As with many of FromSoftware’s dark fantasy RPGs, most of what could be considered the story of Elden Ring, happens before the game even begins. The lore of Elden Ring is complex web of demigods and their children, and it would be easy for a player to finish Elden Ring without ever understanding the game's story. The player is left to use dialogue, item descriptions, and context clues if they wish to understand the relationships between these characters.
However, the game also promotes players sharing information, as seen with Elden Ring’s in-game message sharing mechanic for helping, or pranking, fellow players. Elden Ring’s player community has countless members dedicated to compiling and unraveling the game’s deep lore, and one of the most important aspects of this is the relationships between all the major demigod characters.
The demigods in Elden Ring are major characters in the game’s story, with many of them making up the game’s main boss fights. But it will come as a surprise for many new players to learn that most of these major characters are step-siblings to one another. This confusing element of these character relationships is broken down clearly in a new family tree created by Reddit user Tolnin. The Reddit user’s image shows both the parental relationships that are confirmed within Elden Ring, along with some highly plausible fan-theorized character connections such as Melina being a daughter of Marika.
Something Tolnin’s family tree image helps to illustrate is why so many of Elden Ring’s demigod characters have similar sounding names. While playing Elden Ring and trying to understand the game’s story, this detail can be the cause of a lot of confusion as players may understandably conflate descriptions of characters like Godwin and Godfrey in their heads. A clear family tree like that of Tolnin’s helps players to more clearly define these different characters with similar names.
Characters born to Radagon and Rennala all have names beginning with R, while many of Markia’s children have names beginning with M. Marika also had a child with Godfrey named Godwin. It didn’t take long for fans to realize that these naming conventions make up the initials of George R.R. Martin, who wrote a lot of the backstory for Elden Ring, and who many fans believe may have slipped his initials into these Elden Ring character names as an Easter egg.
George R.R. Martin has stated before that he writes repeating naming conventions into fictional family lineages because many real medieval family trees contained similar repeating names. But Martin has denied purposefully hiding his initials in the names of Elden Ring’s characters.
Elden Ring is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.