World Bible as Data: A JSON-First Approach for Game Dev and Narrative Pipelines

•Urdr Team

If you are building a game (or any production pipeline), your world isn’t just “lore”.

It becomes:

  • quest text
  • dialogue barks
  • item tooltips
  • map labels
  • art briefs
  • audio direction

And production teams don’t want lore as pages.

They want lore as data.

Why Wiki-Style Worldbuilding Breaks at Scale

Wikis are optimized for human reading.

But game production needs:

  • consistent naming (IDs)
  • stable references (links that never break)
  • exports (JSON, Markdown, CSV)
  • integration (tooling, scripts, localization)

In a wiki/doc workflow, “canon” is hidden inside paragraphs.

That makes it hard to:

  • reuse
  • validate
  • search reliably
  • prevent contradictions

Data-First Worldbuilding: The Basic Model

A data-first world bible stores your canon as:

  • entities (character, faction, location, system)
  • attributes (name, type, origin, description, stats)
  • relationships (member-of, located-in, enemy-of)

If you’ve built anything in software, this should feel familiar.

The Production Benefits

1) Exports Become Trivial

When your lore is structured, exporting is a mapping problem.

You can export:

  • a whole world
  • a single faction and its members
  • all locations in a region
  • all events in a timeline window

2) Consistency Becomes Checkable

Contradictions aren’t “opinions”.

They’re conflicts between facts:

  • two different birth years
  • a rule violated by a scene
  • a location described as both desert and tundra

You can’t check what you can’t structure.

3) Tooling Becomes Possible

Data enables:

  • quest generators that reference real factions
  • NPC generators that use existing cultures
  • UI that links everything automatically
  • “what changed?” diffs between versions of canon

Urdr’s Approach

Urdr models narrative elements using a strict, genre-agnostic schema (the “Unified 7”):

  • Actor
  • Group
  • Location
  • Object
  • System
  • Event
  • Species

This is designed so your world bible can behave like a backend.

Even if you never write code, you benefit from the properties of good data:

  • fast retrieval
  • clear structure
  • exportability

A Simple Migration Path (If You’re Coming From a Wiki)

You don’t need to rewrite everything.

Start by migrating the highest-value entities:

  1. The top 20 characters
  2. The top 10 factions
  3. The top 20 locations
  4. The core rules (magic/tech/law)

Then attach:

  • relationships
  • timeline events
  • key objects

This immediately improves coherence and makes future work cheaper.

Next Step

If you want a world bible that fits a production pipeline: