Tips for creating a great category tree on World Anvil

   

If your world is public, categories help readers discover your work. Look at World Anvil’s top worlds, such as Melior, Ethnis, or Cathedris, and you’ll see that they all have solid category trees in their table of contents.

 

This is how your categories show up on your world homepage

    If your world is private, you might eventually reach a point where you don’t remember which articles you’ve written. Categories in private worlds help you find your own work when your world gets too big—and organizing a small world is easier than organizing a big one, so start with categories as soon as possible!  

This is how your categories show up in the Articles & Categories manager on World Anvil

   

General tips for organizing your world in categories

 

The most difficult thing about creating a category structure is deciding how it should be structured. After all, you don’t want to reorganize your whole world every time you change your mind! So here are some tips for you:

 

• Create only what you need: every world is different, so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Plus, while creating a basic structure from a get-go can be helpful, don’t create very specific categories until you need them. They are tools to organize your articles—but if you don’t have articles to organize, they’re useless!
• Don’t fill them too much: you shouldn’t have more than 15-20 items in a category! Too many items can be overwhelming and makes finding things difficult—which defeats the category’s purpose. For large categories, create several levels of subcategories, especially in bigger worlds.
• Use tags too: tags are another article organization system that can work in parallel with categories. So if you ever find yourself thinking that an article could be in multiple categories, pick the most relevant one and use tags for the rest.

 

Table of contents for a world setting

 

Here’s a list of categories we recommend as a starting point. You can customize this however you need for your setting, and what you include will depend a lot on what kind of world you’re creating!

 

Your category tree will—and should—be more detailed around topics you’re focusing on, and more generic on topics that aren’t important for your world. A SciFi world might have a lot of Technology sub-categories, while a fantasy world might have none at all.

 

Example table of contents for a world setting

 

• Fauna and Flora:
• Add subcategories for monsters, normal animals, and plants.
• Sapient species (like humans, elves or RPG “races”) are also animals, so put them here.
• Deities and Religions:
• If you have a complex pantheon system, add subcategories e.g. for groups of gods.
• Religions might have subcategories like traditions, documents, their own calendar, important people etc.
• Depending on your world’s genre & themes, you could put your religions under an Organizations section, instead.
• Organizations:
• This includes any group of people working towards a specific goal!
• Add subcategories for geopolitical organizations like Empires and countries, and other relevant types of organization in your world. Some will have subcategories, like local governments.
• You might need other subcategories for major (or minor) organizations, like Adventuring guilds, Trade Networks, Megacorporations or Crime Syndicates.
• Ethnicities and Cultures:
• Consider having a subcategory for each major culture.
• Use cultural sub-categories for cultural traditions like music and art, festivals or rituals, e.g. Lunar festivals, flamenco dancing, etc.
• Science and Technology:
• For hi-tech settings, add a category for each major technology you have in your world (e.g. Cybertech, Stargates, Transporters) and include the items that use that tech.
• Subcategories might also include unique items or materials that exist in your world.
• If magic is considered science in your setting, add a Magic subcategory here.
• Commerce and Trade:
• This is for anything that relates to money, trade, and all the infrastructure that supports it. You might divide this into geopolitical regions too.

 

Depending on the purpose of your worldbuilding, you could also add an Introduction category with articles that cover the basics of your setting. This is a great way to introduce your readers to your work!

 

This is just one approach, and each world setting is different. If topics aren’t important for your world, don’t create dedicated categories for them, just tuck your articles into a wider category. For example, if religion isn’t important in your world, put any religion articles inside the generic Culture category.

 

These are worlds made by the World Anvil community that you can take as inspiration!

 

Characters in the table of contents

 

You’ll notice there isn’t a Characters category. You can create a separate one, but consider putting them under one of the categories above. For example, you could have “Political leaders” and “Merchant Traders” as subcategories under “Organizations” and “Commerce and Trade”.

 

How to organize magic in the table of contents

 

If magic is important in your world (like in Mistborn), you’ll probably want to have several magic-related categories: spells, components, laws of magic, schools of magic, history of magic, and so on. If magic is just a backdrop (like in A Song of Ice and Fire), a generic “Magic” category will do just fine.

 

A note on space settings

 

If your setting is larger than a planet, like an entire solar system or even a galaxy, create a category for each of the inhabited planets (or systems for a galaxy). If each planet or system is wildly different, create subcategories like “species” or “characters” for each one.

 

On the flip side, if the divide between planets isn’t important, dividing the category tree by planet might not be important either.

 

Campaign setting table of contents

 

As well as the world encyclopedia, there are other things you’ll need in your Campaign World Table of contents. There’s no such thing as a “standard outline” for a world, or an RPG table of contents! But here are some tips to get started.

 

RPGs usually have a very clear divide between public knowledge known (or knowable) by your players, such as worldbuilding information and character creation options, and private GM-only information, like session plans and notes.

 

Your categories should reflect this divide, and if you’re a Guild member you can change their visibility too. This will let you share your world with your players, but limit their access so they only see what they’re supposed to.

 

Public categories for your campaign setting

 

For the category tree it doesn’t actually matter if you’re running your own campaign setting, or a published one (like the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk)—even if you run a published one, you’ll be running your own version of it, so these tips still apply!

 

• Start here: Create a “Start here” category. Players don’t want to read pages of lore before starting the game, so make it easy for them! In this category, add articles with character creation options (like classes and playable races if they’re different), and a Player Primer with an introduction to the world’s lore.
• Homebrew Rules: If you have homebrew rules (or your own RPG system), group these in a single category too. This will clearly separate them from the worldbuilding content. If you’re still playtesting some of your rules, having a Playtesting category is a good idea too.
• If you’re basing your campaign on a published setting, only create categories for the parts that are different from the original one. Copying content from another campaign setting is not worth the time (plus it’s copyright infringement!).
• You don’t need to separate secret lore from public lore with categories—making the secret articles private will hide them from your players. Instead, use tags to separate your secret articles from the public ones.

 

GM-only categories for your campaign setting

 

The GM-only categories contain secret information about the campaign that is not part of the worldbuilding itself. This is your “meta” info, like session plans, the campaign’s master plot, resources like lists of names and random tables, etc.

 

If you’re running a campaign (as opposed to one-shots), we recommend having a “master plot” article where you jot down the structure of the campaign or your ideas for potential future adventures. Then, create individual plots for each session or adventure. Of course, it all comes down to your preferred planning method.

 

RPG table of contents examples

 

These are worlds made by the World Anvil community that you can take as inspiration!

   

Novel setting table of contents

 

In addition to your world encyclopedia, you’ll need to include other things in your world bible table of contents. Every writer is different, and the way you approach your category tree will depend on your approach to writing, your genre, and if you’re a Plotter or a Pantser.

 

If you’re a Plotter, it may be worth waiting until you have your plot complete to see what will be the focus of your story, although you may already know a lot about your world from your meta.

 

But if you’re a Pantser, create a simple category tree with the basics of what you know about the story. Go back and improve it once you learn more about your story through writing.

 

Your novel-setting bible / world encyclopedia

 

Regardless of your approach to writing, we recommend having two main category groups—and the first one is the worldbuilding category! Use it to organize everything about your world: characters, locations, items, events, and so on.

 

If you share the world with your readers, we recommend keeping everything under the same categories regardless of their visibility (and then controlling each article’s visibility individually). This will make it much easier for you to keep track of things. If you still want to easily filter out private or public information, you can use the tagging system.

 

Non-worldbuilding related materials

 

The other group of categories contains anything that is not worldbuilding. This includes private things like your plots, ideas, and drafts, but also public ones! For example, you can create an article with information about your books, including updates on upcoming books and other information that could be useful for your readers.

 

If you’re writing short stories using the Prose template, you can also include them under this category—or create a specific one for them. You can embed your Manuscripts into your world homepage, but you might also want to create an article that groups them by series, or even book by book, so readers can find and learn about them directly from your table of contents. The writer’s workflow guide has more information about this.

 

Novel setting table of contents examples

 

These are worlds made by the World Anvil community that you can take as inspiration!