The Curious Case of Castle Falkenstein

I grabbed Castle Falkenstein because I wanted to research the origin point of a few different card-based TTRPG systems I knew of. There's some great stuff in here (the game supposedly uses cards because alternate universe Victorian high society is opposed to dice) and some questionable stuff in here (there's a swoon table for female characters specifically). The book starts with a ~120 pages of prose narrative and lore spreads, describing how a fictional game designer was isekai'd into the 19th century of a steampunk parallel Earth. It's helpful enough to note that if you want to skip to the rules, you can. but! It takes like fifty pages for the rules section to explain the basic resolution mechanic.

Instead it opens with genre grounding, character creation, skill lists, even tips for running a campaign, before it explains how to play cards to make things happen. Is this just how 90s RPGs were organized? i have no idea

The concern for genre references is particularly interesting to me. I'd think that including 120 pages of narrative and setting material and the front of the book would be a great reason to not reduce your target genre to a few simple principles for your readers to imitate. The whole setting exists to enable steampunk swashbuckling, so why explain that twice?

I'm not opposed to redundancy, I guess, and I wouldn't be as weirded out by it if the book was organized a little differently. But lately I've been thinking about genre and setting as... alternate paths to a target experience. You can say "it doesn't matter what the town is called, it just matters that we're playing a romcom game," or you can say "we're playing on Arrakis, the emotional arc of the narrative is up to you" and both are valid ways to set base expectations for a TTRPG. Trying to do both at once feels messier somehow. I've considered the idea that narrativizing is corrosive to the "reality" of a setting, but I don't think that's quite right. I do think it's true that the more you send people to other works to let their genre inform yours, the more that everyone else's genre work will start to overwrite the more unique or distinctive parts of your own setting.