All There in the Manual - TV Tropes

"The name of this world is Nalthis, by the way. Mistborn takes place on a world called Scadrial, and Elantris on a world known as Sel. See the fun things you learn by reading annotations?"

• Omega Mart: Most people who've seen the advertisement videos are unaware that there's an entire Alternate Reality Game based around the store that requires you to visit in-person, particularly detailing how Cecelia Dram killed her father and assumed his role as the CEO of Dramcorp. Most of these videos are only available through the supermarket itself, or through direct captures made available through fan accounts.

• Lamput: An official description for the episode "Martial Art" mentions that Lamput "enjoys his favorite fungfu film," implying this isn't the only time he's watched it. There's nothing in the episode itself to suggest it.

• As the clock ticked down to the retirement date planned for Lynn Johnston's comic strip For Better or for Worse, she attempted to wrap up numerous loose ends in her ongoing story arcs. The sudden surge of activity in the previously glacial pace of the strips was too much to fit into her three- or four-panel a day limitation, so she set up a website containing letters written by the characters to their fans. In the letters she explained in more detail some of the sudden changes in plot or personality, and indulged in major retconning in response to fan outrage at some of the more absurd developments. Nonsensical in-strip events that were explained in the characters' letters became so commonplace they were a running gag in discussions on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics.strips.
• The comic strip Pluggers uses a cast of Funny Animals to illustrate "Pluggerisms" sent in by readers (granted, the definition is a sliding scale). The now-defunct website used to include mini-bios for each characters, but their traits rarely, if ever, showed up in the actual strip. For instance, Sheila the kangaroo is supposed to be an aerobics instructor according to the 1997 character bios, but not once was she ever shown being one. The character bios were done away with less than four years later.
• The names of Phoebe's parents in Phoebe and Her Unicorn are Ethan and Emily according the character bio on the syndicate's website. While Ethan's name was eventually revealed in-strip, Emily's name is still a mystery unless you read the said bio.

• The Bible: It says after the reign of each king "For the rest of his deeds and achievements, you can read book X". Except these days, you cannot.
• The Talmud began as oral commentary on the Hebrew Bible by learned rabbis. Eventually these commentaries were written down and collected into a single document.
• The Iliad: Some of the most famous parts — the invocation of the Achilles heel and the Trojan Horse, for instance — are not actually in the poem. Instead, they're in The Odyssey. Similarly, the cause of the war and the recruiting of many of the warriors are told in outside sources. To be accurate, the Iliad and Odyssey are the only surviving parts of a cycle of epic poems about the Trojan War. We do have descriptions of what was in those lost parts though, and that includes most of the background mentioned. And neither the Achilles Heel nor Trojan Horse appear in The Odyssey. They appear in The Aeneid, written by Roman Vergilius (Virgil) some 700 years later.

• Much of the background information for Pinball Magic, such as the background of Matra Magna and the Society of Masters, is only available in the operator's manual.
• Doctor Who has a rather complex story that is only available through the flyers, manual, and promotional video.
• Most of the backstories for LittleWing's pinball games are presented only in the instruction manual or their web site. For instance, Mad Daedalus has a story about a Robo Ship between an ancient inventor and an alien AI, a power-mad tyrant king, and a Stable Time Loop, all in an 800-word introduction in the instruction manual.
• WHO dunnit (1995) has an overarching set of Plot Threads that connect the five suspects, most of which is only hinted at through the characters' various interrogation answers. A complete timeline for their personal histories is given in the operator manual.
• The backstory for Strange Science is presented in an eight-page promotional comic book from Bally.
• Similarly, the backstory for Fathom is given in a one-page comic on the front of the game's advertising flyer.
• Scott Danesi's website indicates that the woman on the backglass of Total Nuclear Annihilation is named Scarlett.

• Collectible Card Games do this to an extent. Sure, there are starter sets with rulebooks but if you are simply buying packs of cards you will have to go online to read up on how to play. Even if you buy the starter set you will still have to read up on the 'advanced rules' on the official site.
  • This also applies to such games that try to incorporate an actual storyline spanning one or more sets due to the inherent 'snapshot' nature of card art and flavor text. Magic is one fairly prominent example — it's not hard to get a general idea of what's going on in a given setting from just the cards, but those still leave plenty of blanks to be filled in via the novels or articles on WotC's website.
  • Before the Magic novels, players pretty much put the storyline together based on the snippets of flavor text on the cards (eg. Ice Age and Antiquities).
  • Legend of the Five Rings is also notorious for this, with every expansion "main pack" containing different snippets of storyline depending on the faction of the said expansion pack. Furthermore, there are also novels, short stories published on the website, as well as the little snippets on the cards themselves.
    • Also applied to some art, with two or three cards forming diptychs and triptychs, or displaying some sort of event in snapshots (as in Iaijutsu Challenge, Iaijutsu Duel, and Kharmic Strike.)
• Anima: Beyond Fantasy is another good example. The game has a fairly rich setting that, however, is scattered among a RPG (and its manuals), a miniatures game (better said, its manual), several card games, and a videogame.
• BattleTech. If you want to understand why giant robots are blasting the crap out of each other, to say nothing about picking out which faction is the "good" one, you need to delve into the almost excessive amount of supplemental material.
• The names of the Hasbro Beyblade Burst Forge Discs and Performance Tips are not mentioned on the packaging or in the instructions, which just uses their part numbers. However, they are given their proper names in the app/mobile game, viewable while editing a Beyblade.
• Dragonlance is also like this. A lot of the information about the world and things like how magic works are in the various Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks. Even non-gamers have been known to buy the 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons Dragonlance sourcebooks for information about the world.
• Most of the lore in Dungeons of Drakkenheim focuses on exploring the titular city, with details about the world in which the city was built being relegated to an appendix at the back of the book. The player's guide also expands a lot on this lore, to the point that it allows an interested party to run adventures outside of Drakkenheim's ruins.
• Shadowrun, especially in the first through third editions, put nothing more than a timeline in the core books, but had a vast multi-leveled metaplot through the published adventures and, most well-known, the in-character "comments" section of the sourcebooks. Each story arc of the story of the metaplot was hinted in previous books, from the bugs to the Otaku.
• Eberron. Eberron Eberron Eberron Eberron Eberron. 90% of the details and Dungeons & Dragons statlines can be found in the extra sourcebooks like The Forge of War and Faiths of Eberron.
  • True of pretty much any D&D setting across the history of the game (and many, many RPGs aside from D&D, as well). The core setting books/box sets are there to provide just enough information to start your own campaign in that setting if you want to fill in the little details yourself. However, the extra books are there to fill in all the blanks for those who want the "official word," and for the development of the metaplot. In other words, it's a common scheme by RPG publishers to get you to buy more books. That, and highly detailing a whole world would make many books into weighty $100+ tomes — like Monte Cook's Ptolus, which clocks in at 672 pages detailing a single large city.
• Abused by the creator of Old Man Henderson, one of but a handful of characters to win Call of Cthulhu — the author wrote Henderson a 320 page backstory which allowed him New Rules as the Plot Demands. To quote the author:

  The point to having such a long backstory was three-fold: 1: to ensure the GM would never actually read it and 2: Since he would never read it except for in excerpts i pointed out to justify things, I could re-write and change things around completely at random without anyone noticing and MOST IMPORTANTLY 3: Convince everyone that I was serious about this character, and that it wasn't simply the game wrecking bullshit that it was. Dickish yes, but he really did have it coming.

• The published adventure paths for Pathfinder typically contain loads of information about various worldbuilding topics as well as more campaign-specific information, down to detailed backstories and motivations of one-shot NPCs that are likely to be little more than a speed bump to the player party. How much of this gets shared with the players is up to the GM's discretion.
  • Indeed, the original setting has undergone massive changes consistent with every single adventure path having successfully been completed by a bunch of heroes no one knows the names of. If you were to compare the First Edition original Inner Sea region to the 2nd Edition Inner Sea region, you would see the last decade and a half have seen massive changes. Exactly how it all went down is captured in about 144 separate books making up the adventure paths.
• There's a rather extensive lore to Sentinels of the Multiverse for those who are interested, but it has little effect on the game itself. Most of it can be found in the creators' podcast, The Letters Page.
• The background material for Star Realms and its fantasy counterpart Hero Realms isn't included in the game manuals, but is accessible on the publisher's official sites.
• In the board game Talisman, the entire story of how the victory causing Crown of Command got to be where it was and why the world is in its current state is in the manual, and easily ignorable for players who just want to roll dice and acquire treasure.
• Warhammer 40,000 has a small library of rulebooks, rules supplements, codex sourcebooks, codex supplements, alternate army lists, Imperial Armour collections, Chapter Approved collections, etc, etc. And that's just the latest edition.
  • And that's the background stuff.
    • Fiction set in the universe expects you to be familiar with pretty much all of the general background, as well as the appearance and abilities of anything with a codex entry. So instead of a monster description you get something like "oh no, a Lictor!"
• The metaplot in the old World of Darkness. You can play the roleplaying game without the metaplot, but the game writers scattered the metaplot and canon character background stories across various rule supplements, novels set within specific gamelines, crossover novels between the different gamelines, and computer games. Vampire: The Masquerade especially had the whole series of "clan novels" towards the End of the World metaplot. The final supplements that detailed the final fate of the various races and factions (or at least gave lazy Write Your Own Ending options to chose from) still sucked. Other people found it completely awesome, though.
  • This was especially egregious with later books, in particular the later Changing Breeds books. The Nagah (Were-snake) tribe book is the only book that ties Hunter: The Reckoning into the rest of the Werewolf/Vampire line, and does this with a single paragraph. Turns out that Hunters are Gaia's last-ditch attempt at saving herself, since all her other children have utterly failed in the task.
• The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has (or rather, had) a somewhat extensive metaplot if you paid attention to the flavor text of some of the cards, though some of it was apparent in the artwork. Since cards only have either flavor text or effect text, the sudden drop off of monsters with no effects caused this to all but disappear. "Master guides" explaining the background of the card game's universe were released, explaining things that the cards didn't get a chance to. Newer strategies involving Normal monsters means that Konami is producing more new cards with flavor text, so this might turn around.

• Almost all traditional Theatrical Productions have this to an extent — whereas a film or TV series have credits in them, and books feature acknowledgements, etc. etc., if one wants to know who the cast and crew of a particular production are, or sometimes even what the setting is, one needs to have a program from that production (or look it up online...), which will have all that listed. With the exception of Les Misérables, no shows generally use title cards to indicate things, and with the exception of Passing Strange, no show usually has the names of the cast and crew listed aloud at any time during the run.
• If you want to completely understand the underlying themes, vague plots, and significance of all — well, most of — the peculiar characters and acts in a given Cirque du Soleil show, you will probably have to buy the souvenir program and/or explore the official website. According to the 20th anniversary book 20 Years Under the Sun, the creators prefer that people watch the more abstract shows (as most of their productions in The '90s were) and create their own interpretations of them rather than have the creators' ideas in mind all along.
• In The Drowsy Chaperone, the Man in Chair never names Trix or George's actors, but the CD case to the 2006 recording gives them names. Because this could have been created for the CD alone, it could also be considered Loose Canon.
  • Likewise, the Man in the Chair is never actually named in the show (justified, because he only ever interacts with one other character). The name "the Man in the Chair" is more a description than a name proper, as it's all really does (besides snark).
• Almost all of the character's names in Finale are only mentioned in the script, never actually being mentioned in the show.
• In Hamilton, the full letter that Hamilton writes John Adams was, for a time, only available in the book "Hamilton: The Revolution". It eventually became a song on The Hamilton Mixtape, called "An Open Letter".
• In Les Misérables, Enjolras' name is only mentioned in the script. However, there is often an improvised "Enjolras!" in most productions of the show.
• In Mrs. Hawking, and the semi-steampunk play series by Phoebe Roberts it gives its name to, it's never actually mentioned what Nathaniel does for a living, besides a brief self-identification as a "finance man" in the first sequel Vivat Regina. It takes reading Word of God on the official website to know that he works for his family's venture capital firm.
• In Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, the song Prologue includes the lyrics:

  And this is all in your program

  You are at the opera

  You're gonna have to study up a little bit

  If you wanna keep with the plot

• In Urinetown, many of the revolutionaries' and UGC executives' names are only mentioned in the script and never actually said in the show.

• Many of the attractions at the Disney Theme Parks and Universal Studios have backstories, but you have to look in books and promotional materials for the parks to find them. Some of them are explained by voiceover artists over intercoms or through video packages aired while you're waiting in line, but not everyone pays attention to them — or they speed through the line too fast to even see them.
  • For an example, Revenge of the Mummy at Universal Studios Florida is based around the concept that you're participating in a filming of another Mummy movie. If you take the Express line, you'll go through too fast to even figure this out, leaving some Orphaned References behind (such as the crew member wrapped up like a mummy, and a cameo from Brendan Fraser at the very end).
  • While The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man explains the gist of its plot during the queue — the Sinister Six have stolen the Statue of Liberty using a levitation ray, and the Daily Bugle decides to send in tourists to cover the scoop while Spider-Man saves the day — it is never properly explained where Doctor Octopus' levitation ray came from. He claims that he created it himself, but a tie-in comic book reveals that this was not the case, and that he actually stole it from Stark Industries.
  • Disney is an odd case of this, as their official policy regarding a ride's backstory is that it is whatever the cast members working there that day decide it is. Most rides have a generally accepted story that most cast members will stick to, but any details are subject to change at a moment's notice, and some of the best parts come from certain cast members deciding to change it up a bit. The Haunted Mansion is particularly notorious for its extensive backstory, which was created by cast member anecdotes being meticulously documented and pieced together by fans.
  • The Blizzard Beach water park at Walt Disney World has a unique backstory. One day, Florida was hit with a freak snowstorm and it was decided to create the state's first ski resort. When all the snow melted and the plans were to be cancelled, they saw the Ice Gator sliding down the slopes and they decided to make it a water park.
• Batman the Ride at Six Flags is a notable example; the story is that Batman wants to clean up Gotham City, as told in the queue line, but since the ride itself is a standard roller coaster, there's no follow-up to this plot.

• Toylines in general are like this. At best, packaging has a blurb about the story and a quick bio giving the rundown on the character. At worst, there's nothing in or on the box explaining the world the characters live in. Some may have a TV or movie tie-in (if they're not based on one in the first place), but other than that when they say it's All There In The Manual, they mean it's All There In The Manual.
• The American Girls Collection has each named character — historicals and modern-era characters such as the Girls of the Year— come with a meet book that introduces the character, theme, and setting (and in the case of historical characters, the historical specifics of the era.) The rest of the character's series is sold separately, including any side books or spinoffs. Originally outfits and accessories came with data about the books they were connected to; this was depreciated but in the 2020s started to return. The intentions of the brand founder, Pleasant Rowland, was to market the historical characters as a whole world with educational benefits, with the historicals being marketed as showing history through the eyes of a 9 year old of that era.
• For BIONICLE - besides the fact that the toys are some of those have no story material included at all - the main story has to focus on current toy sets, so information on other characters and general world-building can be the domain of supplemental guidebooks and web-published side stories (and occasionally Word of God).
• Thanks to Mixels having its toyline and shorts appearing concurrent with each other, and because the shorts are heavily situation-based, rather than character-based, the product description bios help shine more light on the personalities of the characters, including elements that are hardly, or even never, shown in the show, such as Krader's short fuse or Shuff's clumsiness.

• Doki Doki Literature Club! ostensibly becomes unplayable once you beat it, but the manual contains an instruction on how to restore everything back to the beginning (though this means that you do have to start all over). However, some players didn't get the memo and found themselves fumbling, to the point it produced an urban legend that the game is bricked once it's beaten and has to be reinstalled to be replayed.

• The graphic novel tie-ins for the 2015 iteration of DC Super Hero Girls (all of which happened to be written by franchise creator Shea Fontana) featured details not brought up in the web series, such as Supergirl's fondness for garlic knots, as well as the only appearances of many characters who aren't present in either the web series or the animated films, particularly Lex Luthor, Vandal Savage, the extraterrestrial members of the Green Lantern Corps, Etrigan and the Phantom Zone criminals Zod, Non and Faora.
• The Special Info Episode of DSBT InsaniT gives a lot of information about the cats and the world that you would never know otherwise.
• Since some of the dialogue in Dusk's Dawn is unintelligible, most people wouldn't know what Iridescence's name is, or that the yellow pony's last name is De Noir. The former's shown on the website banner.
• The first Happy Tree Friends DVD contains a "Collect Them All" feature, which gives extra details, fun facts, and statistics on the titular characters.
• Watch the Youtube animated Pilot Movie Lackadaisy and want to know what all these characters were doing a few months ago? Why whiskey runner Rocky deliberately chooses to run down the 'Sable Stone & Quarry Inc' sign and genially intimidate its owner Wick? See Freckle and Ivy's first kiss? Watch Mordecai readily and wordily admit to loathing his work with the Marigold Gang? Head to Lackadaisy.com and be one of many to mistake fourteen years of canonical strips for a nice little prequel comic before diving into character bios, a gallery of bonus semi-canon and gag strips, and asking questions on the author's tumblr for a straight line to the Word of God.
• Some of the Red vs. Blue DVDs have character profiles which give information on all of the characters that isn't found in the series, such as backstories, hometowns, and explanations for plotholes. For some characters, this is the only evidence of their full names. For instance, Sister's full name is Kaikaina Grif, Junior's is Blarggity Blarg-Tucker, and Sarge's is Sargeant S. Sarge III.
• RWBY:
  • Monty Oum's posted several full models of the show's characters and their weapons; this is many weapon names were revealed, and it's also how Junior's real name (Hei Xiong) and Adam's last name (Taurus) were first revealed.
  • Things like character semblances and the like are often revealed in the show's podcast and at show panels, with one (controversial) example being Ironwood's semblance, Mettle.
  • Torchwick's ice-cream-themed sidekick is known simply as "Neo" in the show proper. Spin-off media such as RWBY Chibi and RWBY: Roman Holiday give her full name as "Neopolitan", with the latter revealing that it was a Meaningful Rename following her parents' deaths.
• Trick Moon: Characters that only show up in the opening theme are named in posts on creator Geneva Hodgson's twitter account, which also includes character details not shown in the short proper.
• Witch Academy: The names of multiple characters, namely the King, the Headmistress of Mogarip, and the Headmaster of Mephgazub^note  are only confirmed in the supplementary Voice Claims video.

• Natural Six: The official website includes some extra lore, including a full map of the world (also occasionally shown in the episodes themselves) and a full glossary, which contains some bonus information in some of its entries, such as the offices, holy symbols, and sacred texts of each god.
• Rerez: Most of the questions that Shane and Adam have about Balan Wonderworld are answered in the novel, but they defend not reading it, on the grounds if the developers thought the information was important for the player to know, it should have been packaged with the game.
• Shad Brooks of Shadiversity discusses this occasionally, but he claims it is a sign of bad writing, especially if the work in question is an adaptation. He says that the adaptation's lore must be self-contained and make sense, all without the viewer ever needing to consult the source material or have background knowledge thereof for the adaptation to work.