There’s this thing I do when I want to feel like people appreciate what I do. I call it “dance for your article.” To start with, I insert a throwaway line into an article about some other useful article I want to write. Something I know people want. And then I say, “I totally could write this article, but I doubt anyone really wants it.” And then I wait for the comments to start rolling in. Comments wherein people insist that they certainly do want the article and they believe that I am the only genius capable of writing it.

A month ago, I gave you all a look at the so-called Angryverse Campaign Bible. And I mentioned that I could probably write a whole article about the really useful tool that is a campaign bible and the major benefits it provides. And sure enough, people started dancing. And now, enough people have danced that I feel like my genius is appreciated. And it’s time for that article.

So, let’s talk about campaign bibles and why I totally lied when I said I was going to show you mine.

An Ugly Little Map

When I offered you a glimpse into the Angryverse Campaign Bible last month by sharing a big ole infodump about how undead worked in my game, I told you a terrible lie. Because that wasn’t my campaign bible at all. I would never share my campaign bible with anyone. And that’s the second thing you have to understand about campaign bibles. Which is what we’re talking about today. What campaign bibles are, why they are useful, and how to make one.

Anyway, the second thing you have to know about campaign bibles is that you never show them to anyone. They are only for you. The first thing you have to know about campaign bibles is what a campaign bible actually is. And the zeroth thing you have to know about campaign bibles is that it wasn’t actually my idea to call them bibles.

The word ‘bible’ comes from the Greek. It means ‘book.’ And the concept of a story bible or setting bible comes from both screenwriting and writing writing. Book writing. Being an author. It turns out that most television series, most purposeful movie franchises that don’t suck, and most book series have bibles. And that’s what writers, producers, publishers, and other people “in the business” call them. While bibles vary from medium to medium, they all serve the same two basic purposes. First, bibles serve as a roadmap for the series or the franchise or whatever. It summarizes what’s going to happen throughout the various books or episodes or movies in the series. Most television producers actually require these sorts of bibles before they’ll approve a series because they want to know there’s a plan. And you can find a lot of television series bibles on the internet if you’re curious.

Second, series bibles are a repository for all the information that’s necessary to tell stories in the world of the series. Usually, a series bible has all these fact sheets for different characters and locations or for different aspects of the world. Anything that the creators need to keep track of from episode to episode or book to book. Now, this stuff varies widely from series to series, depending on the needs of the series. J.R.R. Martin probably has a fact sheet for every noble house in the world of Ice and Thrones. And J.K.K. Rowling probably had a fact sheet to keep track of all the silly magic spells in the world of Goblets and Fire that listed each spell’s silly pseudo-Latin incantation and what the spell did and what wand motion made it happen.

If there’s a world detail that some obsessive fan would scream at an author about if the author ever got it wrong, it’s probably in the series bible somewhere.

So, bibles are just places where creators spell out their plans and keep track of their facts. They’re reference materials, plain and simple. And they are plain and simple. Bibles aren’t pretty things. They’re brief and to the point. Just lists of facts and piles of synopses. And the only people who want to read that s$&% are the fans who want to yell at their favorite author because Harry Potter used the wrong somatic gesture in book 17 when he cast poopicus pantalones on Sandor Clegane.

What I showed you a few weeks ago was NOT part of my campaign bible. Because it was pretty and readable and it had a hell of a lot of words. Sorry, I lied.

The Campaign Bible

Now, I’m not talking about TV series or movie franchises here. I’m talking about writing homebrew campaigns for your friends to play using your favorite tabletop role-playing game system. Or just using f$&%ing D&D 5E because no one will let you use your favorite systems. Obviously, your needs are going to be a little different from J.J.J. Abrams. And because no two campaigns are precisely alike – even two campaigns run by the same GM – your needs may even be different from your own needs.

A few years ago, I ran this campaign that involved the players trying to stop an evil demon prince from uncovering the true name of a god as part of his plan to destroy the god and seize her divine power. It was pretty epic. There was this complicated back and forth between the players and the villains. And I had to plan a lot of the big s$&% in advance. Meanwhile, my current campaign is just a string of random adventures that I think up about ten minutes before I have to start running the things.

As you can imagine, the bibles for those two campaigns are very different. And that’s the point. Campaign bibles come in many forms, and the form any campaign bible actually takes is dictated entirely by the needs of the game. That first game of mine needed lots of plot points and villainous plans spelled out in advance. And it took place in a semi-homebrewed world, so I also had to keep track of a lot of world details. My campaign bible for my current game has no roadmap at all. Just quick summaries of the s$%& that has already happened. And it takes place in Faerun. So I don’t have to keep track of a lot of world details. And the world of Faerun is such a mess of retcons and rewrites and cataclysmic, world-changing events to justify edition changes that it wouldn’t matter if I did keep track of anything anyway.

But whatever sort of campaign you’re running, a bible is still a really useful thing.

Who Needs the Bible Anyway?

I know this bible thing sounds like a pain in the a$&. So why should you keep a campaign bible? Especially if you’re just running an adventure of the week campaign in a totally boring published setting? Or just running Descent into Avernus?

Well, to be honest, if you’re running a published adventure totally by the book and your players just play the adventure as written and nothing unexpected or unusual or creative happens, you can survive without a bible. But the minute your players decide to befriend that one obnoxious goblin or kobold or hollyphant and you start pulling character details out of you’re a$&, you’re going to wish you had someplace to park your a$& details. And that someplace is a campaign bible.

A campaign bible helps you maintain what I call the three ‘C’s of campaign bibles. I call them that because two of them start with the letter ‘c’ and I spent some time rewording the third one and looking up synonyms until it started with the letter ‘c’ too. The three ‘C’s of campaign bibles are Consistency, Cohesion, and Creativity.

Now, I’ve had a lot to say about consistency. Particularly in my book. The one I wrote. Go buy it if you don’t have a copy yet. I called consistency one of the three pillars that hold up the entire role-playing game ceiling. And you thought they were combat, role-playing, and exploration. Ha!

Consistency means that once you establish something about your game, you stick to it forever. You might say that all orcs are evil because orcs were created by the god of rage and slaughter and their blood burns with a divine hatred for everything that isn’t an orc. Or you might decide that fireball spells never work underwater. Or you might reveal that skeletons are actually constructs, not undead. Doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is you never go back on your word. Because players make decisions based on everything they learn about the world. More importantly, for some players, learning about the world is the most fun thing you can do in an RPG. And the stuff they learn keeps changing, it ruins their fun.

Cohesion is related to consistency. Cohesion just means that all the different parts of your game world fit together. In the Angryverse, you can’t bring an elemental or demon or your pet dog Woofy back from the dead with any sort of spell. Also, reincarnation doesn’t exist and the reincarnation spell has been removed from the game. Also, Woofy will never rise from the grave as an undead by himself. It takes deliberate magic to make an undead animal. You may not know the reasons for those things, but when you look at them, there’s a definite pattern. Even if you can’t say exactly what it is.

Consistency ensures you follow the same rules over and over. Cohesion ensures that the new rules you invent feel like they fit the old rules. Together, those two things add up to verisimilitude: the illusion of reality. That is, the illusion that the game world could be a real place if you accept certain underlying assumptions.

The third ‘C’ is creativity. But that’s only because I wanted it to start with the letter ‘c’ and because it was hard to come up with a single word or phrase that summed up the fact that a campaign bible helps prevent your creative juices from drying up by ensuring that you always have plenty of idea seeds and that you never have to start anything with a truly blank page. How does that work? Well, you know how you sometimes need to come up with a hook for your next adventure? Or you have a hook, but you need a villain? Or you need a location for the adventure? The campaign bible has a ready list of all of those things. Instead of having to invent a random location every time you want to have a fun, dungeon-crawly adventure, you could leaf through your campaign bible and discover that you mentioned something called “the ruins of the island fortress of Bleakstone?” Well, you didn’t really know what it was at the time. Except that it was a ruined fortress on an island. But now you know what it actually is: the site of your next adventure.

And if you’re running a more structured campaign with a specific end goal, then your bible is even more useful. Because it has an actual pile of ready-made plot points just waiting for you to turn them into adventures.

That’s the power of the bible.

How Not to Bible

Before I tell you how to make a useful campaign bible – and I promise I’m going to make it easy – before I tell you how to make a useful campaign bible, I have to discuss three things that are not the way to make a useful bible. Well, they are more like three very common mistakes that GMs always seem to make with their campaign bibles. And those are in addition to the mistake I already implied above. Which I guess means that I actually have to discuss four mistakes.

Mistake 1: Writing a Bible for People to Read

Your bible is NOT a setting guide. It’s not backstory. It’s not a document you hand out to anyone. If you want to make a setting guide, your bible will help. But don’t do that. No one wants to read that s$&% anyway. No one but you. Your players certainly don’t. The only thing the players need to know is how to make a character and start playing the game. And if there’s so much history and backstory and other prosaic bulls$&% necessary to make a character that you have to write it all down, you need to stop. Or just give up GMing and write the Silmarillion. And, by the way, that mess of a book is precisely what happens when someone finds your campaign bible and decides to publish it.

The Silmarillion is overwrought, boring crap. Fight me.

Mistake 2: Not Reading Your Bible

No one wants to read your bible. Not even you. And that’s a problem because you have to read it. You have to skim through it from time to time and just read the stuff in it. Not just when you’re intentionally looking something up. You need to read it periodically and randomly. Just open it up to a random page and read a few adventure summaries or NPC fact sheets or whatever.

Lots of GMs keep notes – GMs love to keep notes – but very few of them ever go back and read their notes. They love to fill notebooks and binders and Word documents and Wikipedias and One Notes with pages upon pages and gigabytes upon gigabytes of stuff. And then they stack all that s$&% up and forget about it. Some GMs like to explain that writing stuff down – or typing it out – is the important part. It helps them remember everything important. Those GMs are not as smart as they think they are. And they are wrong. No one has infinite storage capacity and no one can remember something they’ve forgotten. And memory only helps with consistency anyway.

You can probably remember a lot of facts about your game world. You remember how fireballs work and you remember everything you’ve ever written about the fire mages of Firemagia. As facts. But if you don’t immerse yourself in those facts, they don’t slosh around in your brain and form new associations with other things. They just sit in your memory archives until you specifically recall them. However, if you’re suddenly reminded of the fire mages of Firemagia as you leaf through your bible and you happen to be thinking about the ice knights who were trying to resurrect that legendary frost dragon last week, you may realize those two organizations probably have a history together. Creativity is what happens when random things bump into each other in your head and form some kind of connection. And reading random bits of your bible makes that happen.

Reading your bible periodically also steeps you in the tone of your campaign. And that helps you maintain cohesion. See, tone is this slippery, nebulous thing. It’s the “feel” of your game. It’s not something you do on purpose and it’s not something you can see. It’s something that emerges as you run your game. And it’s something you really don’t notice consciously. But, with enough exposure, you start to get a sense of it.

So don’t just pile up your notes and refer to them when you need them. Read them.

Mistake 3: Writing Your Bible Like a Book

No one wants to read your world’s backstory. Not even you. Have I said that before?

Problem is that you have to read it. So, you want to make it as easy to read as possible. Not pleasant. Not fun. Just easy. That’s why a campaign bible should be written in synopses, facts, and lists. Stuff that gets the key points across without wasting your time. A character’s backstory should be nothing more than a bunch of sentence fragments of the highlights of their life.

• born to poor farmers in Firemagia in the year of the Floating Goat
• conscripted by the Firemagia sorcerarmy at 13
• completely unable to use magic due to a malformed pineal gland

See? Just facts. Just the essence of facts.

That makes your bible very easy to read. But it also keeps you from getting in the way of your own creativity. In the next section, I’m going to harp on the idea that you should never write down any facts in your bible that didn’t actually come out during play. Until you say something to the players, it isn’t true. And, after you say it, you can never unsay it.

For instance, say you had this NPC in one session of your game. He showed up, hired the party to spy on the ice knights of Iceknightopolis, took the information, paid the party, and left. The only thing the party ever found out about him is that he works for the Firemagian government.

Well, if you wrote this long, elaborate story about how he was born of low means and how he got conscripted and couldn’t do magic but it turned out that he was really good at planning and reconnaissance and his talents were recognized and he became a loyal and proud non-magical spymaster for Firemagia, well, that’s all that dude can ever be. Because you can’t strike that s$&% from the record once you put it in the bible. Even if you think you can. Your creative brain doesn’t work that way.

Later on, if the campaign takes a weird turn and you need a bitter Firemagian traitor to sell the party out to the Ice Knights, you can’t use that spymaster. Because the spymaster you wrote would never turn traitor. Not without you jumping through a lot of narrative hoops to make that happen. And sure, it’s easy to see how to rewrite the character now. But if you’re six months removed from that spymaster and trying to come up with a villain, your brain won’t jump to that spymaster and you might pass right over him as you search your campaign bible because he doesn’t fit the mold. Your brain is very quick to dismiss s$&% like that. Or not think of it at all.

Once you write something in your bible, you make it an immutable fact of your world. And in your brain. So never write down anything until you’re absolutely sure it’s a fact. And the best way to avoid writing down anything that doesn’t have to be a fact is to write as concisely as possible.

Mistake 4: Keeping Your Bible Organized

These days, there’s lots of great ways to organize s#&$%. There’s One Notes and Wikipedias and magic technology journals you can photograph with your phone and then have your phone automatically color code and organize everything. And that s$&% is great if you’re a f$&%ing criminal attorney whose success hinges on being able to recall the precise thing the opposing counsel said seventeen months ago during an informal meeting in the men’s bathroom. But that s$&% is really bad for people who invent games about pretend elves because it really f$&%s with your creativity.

And that’s good news because all that organization is really time-consuming and it doesn’t come naturally to most people and it isn’t at all fun if you’re sane.

As I said above, the creative process is all about unrelated things sloshing around in your brain and bumping into each other. Occasionally, two things will crash into each other, some sparks will fly, and your brain will suddenly notice a connection between those things and come up with something entirely new. That’s why boredom is actually great for creativity and why the best thing you can do to enhance your creative ability is to put your iPhone in another room whenever you’re not actually making a telephone call with it. Which no one ever does anymore and that’s why I haven’t seen my phone in seven weeks.

The more you organize and classify your s$&% so you can easily find exactly what you need, the less likely you are to turn up something you weren’t looking for. And that means you’re less likely to experience any of those crucial idea collisions in your brain. I’m not saying you should be completely disorganized. You can’t get by on a pile of loose papers in three different shoeboxes. If you can’t find what you do need when you do need it, that’s no good either. But every minute you spend organizing and classifying is a minute you spend not reading and not creating. A creative brain thrives on sloppy. Besides, it’s a game about pretend elves, not the New York Penal Code. Holy mother of f$&%, how organized does it need to be?

To sum up all these rules:

• keep it sloppy
• keep it brief
• keep reading it
• and keep it to yourself

How to Bible: Exploring Your World

A campaign bible is a living document. You’re constantly adding to it as you discover new things about your game and your world. And that’s the secret to running a great game using a campaign bible: however much planning you put into your game, it’s still Terra Incognita until you start running it. Treat it that way. You don’t write a campaign, you play a campaign. You don’t build a world, you discover a world.

I know this sounds like a bunch of hippy-dippy bulls$&%, but if you can get yourself to believe your game world really exists and you’re just channeling it week after week, you’ll have a compelling world. And your campaign bible is your explorer’s journal. It’s where you chart your course across the unknown face of the world of your game and it’s where you record your discoveries.

That’s why it’s sloppy and ugly and disorganized. Because you’re an explorer and you’re constantly discovering new things. Bilbo didn’t write There and Back Again while he was out riding rabbit sleds with a hallucinating fruitcake that Dumbledore wouldn’t hire to teach care of magical creatures even if there was a teachers’ strike at Hogwarts and Hagrid had dragon pox. He wrote that s$&% when he got home.

That’s also why you shouldn’t go crazy on the backstory. If you need some backstory to set the campaign off, that’s fine. If you need a bunch of plot points figured out in advance to pull off your epic campaign, that’s also fine. But do only as much as you absolutely need. Your campaign bible should be as empty as possible before you start playing. It’s okay to plan things out. I believe firmly in planning. But plan the absolute minimum.

But enough of that bulls$&%. What should you actually write?

How to Bible: Roadmaps, Summaries, and Fact Sheets

The best campaign bibles have three parts. I like to use a simple, five-subject notebook with the last two dividers torn out to give me two small parts and one big part. Because that last part has a lot of little parts. And I use notebooks because it’s absolutely impossible to impose anything more than minimal organization on the thing. If you prefer three-ring binders or electronic documents, those are fine too. Just don’t start organizing s$&%.

The first part of your bible is the roadmap. If you have a plan for your campaign, it goes there. And remember, a plan is a goal, a list of plot points, some minimal backstory, and maybe an idea or three for some adventures that have to happen. That’s all. Don’t go crazy. Just get the game pointed in the right direction, give it a push, and know what landmarks to look out for.

If your campaign doesn’t have a roadmap and doesn’t need one, leave this part as a place to write down random adventure ideas that you might use later. Just remember to keep it concise. An idea like “tower frozen in a glacier” can be adapted to lots of different things. But if you add too many details about who the tower belonged to and how it got frozen and where it is, that prevents you from making anything else out of it.

The second part of your campaign bible is for adventure summaries. Which are precisely what they sound like. I like to give each adventure one page. You just summarize each adventure after it happens. And when I say summarize, I mean SUMMARIZE. I’ve seen some of the summaries and recaps you GMs write. Holy mother of f$&%, you’re not adapting your game as a novel. An adventure summary is a list of events and plot points. Significant events and plot points. Not every f$&%ing encounter and every f$&%ing conversation spelled out in eloquent f$&%ing prose.

After you write a short, succinct list of the adventure’s plot points and developments, you’ll include a short, succinct list of the important facts the players learned during the adventure. Who did they meet? What did they learn about that NPC’s background? What new location did they hear about? What did they hear about it? Did they learn anything new about how the world works? Did you make any judgment calls about the rules that change the game?

And remember to write down only things the players actually learned. Not s$&% you wanted to include but didn’t. Not backstory bulls$&% you made up that had no impact on the game because you don’t know how to weave backstory into the narrative. Only stuff you can count on the players knowing because that’s the stuff you can safely build on. And only stuff that is now set in stone.

The rest of your campaign bible is made up of fact sheets. And the trick to using the notebook method is to leave lots of room between everything so you can add more pages.

A fact sheet is a sheet of facts. Short, succinct lists of informational bits and bobs. Not prose. If you can’t master the vital skill of distilling things down to the important points and removing the excess crap, you can’t communicate effectively. Quit GMing.

Yes, I’m harping on this. It’s important.

What do you need fact sheets for? You need them for whatever you need them for. I can’t tell you. That’s why you leave a lot of room. But most campaigns have a roster of NPCs. So, you probably need NPC fact sheets at the very least. I’ll use those to explain how to fact sheet.

The way I like to do fact sheets is to start with a list of things that need to be on fact sheets. So, my NPC fact sheet is just a list of all the NPCs that I’ve discovered in my world. Discovered through play, that is. Not written into an adventure. Until the PCs meet them, the NPC doesn’t exist.

Anyway, I just add each NPC to the list once they exist and I write down the two or three key facts about them. Whatever the PCs have discovered. And then, once I have one fact too many about that NPC, I give them a page of their own right after the big NPC fact sheet. Or after the last NPC who needed a page of their own. Once again, it’s important to leave space. Or master using the Ctrl+Enter shortcut if you’re using Microsoft Word.

So, the cycle continues. The players meet an NPC or learn about them, I add them to the list. They learn one fact too many about that NPC and then I give the NPC a page of their own. That means that not only do NPCs only get full pages once they are important enough in the game to deserve them, but also that every NPC who has a page of their own is already on the list of all the NPCs ever. And I do the same for everything else I need to keep track of. Locations, gods, planes of existence, factions and organizations, historical events, facts about the cosmos, whatever.

And that’s it. That’s a campaign bible. It’s just a collection of lists and summaries. Easy to peruse, easy to maintain, a little bit ugly, a little bit disorganized, and highly personal. But it’s also a simple, powerful tool. As long as you don’t get f$&%ing obsessed with it.

Fortunately, no GM was ever prone to obsessing over organizing their tools instead of actually building something with them.