Setting Bible?

[TheRedLantern]

I'm curious about whether anyone else makes these and, if so, how they organize them. This is mainly targeted to the people writing a series (or multiple series) set in the same universe/world/setting. Or very long single works that need a lot of internal consistency.

I came across the idea when reading the setting bible that David Eddings published for his Belgariad and Mallorean fantasy epics. It's an overview of the whole setting, all the background material that he created before writing a dozen novels set in this world. I latched onto the idea, realizing my own epic princess fantasy story plus setting plus magic didn't all fit in my 13 year old brain.

I've tried making these in Google Docs (works great until the document gets large and slow to open & modify) and with a wiki running on my own computer (more cumbersome to add to because of the wiki formatting, but very easy to keep in sync). I'm at a spot where I need to redo mine from nearly the ground up, so I'm interested in hearing how other authors have kept the details of their stories consistent.

 

[Nynah]

I use Notion for all my longer-form ideas. It works basically like a wiki; you have the option to get fairly fancy with it but I like it because it allows me to nest different pages under different headings. My own personal one is pretty barebones because I don't need it to be elaborate, but there's a lot of functionality Notion offers for free if that is of interest to you. Plus you can access it from anywhere.

 

[StillStunned]

I haven't for any of my fantasy/sci-fi stories, but mostly because I like setting each story in a new location, and discovering new parts of the world.

There's something of a "canon" for the City of Scum, but that's because it's open to everyone to write in.

 

[iwatchus]

I'm curious about whether anyone else makes these and, if so, how they organize them. This is mainly targeted to the people writing a series (or multiple series) set in the same universe/world/setting. Or very long single works that need a lot of internal consistency.

I came across the idea when reading the setting bible that David Eddings published for his Belgariad and Mallorean fantasy epics. It's an overview of the whole setting, all the background material that he created before writing a dozen novels set in this world. I latched onto the idea, realizing my own epic princess fantasy story plus setting plus magic didn't all fit in my 13 year old brain.

I've tried making these in Google Docs (works great until the document gets large and slow to open & modify) and with a wiki running on my own computer (more cumbersome to add to because of the wiki formatting, but very easy to keep in sync). I'm at a spot where I need to redo mine from nearly the ground up, so I'm interested in hearing how other authors have kept the details of their stories consistent.

For my only series that needed anything like this, I created something, although not nearly as grandiose.

I started with one paragraph bios for the key characters. By the end of the series, I was up to thirty-some characters described in a single bit text flle. More than that if you include all the spouses and parents etc, who I had named and gave professions, etc, to.

Relatively early on, I started a timeline. Noting the date (and story) where things happen. I updated this each time I wrote a new story. I have roughed in dates for things that I know are still coming.

Around story three or four, I ended up drawing a floor plan for the condo where much of the story happens. One of the characters refers to it as the condo of sin. Mostly to make sure I was right on who could see what when. I ended up having to make an edit to one of the early stories because some description of the layout was inconsistent with what I ended up having.

The timeline turned out to be the most crucial thing for my writing, but I think the floorpan was a huge mental step into really understanding the world, maybe more for my confidence than anything concrete..

 

[TheRedLantern]

There's something of a "canon" for the City of Scum, but that's because it's open to everyone to write in.

I was definitely interested in hearing from someone who has been participating in that. I skimmed over a couple of stories looking for hooks to connect to (eg, I remember reading something that mentioned a gang of female thieves), but then never felt sure that someone else hadn't already fleshed that out in one of their stories. I wouldn't want to spend a couple weeks turning that gang into something based on the Ismaili assassins when another author wrote a whole story about that gang being arachnomancers with a whole magic system built around it.

How are you keeping things straight?

 

[ChuckWolf]

Most of my stories take place in the fictional city of Sierra Diabla, located Nevada-ish and because of a past real estate scandal, the various sex-worker businesses that bailed the city out, now have a stranglehold over it.

There's also a party/football college that cranks out diplomas and quarterbacks.

 

[TheRedLantern]

Most of my stories take place in the fictional city of Sierra Diabla, located Nevada-ish and because of a past real estate scandal, the various sex-worker businesses that bailed the city out, now have a stranglehold over it.

That's a GREAT setting for erotica. I'd imagine you could almost turn a crank and have plot bunnies pop out.

How do you keep that kind of stuff straight from story to story?

 

[StillStunned]

I was definitely interested in hearing from someone who has been participating in that. I skimmed over a couple of stories looking for hooks to connect to (eg, I remember reading something that mentioned a gang of female thieves), but then never felt sure that someone else hadn't already fleshed that out in one of their stories. I wouldn't want to spend a couple weeks turning that gang into something based on the Ismaili assassins when another author wrote a whole story about that gang being arachnomancers with a whole magic system built around it.

How are you keeping things straight?

I think part of it is that it's a fairly straightforward, human-centric world. Like old-fashioned sword & sorcery: anything out of the ordinary is mistrusted and likely persecuted. Magic is mysterious and dangerous. The wine is sour, the streets are filthy, and everyone is looking out for themselves.

The thing is that it's a setting for character studies rather than high adventure. So it doesn't need exotic peoples and fancy magic. Just people living their shitty lives as best they can.

I really ought to go back and finish those stories I was working on...

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

My stuff takes place in suburbia.

 

[filthytrancendence]

I'm interested as well. I've been using an outline in a document and it is already on the road to unwieldy. It's also basically just shorthand for myself, to keep track of spellings of names, places, and details I decide on for characters and places so I don't have to sift through the whole text to maintain continuity every time I come back to things.

It's got a section for the MC's, which is the longest and most detailed and the part I mostly wrote before starting the story, and sections for secondary and tertiary characters, as well as settings. It's working so far but as you say, it's destined to become unwieldy.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

"Everything is canon until it isn't;" and my stories are now taking place in the same universe until they're not. I stopped worldbuilding for now because of this: everything will now take place in one alternate universe that mirrors our own, except by some certain stories.

Now, before I wrote erotica, I kept my worldbuilding notes in a way that I now cringe at: many word documents scattered all over different folders. Sure, it's easy to index them, but it makes it much harder to crossreference things. The less friction I feel when I'm about to write, the better for me. I stopped doing that once a piece of software came to me back in late 2020 IIRC: Obsidian.

With Obsidian I ended up making my own local wiki for my D&D campaign through a bunch of markdown files linked together. It was easy to crossreference things, and I even wrote my NaNoWriMo of 2021 there. It even replaced my notes-taking app on my phone, and heck, that's what I used to write my 10-minute novelist challenge before my phone's battery decided to get angry at me for writing, forcing me to switch over to the computer. The only hindrance was that I had to learn markdown, but since markdown is used all over the place online nowdays (Reddit and Discord, for instance, they use some version of markdown), it was easier. It runs offline, it's free, and I believe it is partially open source. You can pay for cloud services, but I don't use those. I rather have my files on physical media accross different devices (computer, phone, USB drives...). There are a lot of tutorials on Youtube on how to use Obsidian; some are more focused on using it as a second brain (Odysseas is one of those channels that does this), but they pretty much show you the capabilities of the software. It's pretty powerful for something so simple-looking.

If I'm not using Obsidian, a good ol' notebook works for me too. Seriously, give me a writing tool that has less features, or give me nothing. I managed to worldbuild an entire D&D city inside a 200-page A5 notebook.

If you're thinking about doing a setting compendium, I'd recommend you to only put the essentials in there if you're building things from the ground up. You may have three containers and a basement full of notebooks like Ed Greenwood does with the Forgotten Realms, but at the end of the day, you'll probably end up needing less than 1% of that amount of content.

 

[TheLobster]

I believe the original way for setting Bible was to use movable type made of metal which could be arranged to form the desired page of text.

But this might be an outdated practice; refer to your local print shop for more up-to-date details.

 

[TheRedLantern]

I believe the original way for setting Bible was to use movable type made of metal which could be arranged to form the desired page of text.

But this might be an outdated practice; refer to your local print shop for more up-to-date details.

ChatGPT, what's a "local print shop?" Link me to a TikTok video.

 

[MrPixel]

ChatGPT, what's a "local print shop?" Link me to a TikTok video.

As one who has hand-set moveable lead type for printing, I resemble that remark.

 

[iwatchus]

My first thought about the title of this thread, coming from the thread on mythogical erotica, was someone announcing an event for biblical erotica. You know

Setting: Bible
Rating : X

 

[TheRedLantern]

With Obsidian I ended up making my own local wiki

I'd heard about Obsidian. I'll have to give that a try. I was just using MediaWiki, which is barebones and requires you to know markdown (which is not a problem in my case).

It was easy to crossreference things, and I even wrote my NaNoWriMo of 2021 there

So you even put your manuscripts in there? How did it handle 50K words?

 

[KittyOfSteele]

So you even put your manuscripts in there? How did it handle 50K words?

Smoothly. My computer is old, like, nearly 20 years old, currently running Linux, and it worked smoothly. My phone handles it very well. I managed to get to 40K on a manuscript before switching to the computer, but that is because my phone's battery is having some troubles right now, not because of Obsidian proper as it is happening with any app that I use whatsoever. It was actually better than using Ghostwriter or Manuskript in my experience. Manuskript, for some reason, is lagging on me at 30K.

 

[THBGato]

I just use Bristol, UK, where I used to live. I check online to make sure certain clubs/venues are still open, otherwise I just write from memory.

 

[ChuckWolf]

That's a GREAT setting for erotica. I'd imagine you could almost turn a crank and have plot bunnies pop out.

How do you keep that kind of stuff straight from story to story?

Thank you!

And keeping stuff straight isn't very hard as I don't tend to go into specific details (aside from some of the stuff already mentioned) and some things come from characters who may be unreliable narrators.

Hasn't become an issue as of yet.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I just use Bristol, UK, where I used to live. I check online to make sure certain clubs/venues are still open, otherwise I just write from memory.

Reading through this thread I'm thinking, I use my mind, memories and memory therein. The only thing I write down are the stories.

 

[Areala-chan]

I was definitely interested in hearing from someone who has been participating in that. I skimmed over a couple of stories looking for hooks to connect to (eg, I remember reading something that mentioned a gang of female thieves), but then never felt sure that someone else hadn't already fleshed that out in one of their stories. I wouldn't want to spend a couple weeks turning that gang into something based on the Ismaili assassins when another author wrote a whole story about that gang being arachnomancers with a whole magic system built around it.

How are you keeping things straight?

There's not really much to "keep straight". The City is ever-changing, ever-evolving, and who is to say that the tales told about it don't contradict each other due to a mistaken understanding of who was doing what when.

Back in the 2nd edition of D&D, there was a setting called Planescape, which posited a central "hub" plane to which all the other inner, outer, demi-, and elemental planes were connected. This hub was basically one enormous city named "Sigil", and the only thing consistent about it was that it was always changing. Structures were constantly getting demolished and rebuilt, streets were paved over old ruins, which were later re-excavated and turned into towering mansions. People died, then they got better, then they died again. The various factions vying for power grew, shifted, splintered, merged, and sometimes completely vanished without explanation. Assuming your first visit to Sigil wasn't your last, chances are it would have changed the next time you visited it even if only a few weeks had gone by. The bar you stopped at the last time might have been converted into a crematory attached to an insane asylum. The dwarven information broker you dealt with last time might have been replaced by a devil. The fountain in the square might now be a gigantic Mimic that loves eating all the coins people toss in for good luck, and there's nothing but a still-smoking crater where the Guild of Honest and Excellent Coopers used to stand because someone somewhere bought a defective barrel and was told, "All sales are final."

Planescape was fucking awesome!

When I wrote my story (and the second one I've got in the works), I basically looked at Sigil as my template for how the City operates. If something I wrote contradicted something @StillStunned wrote later, or if someone else came along and used something I had written about in a completely different way, who cares? Everybody's right, because who's to say we aren't writing about events that happened a century apart from one another?

Invent something new. Play around. It's a giant sandbox. The point is to tell a fun story, not to slavishly adhere to any kind of rulebook or lore. At least, that's been my impression.

 

[filthytrancendence]

Planescape was fucking awesome!

I think Planescape: Torment is tied with Pathologic on most pretentious game critic's list of 'best games ever made that nobody's ever actually played.'

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I use an Excel spreadsheet.

Each new story gets a new tab (sheet) where characters, settings, timelines, etc. are listed. After multiple crossover and satellite stories, I added tabs for all the characters with timelines to keep their ages relationships consistent across generations.

My approach to storyboarding has, I believe, produced more consistency than would have been possible otherwise.

 

[Areala-chan]

I think Planescape: Torment is tied with Pathologic on most pretentious game critic's list of 'best games ever made that nobody's ever actually played.'

Yeah, for good reason. Torment was released in 1999, and over the course of its lifetime, including its remastered release around ten years ago, it moved fewer than half a million units. For comparison purposes, Final Fantasy VIII, which was released the same year, sold roughly that many copies on its first day, and has gone on to sell nearly ten million.

Torment was always a niche product targeting a much narrower demographic than similar CRPGs of its era, like Baldur's Gate and Diablo. If you were part of that niche though, there's never been anything quite like it since.

 

[PennameWombat]

I use an Excel spreadsheet.

Each new story gets a new tab (sheet) where characters, settings, timelines, etc. are listed. After multiple crossover and satellite stories, I added tabs for all the characters with timelines to keep their ages relationships consistent across generations.

My approach to storyboarding has, I believe, produced more consistency than would have been possible otherwise.

Somewhat this, but a Libre Office spreadsheet, not Excel.

But I focus on just the characters, physical characteristics (height, eyes, hair, body types, few other things) and relationships, and key timeline. I don't go into much more detail than that.

And only for the Mel's Universe stories (which, admittedly, are over half of my posted stories, although quite a few only have tangential relationship which is more of an easter egg kind of thing for any truly dedicated readers I might have. And a couple comments I've received indicate at least a couple of readers noticed some of the interrelationships.