Recently, the writer’s bible for Batman: the Animated Series appeared on the internet as a 153-page PDF file. It’s a great insight on the vision the show’s creators had, and covers the tone of the show, story structure, use of humor, recurring settings, and how recurring characters should be portrayed. It also has a lot of illustrations, including a host of Gotham cityscapes and model sheets for the main characters.

There’s serious worldbuilding in this document. It covers not only what goes into the show, but what gets left out; they acknowledge that Batman has a decades-long history that encompasses a lot of styles and storylines, and they lay out what gets ignore and how they want “their” Batman to be.

In reading through this, I’m thinking how much like a gamemaster’s notebook this is. Or, how much it’s like the setting books I find most useful. Here’s what this is about. Here’s the tone and the themes of the game. Here’s what the NPCs are like. Here are some recurring locations. Go! It’s given me some things to think about in my own worldbuilding efforts, as well as some changes I want to make to the GM notebooks I’m building for a couple of campaigns I want to run.

I want to go out on the internet and find writer’s bibles for other television series. What would be interesting would be to find bibles for the same show, but from different seasons, to see how things changed and evolved. Like a gamemaster’s campaign notebook, one would expect a show writer’s bible to grow and change as time went on and new characters, concepts and storylines got added.

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