To authors who do worldbuilding. How big is your lore bible?

[VertisGuguChalimoth]

Since I'm just starting, mine is only 33 pages (10294 words).

Vertis was wondering how big your lore bibles are, for reference.

 

[Yuin]

Since I'm just starting, mine is only 33 pages.

Vertis was wondering how big your lore bibles are, for reference.

15 pages because I’m heartless. Lowkey I wrote it in note form and hope I remember the conditions, context and timeline of events.

I already planned volume 2 even tho the ending for vol 1 is nonexistent to me

 

[Empress_Omnii]

@TheEldritchGod Ping because I believe you might have a good answer. Maybe?

 

[Phantonym]

Mine is all in my head... I will probably write it down after writing my first chapter... (I have a prologue and synopsis but nothing else)

 

[Hoshino]

I remember it all, nya.

 

[LesserCodex]

My world building is gradual in a sense I've got two pdfs with around two thousand words each, one talking about the continent and the world history stuff the common people know and learn in the library and the more hidden stuff, the existence of the system how it birthed races that exist now and its purpose among other things related to the races of the world. And the history of the conflicts that led to the enemies and organisations that exist in my world today.

I like to sprinkle things in slowly in between chapters, and often when characters talk, they tend to bring these things up but I never go into it, an example would the phrase of dragons, because they are seen as divine beings, the term gods doesn't have the same weight in the world.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

The last one I had was fifteen pages of text and ten pages of game information (for an AD&D campaign back in the 90s). But everything is in flux so I don't really have a set one anymore.

 

[Fairemont]

My draft is about 100k words. My glossary and such is about 80k.

 

[sbdrag]

I did just write a TTRPG based on the setting which is *basically* mostly the lore bible and that's like... 290 pages... and if you subtract the pages that are rules, you can just... substitute stuff from the wiki that didn't have a reason to be in the core rule book and probably end up about the same

(Protip: don't make a handwaviam magic system if you need to give it rules later )

 

[CharlesEBrown]

(Protip: don't make a handwaviam if you need to give it rules later )

Ah yes, the "Yu-Gi-Oh Lesson" - talked to a guy who knew the creators of the franchise. They first wrote a one-shot Pokemon parody manga, with cards instead of magic balls to hold the monsters.
When that took off, they added a one-shot parody of the gamers who took over their shop two nights a week, mostly for D&D - but kept the card theme involved instead of dice.
Then they made a third book with no plan to continue... until a publisher came to them, offering to do a new print run of the first three books, if they would make it an ongoing series, and an added substantial bonus if they could make it a game too...
They said that if they had any idea it might become an actual game some day, they would have done a LOT of things differently from the start!

 

[HypnoticNovels]

Yeah, like a lot of the other bois here, I just have it in my head IMO, all you really need is the over-arching thing and then you can add specifics (like character interactions) as you go. If the general plot line is too difficult to keep track of in your head, there's a chance it might be too confusing for the readers, too

 

[Forcalor]

I organize everything through an archive on GitHub with an easy and quick access, and if you include my array of notes... well, it's not that big, actually, maybe 30k words? I have a tendency to pen down only what I will use later.

 

[sbdrag]

Yeah, like a lot of the other bois here, I just have it in my head IMO, all you really need is the over-arching thing and then you can add specifics (like character interactions) as you go. If the general plot line is too difficult to keep track of in your head, there's a chance it might be too confusing for the readers, too

I mean, a lore/story bible isn't an outline or plot record it usually includes an outline or plot notes, but it's often more about setting stuff

if you have a lot of background lore and world building, it's a good way to keep track of details that might only come up occasionally so you don't forget them, like the name of an important location that's mentioned early on but doesn't come up again until later or cultural notes that don't really have a place to be explicitly explained in the story but still influence how characters act. or rules of how magic works, if that isn't explained explicitly in the story, etc. it's a way to keep yourself consistent, especially if you write very long stories that end up with a lot of background lore.

and some authors use it for world details that never make it into the story because world building is fun lol

 

[Wolfsiege]

A bunch of messy disorganized ideas in a Microsoft word document explained as if I was explaining it to a drunk uncle and was drunk myself, it has about 16882 words and zero organization, I sorta gaze upon it like Saruman gazing into the Palantir once in a while and get surprised by my own random-ass ideas as if I wasn't the one to write them and then add in further elaboration. I suppose this might either generate a good story or a very funny RIP document when they find my dead body in front of a computer.

 

[JHarp]

Lore Bible? I ended up moving a majority of my 15+ years of work into Obsidian so I've now got a lore-wiki complete with reference material.
Whats that? I'm not meant to have spreadsheets for each major region and waterfront for every type of fish and their ecology/distribution? Oh.

 

[Rezcore]

Part of mine is on here. I also have about 300 pages dedicated to characters and their traits. 40 separate pages for navy, 30 for air force, 100 for army. It's fucking huge.

 

[Soumiyya]

So far I have a 25 page google doc on just the elves and their culture ?

 

[Little-Moon]

Ehh....the biggest lore bible in my case is around 2 handwritten Notebooks. I like to do a lot of my stuff by hand before typing it out especially world building.

 

[Keene]

With enough exposition, I've found the series itself doubles as a lore bible

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Oh, but I suppose I should admit that one reason my "lore bible" no longer exists is that my world was destroyed in 2001, part of the Gawdswar, that reordered the universe and created Garweeze Wurld for the old HackMaster RPG