Chapter 1. An Encyclopedia for One IP — What Is a LOREBOOK?

J. R. R. Tolkien never completed The Silmarillion before his death. From the publication of The Hobbit in 1937 onward, the materials on Middle-earth that he had accumulated throughout his life—myths of Valinor, the wars of the First Age, and bundles of notes and manuscripts on the rise and fall of Númenor—filled his shelves in Oxford. Even when he died in 1973, the outline of a book was visible among them. His son Christopher spent another twenty-five years organizing the material, and Unfinished Tales, the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth, and finally The Children of Húrin (2007) entered the bookshelf one after another. It took seventy years for the materials of one IP to be bound into books.

Every creator eventually creates a world. Make one character and the world in which that character lives follows; design one city and the laws of that city follow. When the materials of a work accumulate, there comes a time when a world begins to emerge between them. Anyone who has operated an IP for five years can imagine the rulebooks, short stories, planning documents, external wikis, and character sheets piled throughout folders—and the moment when one wants to bind all of them into a single book. It can remain unfinished even after a lifetime, as Tolkien's did. That difficulty is the starting point of this text.

This text deals with the process of binding that emerging world into one book. It is a fourteen-installment series presented in fourteen chapters, and a nine- to fourteen-month project that produces a print edition and a public web edition at the same time.

The five sister works of MEJE Works

Because this text is designed as one of the sister works of MEJE Works Corp., let us briefly introduce the company before beginning. MEJE Works is a worldbuilding company. Its founder, Kim Dong-eun (White Dragon/WhtDrgon), is a metaverse and community specialist whose career includes combined idol, film, and game content as well as leading HYBE's worldbuilding library team. The company's principal work is worldbuilding, developed from more than twenty years of MMORPG production and convergence-content work and refined under names such as campaign setting and world setting book.

Worldbuilding was once manual work that took more than half a year. One person would organize rulebooks, short stories, planning documents, and external wikis by hand, and binding scattered material into one book took nearly a year. That work has gradually become shorter. Alongside creative writing that technology cannot adequately cover, the archival work once consuming countless opportunities for creation is becoming an environment in which AI helps us focus on the procedural creation of World Building and Universe Setting.

MEJE Works organizes this procedural creation into five sister works.

Seoyeongak: deeply reading foreign-language works and organizing translation keywords. Its output is a volume of translation and adaptation material.
New Character Build: creating one person from zero. Its output is a twelve-stage character sheet.
Librarying: binding scattered materials into one dictionary or library. Its output is an Obsidian Vault of 1,500 entries.
LOREBOOK: binding materials into one encyclopedia. Its output is a roughly 450-page B5 hardcover print edition and a public web edition. This is the sister work covered by this series.
Storytelling100: constructing one hundred short stories from the library. Its output is a companion collection of one hundred short stories.

The five sister works form the procedural-creation structure of one IP, and this text deals with LOREBOOK. The MEJE Works standard is to begin LOREBOOK after Librarying is complete, but Librarying is not an absolute prerequisite. If a reader's IP has already accumulated a reasonable amount of material, LOREBOOK work can begin, with Librarying accompanying it as the paired tool that organizes the material. You may follow at your own pace.

The areas of creative writing that technology does not cover—determining an IP's tone, giving depth to a character, and deciding how an event unfolds—remain MEJE Works' internal know-how and are not technically unpacked here. Simply organizing materials does not create a world on its own, but it is still difficult to explain creative craft in purely technical terms. This text limits that difficulty to one part of the work: organizing material and packaging a publication.

What is a LOREBOOK?

A LOREBOOK is a publication that binds an IP's world, history, geography, characters, and laws into the form of a single encyclopedia. The word combines lore—tradition or knowledge—with book. In Korean it is called a lorebook or an official setting guide. On the market it also appears under names such as World Codex, Lore Book, and Official Setting Guide.

Here, IP (Intellectual Property) means the body of worldbuilding, characters, and stories that a writer or company owns as an asset. A single novel can be one IP, while a novel, game, and animation together can also constitute one IP. The audience of this text is the producer responsible for that IP from beginning to end. If a writer is the person who directly writes the text, a producer is the person who also decides the division into parts, entry lengths, illustration commissions, and publication specifications.

A scene before the bookshelf

Visit the TRPG section of a bookstore and you may find a thick hardcover on the shelf. It weighs about one kilogram in the hand and has a spine roughly 28 millimeters thick. The Witcher 3 Compendium is similar in thickness; Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (third edition, 2001) is somewhat lighter at 320 pages, while Coyote & Crow (2021) is heavier at 530 pages. A cityscape fills the cover in color. Open the book and the body text flows in two columns, while illustrations occupy roughly twenty percent of each page. At the end, a glossary, index, map book, and chronology compendium are bound as appendices.

What happens when this volume reaches a reader's hands determines the composition of a LOREBOOK. When readers first encounter a new IP and are drawn into its world, they sit before the shelf because they want to handle its material more deeply. They want a closer look at a city's streets, want to know a character's childhood, and want to ask where the background to an event began. A hardcover comes down from the shelf, and the reader opens it on their lap. The way the book responds at that moment is the identity of a LOREBOOK.

The body uses only five colors. Eberron: Rising from the Last War repeats jade, bronze, ink, copper, and white consistently from cover to appendices. There is a narrative color for emphasis in the body, a technical color for infographics, a theme color for the IP's identity, a danger color for warnings or taboos, and an accent color for core boxes. Limiting an IP's visual identity to five colors and repeating them across cover, body, and illustration lets the reader meet the same IP atmosphere on every page. A new color on every page makes the book look scattered; too few produce the monotony of a catalog. Five is the balancing point between them.

Pages are divided into two columns for readability. A narrow column makes each line shorter, and short lines keep the eye from losing its place when it moves to the next. Since Diderot's eighteenth-century Encyclopédie established two-column composition as a standard, encyclopedias, academic papers, and newspapers have followed the same form. It applies naturally to a LOREBOOK, where readers frequently search by entry. Put simply, two columns fit the reading speed of a reference book. The eye remains connected while skimming an entry, and the next entry enters the field of view as the reader moves between them.

Three hundred to six hundred entries are bound into one volume, built on a twelve-part skeleton. Five variations—art book, narrative bible, game-design bible, and official comics or webtoon setting guide alongside the standard encyclopedia—coexist in the market. The next chapter examines their differences in detail.

Both dictionary and guidebook

A LOREBOOK contains two uses in one volume: a reference dictionary and a guidebook for continuous reading.

The reference use is simple. While designing a Forgotten Realms campaign, a reader asks, “Who was Elminster?” They check “Elminster, pp. 142, 198, 305” in the index, turn to page 142, and find a full-color one-page character card for the wizard. Whether the question concerns a city, faction, or character, the reader finds the answer in one or two minutes and closes the book.

Continuous reading has a different character. A reader opens the book for thirty minutes every night and freely begins with whatever entry attracts them. From the street scene of a city in Part 4, Geography, they move to an entry on a temple at the city's edge, then to Part 2, Laws of the World, for the temple's chief deity, and then to a Part 9 character entry for a shaman who serves that god. Reading the whole book becomes a schedule of several months. Online accounts of readers taking about eight months to read Final Fantasy X Ultimania at one or two entries a week are common; a published LOREBOOK becomes a book read slowly beside its reader.

The two uses ordinarily conflict within one volume. Dictionaries do not suit continuous reading, and guidebooks are weak at lookup. If Tolkien's The Silmarillion (1977) was a guidebook that prioritized continuous reading, D&D's Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (2001) was a dictionary that prioritized lookup. A reader of The Silmarillion follows the shaping of Valinor as a continuous myth, but may lose their way when seeking a god's name in its light index. A reader of Forgotten Realms can find a character's name in a second, but reading from the beginning produces an endless succession of city and character cards without a clear flow. One prioritizes flow between stories and is weak at search; the other separates each entry and searches quickly but reads poorly from end to end. A LOREBOOK designs the middle ground. It separates entries to satisfy dictionary use, creates a reading path with wikilinks between them, and lets the index make the final provision for search.

Here, a wikilink is an Obsidian-style link between notes, written as [[entry]]. It is a bridge from one entry to another. In the print edition it becomes a page-number reference; in the public web edition it becomes a clickable link. A Related entries section at the end of an entry gathers five to ten wikilinks, creating the moment when a reader decides whether to close the book or move to the next entry. A LOREBOOK with well-composed wikilinks lets a continuous reader spend an hour with one entry and move naturally to the next. When the flow is broken, the reader closes the book after one entry.

In brief, the design has three essentials: compress each entry to 1,500–3,000 Korean characters so it can be read in one sitting; connect entries with wikilinks to enable continuous reading; and supplement lookup with an index at the end.

Simultaneous print and web publication

A LOREBOOK is published simultaneously in two media: a hardcover print edition and a public web edition in the form of a static site.

The print edition is a book kept on a shelf. The public web edition is a site reached through an internet address: enter a keyword in the search field, reach the entry page within one second, and read it on mobile as well. The media differ, but they use the same 1,500 .md files as a single source. The same material becomes a hardcover through print typesetting and web pages through static-site conversion.

If the two media are produced separately, the material splits in two and one falls behind whenever the other is updated. Blizzard's World of Warcraft offers a useful counterexample. Its three print volumes of Chronicle, the fan wiki Wowpedia, and the official site's race and region pages disperse the same IP across three media. When one is updated, the others take time to catch up, and consistency between media drifts. A single-source principle prevents that drift from the beginning.

The direction is fixed: web first, book afterward. It is possible to move web-friendly .md files into a publication PDF, but difficult to move book-friendly .md files onto the web. Entry length is therefore set at 1,500–3,000 Korean characters, suitable for one web page, and print receives that length through conversion.

Paired with Librarying

The standard input to LOREBOOK work is a Vault after Librarying has been completed, though this is not mandatory. If a reader's IP has accumulated rulebooks, short stories, planning documents, and external wikis across its folders, LOREBOOK work can begin, and Librarying accompanies it as the paired tool for organizing those materials.

Librarying is the task covered in the sister work Librarying. It is a four-stage procedure: extract keywords from an IP's scattered materials—rulebooks, short stories, external wikis, and planning documents; group words with the same meaning under one representative entry; and organize them into roughly 1,500 .md files in the form of an Obsidian wiki. Its output is the collection of material called an Obsidian Vault.

Obsidian is a free note-taking tool that handles .md files as a wiki. The files within one work folder connect through wikilinks and operate like a single wiki. Open the folder in Obsidian and a file list appears in the sidebar; open graph view and the files appear as dots and their links as lines. That folder is called a Vault.

LOREBOOK takes as input the 1,500 Vault entries produced by Librarying. The entries are organized by two classifications. The first is the same set of nine classifications for every IP and asks what function a keyword performs in the narrative: technical term, person, place, object, event, device, mise-en-scène, concept, or value. The second is a set of worldbuilding axes defined differently for each IP and asks which structural domain of that IP contains the keyword. For a fictional IP “XX,” these might be six axes: shamanism, cuisine, spirits, the living world, relationships, and general.

Each entry has two coordinates—one of nine classifications multiplied by one worldbuilding axis—and those coordinates determine the LOREBOOK's division into parts. Chapter 3, on Librarying output, and Chapter 6, on two-coordinate mapping, explain the definitions and part mapping in detail.

Each entry is organized into thirteen columns: representative keyword, classification, worldbuilding axis, alternative names and aliases, English name, romanization, definition, detailed explanation, related keywords, version status, source list, and translation notes, together with a prose paragraph of 200–1,000 Korean characters. This collection of columns is called frontmatter: metadata placed at the head of a .md file. Chapter 5 explains its form.

Librarying and LOREBOOK operate at different layers of decision. In Librarying, decisions occur within an entry: are this keyword and that keyword the same person, or the same event? In LOREBOOK, decisions occur between entries: should these entries be combined into one article or kept separate, and in which part should they appear?

Readers who have not seen the sister work Librarying can still follow along. Chapter 3 revisits the form of Librarying's output, and work can begin without a Vault if a reasonable amount of material has already accumulated.

Introducing an AI collaborator

LOREBOOK work can be done by one person alone, but it takes time. Manually mapping 1,500 entries to parts takes a week; manually converting frontmatter takes another week; manually reviewing consistency of prose tone takes two more. Combined, it becomes difficult to publish one volume a year. This is why market LOREBOOKs commonly follow an eighteen- to twenty-four-month publication cycle. The scale is visible in examples: D&D's Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting moved through four editions from its first edition (1987) to its fourth (2008), averaging about five years per edition over twenty-one years, while Eberron received one major update in the fifteen years between the first Eberron Campaign Setting (2004) and Rising from the Last War (2019). A person who deeply loved one IP could put only two or three LOREBOOKs on the shelf in a lifetime.

The basis for completing the work in nine to fourteen months is the introduction of an AI collaborator. It directly adopts the collaboration method established in the sister work Librarying.

“AI collaborator” means the kind of text-generation assistant people may already have used once or twice in everyday life. Give it a question and it produces an answer; give it a paragraph and it organizes it; give it a table and it converts it into another form. No particular company or model is specified. The procedure is designed to apply unchanged when readers use the tools available in their own environment.

Tasks well suited to an AI collaborator include producing part-mapping candidates for 1,500 entries through two-coordinate search; automatically converting Librarying's thirteen-column frontmatter into LOREBOOK frontmatter; automatically attaching cross-references to 1,500 entries; reviewing consistency of prose tone by part; and preparing illustration specification cards. Human decisions include selecting a ten-, twelve-, or fourteen-part composition and its priorities; integration and division; the acceptance standard for voice; the moment to commission illustrations; and the final integrated-build review. Every chapter presents this division in the same format: the four collaboration axes established in Librarying—specification, intent, expected effect, and limits.

Five kinds of LOREBOOK

The form discussed over fourteen chapters is the standard encyclopedia. It is the most common on the market, and D&D campaign settings belong to this type. The other four variations are as follows.

Standard encyclopedia (default): D&D Forgotten Realms, Lancer World Book.
Art book and official setting guide: Final Fantasy Ultimania, Witcher Compendium, Elden Ring Lore Book.
Narrative bible: Netflix and HBO series bibles, Marvel and Disney IP bibles.
Game-design bible: console and PC game concept bibles, appendices to indie-game GDDs.
Official comics and webtoon setting guide: official setting guides for Tower of God and Naruto.

All five use the name LOREBOOK, but their character differs according to reader, proportion of visual assets, inclusion of rules, and media branching. This text uses the standard encyclopedia as its base and absorbs the other four as variations. Chapter 2 decides which variation suits a reader's IP.

A map of fourteen installments

Here is the flow of the fourteen-installment series in brief.

1 The identity of a LOREBOOK (this installment)
2 Five LOREBOOK variations
3 The shape of Librarying output
4 Six macro sections and the twelve-part form
5 The standard shape and frontmatter of one entry
6 How two coordinates determine part composition
7 Three voices and part-by-part mapping
8 Prose through dual narration
9 Short-story quotation and multilingual policy
10 Phases 0–3, from input to pilot part
11 Phases 4–6, consistency, appendices, and web/print packaging
12 Four axes for collaborating with an AI work partner
13 Consistency, version, and illustration operations
14 Retrospective and first work

Each installment can be read on its own. After reading all fourteen, readers applying them to their own IP also have the companion appendices: an index of major terms, a collection of market cases, an integrated matrix of the four collaboration axes, and one sample integrated entry.

Materials worth preparing

The useful material to have while following this text is the material of one IP. The most natural input is a Vault after Librarying is complete: opening a work folder in Obsidian reveals 1,000–2,000 organized .md files, wikilinks between files, and nodes and links spread across graph view. Even without a Vault, work can begin if a reasonable body of IP material—rulebooks, short stories, planning documents, and external wikis—is already available.

If Librarying is not yet complete, there are two entrances. One is to follow the sister work Librarying in parallel and carry one IP's material through the entire path into a book. The other is to use this text to grasp the overall picture of a LOREBOOK first, then return when the IP reaches the Librarying stage. Either route may be followed comfortably.

Chapter 2 discusses five LOREBOOK variations. Five different books coexist in the market under the same name, and the chapter determines which kind fits the reader's IP.

Copyright in this work belongs to Kim Dong-eun WhtDrgon and MEJE Works Corp. Without the copyright holders' prior written consent, no part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, performed, broadcast, translated, adapted, or otherwise used.