World Rules
Hard laws of how a story's world operates — physics, metaphysics, institutions, or magic — that the generation pipeline must never break.
What are World Rules?
Every fictional world operates on rules. In realistic fiction, those rules are largely the rules of the real world — physics, social convention, institutional logic, human psychology. In genre fiction, there may be additional rules: the laws of a magic system, the particular logic of a supernatural phenomenon, an alternate-historical fact that changes how society works.
But even in realistic fiction, a specific story may have world rules that are specific to it — rules about how memory works in this town, how information travels in this institution, what happens when a record is destroyed, why a particular place feels the way it does. These are not fantastical — they are the specific physics of the story's world, its internal logic made explicit.
World Rules exist to prevent the pipeline from violating that logic in the course of generating chapters. Without explicit rules, a generation system defaults to the most generic version of the world — a world that works the way most worlds in fiction work, not the way this particular world works.
What World Rules look like
World Rules are declarative statements — they state what is true about the world, not what the author prefers or what is thematically interesting.
"The physical destruction of a record removes the subject from living memory." — This is a rule with metaphysical implications. No chapter may show characters remembering someone whose records have been destroyed. The pipeline must treat this as a hard constraint.
"The house does not permit what it does not want to be known." — This is a rule about the agency of a place. It implies that some revelations will be actively resisted by the setting itself.
"No institution in this world has functioned correctly for more than two generations." — This is a social rule that shapes how every institution in the story behaves — with what level of reliability, what degree of corruption, what relationship to its stated purpose.
"Mobile phone signals do not reach the valley." — Simple, practical, and important for plot logic. The pipeline must not generate scenes in which characters call for help on their phones while in the valley.
World Rules vs. Forbidden Rules
World Rules describe how the world works. Forbidden Rules (on the Shape tab) describe what the story must not do — banned words, character treatment prohibitions, threads that must not be resolved. They are complementary but distinct. A World Rule is a fact about the world. A Forbidden Rule is a constraint on the narrative.
How Bespoke Books uses it
In the Bespoke Books Composer, World Rules appear in the World tab as a repeatable text area — one rule per field, added via "+ Add rule." The generation pipeline treats them as hard constraints for Module 1 (Story Bible) and all subsequent generation stages. A chapter that violates a stated World Rule is a continuity failure.