A fantasy world encyclopediathe lore behind the story, indexed A to Z

Method

1. 1

   Agree the five shelves, then hand over the notebooks

   Decide the domains first: Peoples, Places, History, Sorcery and Languages, each with a line that settles arguments before they start: “Places: every named settlement, river, road and ruin. Peoples who live there belong on Peoples.” Within them, a region, age or tongue is a document; shelves do not nest.

   Then give your assistant the notebooks, as typed files or photographs of the pages in a Claude or ChatGPT project. Ask it to create the shelves and documents and file an entry for every named thing, using only what the notebooks say. Where two pages disagree, it files both versions in a Decision entry; where a name has no description, a Question.

2. 2

   Have every entry written to be found

   Tell the assistant the shape of an entry. The title is the name and a gloss, “Oskarn, the salt city”, and the first sentence a definition: “Oskarn is the largest city of the Veyl estuary, built on salt pans the sea reclaims twice a year.” The index reads finding titles and the first line of each entry, so that first sentence is how the names in it reach the index.

   Below it, the same subheadings every time for its kind of thing. For a city: Setting, People, Rule, History, In the books.

3. 3

   Correct it in the editor

   Hundreds of entries arrive in an evening; checking them is the weekend. Open each document, press Edit, and read against your notebooks. Fix what the assistant misread from your handwriting, delete what it guessed, and settle each Decision by deleting the version that is not true. Mark the entries the story leans on as Key.

   Then write what only you can: the entries the notebooks never had. Revisions marks every change as yours or the assistant’s, so you can always see which words are whose.

4. 4

   Link the entries to one another

   An encyclopedia is read sideways. Ask your assistant to go through a shelf and add links wherever an entry names something that has an entry of its own elsewhere; hovering over a link shows a preview of what it points to. You can paste a link yourself, too.

   Ask it to list the names it could not match. Those are the entries you have not written yet.

5. 5

   Borrow from the real world, and check it

   Invented worlds feel solid when their economics do. Ask your assistant to research how medieval tidal salt works were owned and taxed on the web and file what it finds as a new document on a sixth shelf, Borrowings, one finding per practice with its sources. This needs an assistant with web search; Claude and ChatGPT have it, many local set-ups do not.

   Open the sources before you borrow anything. A borrowed practice becomes lore only when you write it into an entry in your own words, changed to fit your world.

6. 6

   Read the index as a spelling check

   Open the index and read it A–Z, then By shelf. Every recurring name is there, with See references for plurals. Look for pairs that should be one: Oskarn and Oskarne, Veyl and Vail. Two spellings in the index mean two spellings in your notes, and soon in your books.

   A name that matters but is missing from the index is buried in the middle of an entry. Put it in the entry’s title or first sentence. A misspelling used only once never reaches the index; ask your assistant to hunt for those.

7. 7

   Publish a traveller’s guide for readers

   Readers of a big fantasy series love an appendix. Ask your assistant to draft one document, “A traveller’s guide to the Reaches”, from entries you choose: what a visitor would know, nothing a later book reveals. Rewrite it in your own voice in the editor; do not share the encyclopedia itself.

   While you draft the books, keep Look up (⌘K) to hand: “Osk” brings up the city, the salt-wardens and the siege. Press Share on the guide, copy the link (it is shown once), and leave out any entry whose secret the next book depends on.