he (or she) has to create a people groups, terrain, language, food, clothing, mannerisms, events, architecture, and a hundred things besides, all without boring or bogging down the reader. Indeed, with both lore and worldbuilding, ideally the reader should absorb all of this information while barely realizing it.
It has been my intention to provide my story with enough lore so as to lend realism to the fantastical, and I have endeavored to build a world that the reader feels he could easily step into, and be lost within it. For that is the fiction writer’s great hope: to trap the weary soul in their made-up world, fill it with emotion and hope, and release it once more into its own reality, inspired and encouraged.
Below are links to the supplemental material for my books by series. Click on each one to see the information.
Word Weld 