Defining My Terms

a brief explanation of lingo

Author

Emily Cambias
April 28, 2025

Like many writers, I have often struggled to explain the (many) confusing variables of the publishing industry to family and friends—all the more so because tabletop games publishing in particular is rife with words and conventions completely opaque to readers and even publishing professionals outside the hobby. Luckily, one thing my education instilled in me (besides a penchant for niche Chicago cultural references) is an interest in lengthy book chapters which define the author’s specific terms ad nauseum, á la Thomas Hobbes or Euclid. Why not, I asked myself, do the same with my newsletter? Since I plan to write about the games industry at least a few times in the near future, I ought to have something I can point myself and others toward as an informal introduction of what it is I’ve actually written, and some of the categories of “what people write” for the hobby. So, dear reader: if you’re interested in learning a little bit of the nitty-gritty vocab of a niche industry, or if you’re just hoping to parse what the hell I’m talking about, read on.

What is a Game, Anyway?*

*The amount of ink that has been shed on the philosophical side of “what is a game?” is substantial; we will leave that can of worms to open on another day.

Tabletop games are divided into two general categories: board games and roleplaying games (usually abbreviated to “TTRPGs”). I’m writing about the latter. When I reference “a game,” what I mean is a single document of rules, imaginary places, and story ideas with which players can make up characters to have adventures. Theoretically, the game can be played with just this document, whatever form it takes. For small independent (“indie”) writers or publishers, it’s usually a small softcover or a chapbook. For larger game companies, it’s a hardback tome called a core book (“core” because they hope it’ll sell well enough to build more books on, which we’ll get to in a sec. Some of the bigger game companies (the ones that produce Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire: the Masquerade, et cetera) even split up their core books into two or three books and sell them as a set, so you have to buy multiple books to get all the rules. Very clever.

Once the initial book comes out, there’s a little waiting period to see how players like the game and what they get excited about—and, crassly, to see how much money it makes. Even for the dedicated free-game makers out there (and I count myself among them), if you release three games and only one makes money, that’s the one you’re probably going to follow up on first. You want to capture players’ imaginations and give them whatever it is they crave.

Sourcebooks are just that. They’re usually slimmer than their predecessors, sometimes a bit more illustrated, and they’re a big old collection of More Stuff. They usually expand on the core rules and add detail to the setting or invent a new setting whole cloth—although, some authors write “system neutral” sourcebooks, an invitation to include their invention with whatever game and characters players want; kind of like selling a lovely picture frame to put around any art. And a splat book is a sourcebook with a special focus—not just a book about “goblins,” but “The Court of the Goblin King,” or a book of literally just World War I tanks your characters could drive.

If you’ve read to the end of a core book (and more than a few sourcebooks), you’ll find several pages devoted to an adventure—the full outline of a story with locations, enemies, and a few sketched-out characters that players can engage with, a bit like a written theater set and costumes. You’ll see me writing about “adventure hooks.” Hooks are the incident at the beginning of an adventure that draw players into the story.

When the whole series of adventures is written up in a book, it’s called a campaign. Unlike sourcebooks, campaign books tend to be pretty hefty, since they have to include enough background material, adventures, and of course specialty rules and tables to fill hours of play. If it’s really long, it’s called a megacampaign. Megacampaigns are a bit less common than other TTRPG books, but there’s no shortage them—The Great Pendragon Campaign, The Curse of Strahd, The Dracula Dossier, are just a few (curiously vampire-oriented). On the opposite side of the spectrum, there’s adventure seeds: short (usually just a page or less) write-ups of just a hook and a little bit of background.

So there you have it—my loose attempt to explain what all these documents are, and a bit about what kind of writing goes into them. I’m sure I’ll update this at some point in the future, but for now, it’s time to move on to…

The Blatant Self-Promotion

Linx