In December 2023, I played Assassin’s Creed Mirage for the first time. It was a wonderful game that I enjoyed very much, but among the aspects of gameplay and game design that I enjoyed was one feature that captured my attention was the History of Baghdad Codex, an in-game database of short articles detailing information found over the course of the developers’ historical research.
The Codex was not new nor unique to Mirage. The Database from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla had similar information, on various regions and locations within the game – a mixture of those created by the developers and those with real world counterparts. In Odyssey, historical sites displayed a little line of text giving some history, and both Odyssey and Origins had “Discovery Mode” where you could learn more about the settings.
However, the Codex inspired me in a way the previous games never did. Something about how it provided a mile deep snapshot into the life of 9th century Baghdad was really inspiring. Not only was it a fascinating exploration of Baghdad in that time, but it was a demonstration in what a rich culture and society looked like. It felt like a living society – far more than it ever did when I read a Wikipedia page.
And so I set a challenge for myself. I would worldbuild The Directorate, my Valsoran nation, like the Codex. Using a series of dispatches, and paying no attention to the length of each one, or the formatting of any, I would write what amounted to Mirage Codex entries, but for Zemedievai. Each one would cover a different subject, and there would be no connection between them. Furthermore, no subject was too small for an entry – in fact, the smaller, the better.
I had previously approached worldbuilding far more methodically and far less ‘vibes-based.’ Using the wiki page model, I would create an outline, which would invariably amount to this – Etymology, Geography, History, Politics, Society, Economy, Demographics, Religion, and Culture. Perhaps, such as in the case of Saintmagnus, I would drop or merge one or two of these sections. I would proceed to outline, in paragraph form, a coherent stream of thought with notes on every aspect of each section I wished to cover. I would then fill it in slowly, section by section.
There’s no doubt that this is the expected model of worldbuilding. TEPWiki is a shrine to this form of worldbuilding, with the creation of a nation page being one of the first steps to creating a nation on Urth. Even gameside, the pressure exists, with Ponderosa’s wiki-style factbooks claiming the top of the dispatch leaderboard and the design or formatting of such factbooks being a craze among all roleplayers, Valsorans included. But it was refreshing to break from this norm.
The first dispatch I made of this type was on Zemedievan marriage customs. I dove deep into Lithuanian culture and society for this. I did more than just model my informational skeleton off of a Wikipedia page section. I looked at websites and articles. And I honestly had fun doing it. I learned more about Lithuania and the other nations on which I model Zemedievan culture and society. Furthermore, I came out of it with a dispatch I was really proud of. It felt rich. Deep. It felt lived in.
The next one was socializing and etiquette, which was featured in EPNS, and I went deep into the weeds for this one. Maybe too deep, for some, but I enjoyed it. The laws of gift giving, forms of address, table manners, and even business meetings were all very interesting little niches to explore. That said, if I was approaching this as a subsection of a wiki page, I may have been able to assign it the same level and depth of information with the right dedication and effort.
The same could not be said of the hygiene dispatch. You see, over the course of the various dispatches I’ve written, many that I have planned or done could be easily applied to a wiki page. For one, etymology, my third major Codex-style project, could have easily been in a wiki page, considering etymology is one of the major sections included in most templates and most pages. I certainly made it longer for Zemedievai than I did for Saintmagnus or Aivintis on TEPWiki, but it was generally the same.
However, there are a slew of topics that don’t fit so neatly into the categories wiki pages usually offer. Sure, someone might briefly mention hygiene somewhere in the society section, but only briefly. Finland has a ‘sauna’ section in culture, because, like the Pryzova region of the Directorate, it has a strong sauna tradition, but that’s just one paragraph and there certainly isn’t going to be any mention of what kind of scents people prefer for their soaps or whether it’s more common to shower in the morning or at night. Or even how much bathing supplants showering.
This information is really just not pertinent to a wiki page or wiki-style factbook. It’s not a major part of the national identity. It’s a very small thing that, in-universe, wouldn’t make sense to be included in the wiki. However, if you start a whole dispatch with the expectation of filling it, you’ll find a way to fill it, and you’ll end up going deep into your research. You’ll end up finding out very interesting things, such as what alleles the proto-Baltic people had.
The point is, not everything about a nation can be fit into a highly structured, sequential wiki page. That can be a very good start to worldbuilding and make you ask the right questions – and I have seen some really good wiki pages written out before, with deep cultures, such as The Oan Isles. However, the format itself is sterile, and it takes great talent to make it otherwise. Talent I really don’t have – the Saintmagnus wiki page was good and I’m proud of it, but it didn’t make the nation feel any more alive.
The Codex model is completely different. By forcing you to fill a niche, you are forced to make your worldbuilding way more detailed than if you were filling in a much broader section. That’s what struck me so much about the actual Codex from Assassin’s Creed. It didn’t have an ‘economy’ entry and a ‘politics’ entry – it had an entry on judges, one on market inspectors, one on taxes, one on the police, one on the military, one on the succession process, and even the postal system.
That level of detail, and that commitment to making every little thing about the world equal in coverage, was what captured me. It was why it made the culture feel deeper than if I had just read a wikipedia article on 9th century Baghdad. It’s why I’ve had so much fun worldbuilding Zemedievai. I can just spend two hours writing about the country’s equivalent of a knight-errant without caring that it doesn’t quite fit into the ‘culture’ section OR the ‘history’ section, with how flexible it is.
This freedom is part of the essence of the Codex model. Sure, in a wiki page, no one wil say anything if you start with politics and then go to history, or start with economy, culture, or whichever section you desire. However, if you don’t do it in ‘order,’ then you’re leaving things out. There’s still blanks to fill in. Etymology, geography, and history might be able to move around a bit within the beginning of the article, but I have never seen someone put culture before politics or history, nor have I ever seen etymology, geography, or history at the end.
In the Codex model, something’s only ever unfinished if a single dispatch is unfinished. Obviously you can’t write about every single little aspect of culture, society, politics, and history, so you’re not expected to make every single dispatch you could. Furthermore, by separating concepts into their own dispatches, you’re not forced to make everything connect and flow. You can just talk about various elements of your nation, without the stress of leaving a longterm project unfinished or the constraints of a highly structured and norms-driven template.
You’re also not limited to what you can talk about. If you really want to, you can talk about what scents your people prefer or whether they shower in the morning or at night. Explore whichever subjects interest you and ignore whichever ones don’t, and go into as much detail as you want. You will revel in the freedom. Of course, wiki page sections can be good ideas for entries into your Codex-style worldbuilding network, but if you want, you can separate fashion to have an entire dispatch on accessories and body modification. You can separate pottery from art. You can make a video games entry.
I suggest making a list of potential entries, if you truly wish to pursue this method of worldbuilding as I have. I started by writing down all the Mirage Codex entries, and simplifying them into general concepts. Then, I added a list of general sections and subsections of culture and society, such as art, fashion, music, and literature. Then I just added anything that seemed interesting to me. I knew the LGBTQ+ community was something I wanted to discuss, so I did – not as a line or paragraph, like in my TEPWiki pages, but as a thing in and of itself.
ChatGPT is also an interesting resource to generate a list of concepts for you. In order to expand my own list, I asked it, “What niche elements of culture or society might be interesting to worldbuild in a fictional country?” Some of the things it included, like culinary tradition, were already on my radar, but it brought up interesting new ideas like family dynamics, dialects and slang, currency, and cultural attitudes about medicine.
The beauty of this is that you can make it as granular as you want. You can do one entry on art, or you can do an entry on oil paintings, modern art, pottery, architecture, sculpting, film, television, literature, poetry, music, opera, theater, glasswork, and digital arts. Maybe there’s even a calligraphy tradition in your country. You can go into detail about all of that, and it doesn’t make your wiki page unbalanced towards a certain section or unwieldy. You could even discuss specific works of art. There’s so much more freedom than with traditional wiki structure.
No real country can be confined to a wiki page, no matter how large. However, if you go into detail about specific things, you can start to emulate what a real country is indeed like. It’s complicated, and not everything can fit into the strict boxes of a wiki-style template. These templates are good for people who want the comfort of structure and guidance. They can even be done way better than the Codex model. But the Codex model is a good way to create rich depth to your worldbuilding, and I highly recommend it.
And while I’ve been referring to everything as a dispatch, nothing stops you from making this entries their own wiki articles. After all, Finnish sauna tradition has its own wikipedia page. In fact, over the course of my Codex-style worldbuilding, I’ve not consulted a single nation page. Realistically, a country might be expected to have both, but we’re NSers. Our time and effort are limited, valuable resources. If you feel the need to choose, I recommend the Codex model.