RPG Setting Construction

Reading this post on Aaron's blog (which linked to this post on game-designer Ken Hite's blog) got me thinking about presenting setting content in a game.

I've already toyed with the idea of combining generalized story hooks with every significant piece of campaign setting.

Now I'm thinking about the technique used in Weapons of the Gods by R. Sean Borgstrom, as described by Hite, where the key setting information is broken out in to separate Lore sheets that come with vignettes, mechanical benefits, and specific story hooks. The players have to purchase these Lore sheets with Destiny points.

I like this idea and the example I found in the free intro .pdf for the game that you can download from rpgnow.

It would be interesting to incorporate some of the same aspects into skills--for example, say a character could have a skill ranked from 1-5 in starship engineering. You could have several different chunks of flavor text, one for each broad level of skill (say ranks 1-2, 3-4, and 5 for three levels). The lower level descriptions are basic and to the point. The greater your knowledge, the more info about the starship systems is provided.

All of this would probably work better in a .pdf than in a printed book, I imagine. Some content might need to be presented in more than one location for ease of use.