TLDR: I got way too into a Crusader Kings 3 game playing as Croatia, started writing in-character peace treaties with my friend, then wrote an entire religious text, and now I’m writing a full Wikipedia-style wiki (kresimiria.wiki) about the fictional country using Jekyll. It’s worldbuilding without the (sometimes) annoying parts of actual storytelling.
If you really want the longer story, a couple of years ago, I was playing Crusader Kings 3 with my close friend Theo. He was playing as Austria, and I picked Croatia, playing as King Kresimir IV. If you’ve ever played CK3, or any Paradox game, you might know how these games go - you start with modest ambitions, maybe unite a kingdom or two, and then suddenly you’ve conquered the entire Holy Roman Empire, or at least that’s what I did. I don’t usually play aggressively, and I much prefer roleplaying to the military aspect.
So, here’s where it gets more intricate. I got so attached to the characters and the world we were building that I started writing actual peace treaties with Theo. We are both just as pedantic as each other, and he kept raising problems with the way I was running my realm, and pointing out tiny tiny violations of our verbal agreements - so we agreed to start writing proper formal documents in Microsoft Word. We wrote full-blown treaties, with clauses and signatories and all that diplomatic nonsense. We were roleplaying hard. (Can you tell I wanted to be a lawyer when I was younger?)
Here is a sample of our first peace treaty, an alliance agreement:
Then I took it even further. See, I was making some… let’s say extremely questionable religious choices in the game, and Theo kept giving me grief about them. So naturally, the only reasonable response was to write an entire religious text to justify myself. I called it the Books of Kresimir, and don’t worry, I’m not just talking about a paragraph or two - I wrote many many chapters. I even added scripture formatting, which took way too long in Microsoft word (I guess it’s not a frequently requested template?)
Here’s a random page from the Books: (You’ll notice distinct similarities to Genesis and other chapters of the Bible - I did take inspiration from much of the structure.)
Eventually we stopped playing the actual Crusader Kings game, but I wasn’t done with Kresimiria. I wanted to keep writing in this world, so I started creating laws. Government structures. I wrote an entire 1921 constitution, along with a historical precedent for it, a group of constitution signatories (‘founding fathers’ if you will) and a map.
The map of Kresimiria (remember, you can see all of this at kresimiria.wiki).
Eventually I migrated everything to Google Docs where I could actually organize things properly - I set up specific councils, laid out in the Constitution, for different types of laws, sorted everything by topic, the works. But then, often while I was meant to be studying, I started writing electoral history. As in, for each election in Kresimirian history, I wrote who ran, who won, what the percentages were, all of that. I made an Excel spreadsheet tracking senators across ten different districts over time, and I had text documents that looked like this:
District V
------------------
Nika Radman (RPP) 49.5% (elected)
Dora Martinovic (RPP) 34.2% (elected)
Karla Vukovic (Indp.) 10.1%
Teo Subotic (Indp.) 6.2%
You get the idea. Lists and lists of election results, all sitting in plain text files and spreadsheets.
At some point I looked at this mess of documents and thought “there’s got to be a better way to display this.” I started searching for Wikipedia-style Google Docs templates. Couldn’t find anything that actually worked well. The formatting was always wrong, or the linking was broken, impossible to use, or it just looked terrible. So I kept researching. I tried hosting my own MediaWiki instance. I looked into services like Miraheze that would host it for me. I got to the final step of the Miraheze servers, but they’re free, and so you have to apply for one - I don’t really want all my content controlled by a largely unknown third party. I got bored and frustrated with the whole MediaWiki ecosystem pretty quickly. It may be powerful but it’s too annoying and cumbersome for me to be bothered, and I really didn’t want to host it somewhere.
Then it hit me. I’d just started using Jekyll for this blog you’re reading right now. Jekyll is literally designed for creating websites from Markdown files. And guess what? Wikipedia articles can just be Markdown files. I didn’t need some heavyweight wiki software. I just needed a static site generator and some Wikipedia-looking CSS.
Building kresimiria.wiki
So I spent a couple of days whipping up custom CSS and HTML to make a Wikipedia clone. ‘Borrowed’ some styling ideas (basically copied Wikipedia’s infoboxes almost exactly), tweaked the layout, made it look like a proper encyclopedia. I added some Markdown articles, made a homepage, and voila, proof of concept achieved. (Have a look at kresimiria.wiki).
And then I just - kept writing. Politicians, businessmen, soldiers, businesses and organizations and companies, legal cases, both landmark and mundane, historical events, cultural movements, sports teams, the whole ecosystem of a functioning country.
Here’s what I love about this project: it’s writing, but it’s only the fun part (in my opinion). There is absolutely something to be said about crafting a detailed plot, witty dialogue, and snappy pacing - but I’m not very good at that. Whenever I’ve tried to write a novel, I always get stuck somewhere, and slowly lose motivation as I drown myself in my world. But I am yet to get writers’ block with this. Sometimes you just want to describe how a tax system works or the results of a regional election without worrying about whether your protagonist cares about it. (Frank Herbert would get this - do you remember when pages and pages of Dune would just be explaining the economics of the spice trade?!)
With Kresimiria, I can just worldbuild forever. I can write an entire article about a minor political figure who was only relevant for six years and never won a seat in parliament. I can detail the career of a businessman who founded a chain of local shops, just for the purpose of making the region feel lived-in. I can write about a legal case establishing precedent for the modern day in the country without having to tie it into anyone’s character development.
The best (or worst?) part is I don’t know if this project will ever be ‘done’. There’s always another business to create, an even more minor politician to write about, another cultural figure to make. And I think I’m fine with that - it’s become my go-to creative outlet as a source of relaxation. I’d recommend it to anyone who is an embarrassingly massive nerd, is creative, but doesn’t have the discipline to finish a novel.
(Remember, go check it out! Kresimiria dot wiki.)