# A fantasy world encyclopedia — the lore behind the story, indexed A to Z

Recipe No. 3, Books and writing. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/world-encyclopedia

- For: a fantasy writer building one invented world across several books
- You bring: notebooks of lore (typed, or photographed page by page), a hand-drawn map, a list of invented names in at least two spellings, and the first book’s draft
- You get: an encyclopedia of the world across five shelves (peoples, places, history, sorcery and languages), its entries linked to one another, an A–Z index of every invented name, and a public traveller’s guide for readers
- Time: an evening for your assistant to file the notebooks, a weekend to check and correct them, then an entry or two whenever the world grows
- Keep it: private while you work; share one document by a read-only link

A secondary world grows faster than the books set in it. You know the salt city's founding, the three schisms of the tithe-priests and the grammar of the old tongue, and perhaps a tenth of it will ever reach the page. The rest sits in notebooks, and each book you start sends you hunting through them for the name of a river.

This recipe builds the encyclopedia behind the books. It is about breadth, not continuity: not what you said in chapter 14, but what is true of the world whether or not a reader ever learns it. Your assistant, Claude, ChatGPT or a local model, does the filing: it reads your notebooks and lays them out as five shelves (Peoples, Places, History, Sorcery, Languages), a document per region or era, and an entry per thing, linked to one another. You correct it in the editor. The A–Z index is the encyclopedia's index, and it doubles as a spelling check for invented names.

The lore is yours: the assistant files what your notebooks say and marks the gaps; it does not invent your world. The map stays on paper or in your drawing app; know.sh holds words, not images.

## What you will use

- **Shelf**: Five shelves, one per domain of the world, each with a line saying what belongs on it.
- **Research document**: A document per region, people, era or language, whose overview introduces it like an encyclopedia article.
- **Finding**: One entry per city, person, war, working or word; *Observation* for settled lore, *Decision* where you chose between versions, *Question* for what you have not decided.
- **Your AI assistant**: Reads your notebooks and files hundreds of entries at once, links them, researches real-world practice to borrow from, and hunts for inconsistent spellings.
- **The editor**: Where the lore becomes yours again: correct entries, reorder them, settle which version is true, and write what the notebooks never said.
- **Links between documents**: Entries that mention one another are linked, with a preview when you hover over the link.
- **The A–Z index**: Every recurring invented name, across all five shelves, with See references; read *By shelf* or A–Z.
- **Public link**: A traveller’s guide for readers, one document on a public link, without your secrets.

## Method

### 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

## Prompts to try

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, read the notebook pages I have given you and file every named person, people, place, event, working and word as an entry on the matching shelf of my world: Peoples, Places, History, Sorcery or Languages, one document per region, era or tongue. Use only what the pages say. Title each entry with the name and a short gloss, and start it with a one-sentence definition. Where two pages disagree, file both versions in one Decision finding; where a name has no description, file a Question.

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, go through every entry on my Places shelf. Wherever an entry names a person, people, war or working that has its own entry on another shelf, add a link to that entry. Then list the names you could not match, with the entry each one appears in.

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, find invented names that appear in more than one spelling anywhere on my five world shelves (for example Oskarn and Oskarne), including spellings used only once. For each pair, list the entries that use each spelling and which appears in the earliest-filed entry. Do not change anything.

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, read my Sorcery shelf and list ten questions a careful reader might ask about how the Glass Tithe works that my entries do not answer. File them as Question findings in a new document on the Sorcery shelf called “Open questions about the Tithe”. Do not answer them.

## Variations

- Building a language? Ask your assistant for a quiz on the Old Veyl word list with typed answers, which must match exactly: what you want for spelling your own vocabulary. Take it in know.sh or the iOS app, in TestFlight beta.
- Running a game in the same world? The [tabletop campaign setting](/cookbook/campaign-setting) keeps a players’ guide apart from the game master’s secrets.
- Setting everything in one city? Use one shelf and a document per district, guild and temple.
- Pair it with a [series bible](/cookbook/series-bible): the encyclopedia holds what is true of the world, and the bible what is on the page and where.

## Where it falls short

- No maps or images in know.sh. Your assistant can read a photographed map, but the library holds words; give geography in words, with distances and directions, in each place entry.
- No family trees or diagrams. Lineages are lists or tables inside an entry.
- Shelves do not nest, and only one document goes on a public link at a time; there is no way to publish the whole encyclopedia as a site.
- An assistant reading handwriting misreads names, and smaller local models call tools less reliably. Check what it filed; Revisions shows every change it made.

## A note on original worlds and borrowed ones

Build on your own world, or on real history and public-domain myth. Do not fill your library with another author's in-copyright setting, even as reference; their names, places and lore are theirs.

Ask your assistant to file your notes, not to extend them. Lore it invents is not yours, and it will blur with what is. Research it files from the web is a first pass: open each source, and borrow ideas, not wording. Assistants make mistakes about real history; check anything you will rely on.

The encyclopedia and the books are your writing. If you publish text an AI generated, disclose it where your publisher or retailer asks; Amazon KDP requires it for AI-generated text, though not for AI help with checking your own.

Indexed under: Worldbuilding, Encyclopedias, Invented names, Lore, Invented languages, Reader world guides.