User:Scrooge MacDuck/Sandbox Beta

The Book of the War was the first novel in the Faction Paradox series.

Edited by Lawrence Miles and written collaboratively by more than ten authors, The Book of the War was formatted like an encyclopedia, with a number of stories spread across multiple alphabetically-sorted entries. In each entry, some words were emphasised in bold to point to other entries with that name, enabling the reader to jump around the book and read related entries.

Publisher's summary
The Great Houses: Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.

The Enemy: Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.

Faction Paradox: Renegades, ritualists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage… assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.

The War: A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect."

Marking the first five decades of the conflict, THE BOOK OF THE WAR is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past…

Alt text
The War so far (in highlights); the location of the exact centre of history; the lo-tech way to break into the Eleven-Day Empire; the truth about gravity spiders; the dangers of investigating Violent Unknown Events; the art of breeding your own timeship; a short history of the various ends of humanity; the fate of the Grandfather's Arm; the secrets of removing yourself from history while still leaving yourself free to interfere; a brief interruption from the future; where to meet every human being who ever lived; how to bring your world to the attention of the Spiral Politic using 23,000 corpses; why the War-time powers never recruit celebrities; the problems of running a time-active brothel; on telling the difference between the afterlife and the trailer; banality as a weapon of War; the Faction Paradox guide to Hollywood; and how the Sixth Wave revealed the truth about the enemy without even trying.

Causalities of War
A War which "at this stage (…) remains the War, not yet having enough of its mass in a single region or era to be given a more specific title" has been raging across space and time for 50 subjective years. A book is published to serve as a guide to this War, and opens with a list of the main participants.

The Great Houses, an ancient, voyeuristic civilisation of demigods who remain the "central power" of this "War Era universe", think themselves to be "parts of the historical process much more than a people". Though they fought another war at the very beginning of history, they still consider the idea of having a military ridiculous when the enemy revealed themselves "mere decades" before the start of the new War, they had become complacent. One of the Houses' errors is failing to truly understand the enemy, viewing them as a species or faction when they are really "a kind of all-consuming process", so the book elects to not mention the enemy's name, even if it does have one, because its anonymous authors believes the name would be a distraction from the essence of the enemy.

Despite their misapprehension, the Houses do adapt, and establish a House Military whose cohorts are bred for war. The House Military has begun to operate at "a safe distance" from the "old academicians". Also responding to the changes is Faction Paradox, a rogue House leaves the Homeworld in the years leading up to the War because they foresee the "vulgarity" to which their kind will soon descend and decide to get a head start. They start recruiting humans into their ranks and operating underground as a sort of criminal or terrorist organisation, seemingly hoping that the bigger sides of the War will wipe each other out and leave them to pick over the leftovers. To build themselves an army, they pervert a human offshoot into the fetishistic Remote, "the barbarians of the Spiral Politic", but they soon become so unpredictable that they fallen out of the Faction's control.

The Celestis also leave the Homeworld before the War, though they were not so much a House as an "elite cadre" of interventionists. Fearing that the Great Houses' defeat could mean their erasure from history, they preemptively excise themselves from the material world, becoming little more than ghosts. They manifest themselves as gods to "those individuals who've been tricked into worshipping them" but wield little real power and are considered demonic traitors by the rest of the War-mongers.

The Great Houses label all species not connected to themselves or the Enemy's power-bases as "lesser species". This includes humanity, but the volume is also, "for obvious reasons", concerned with them. However, although the War has intersected with Earth's history as early as 1752, they are important to the major powers not in their own right but because of the time-active capabilities of humanity's descendants, the posthuman sects, and of the mysterious City of the Saved, "a region of dubious origin which exists beyond the end of causality, and which seems to act as a “backup file” for the entire human species".

In any case, it is often observed that the War is slowly "turning every culture into a War culture", which the possible implication that "one day every individual in recordable time will become either a child of the Houses or a child of the enemy".

The Spiral Politic
The Spiral Politic is described. The most common way of describing the structure of the War Era universe, it is not a physical map of the universe or causality, but a symbolic map of the ways in which different planets' histories do or do not interact with each other. The Spiral Politic as it is known in the current version of reality was created by the Great Houses with them at the centre through the event known as the anchoring of the thread; the more closely related a world's history is to that of the Homeworld, the closer to the centre of a 2D map of the Spiral Politic it appears, and the more stable it normally is, while worlds on the outer fringes, far from the Houses' control, are constantly shifting in their relative positions as their histories are altered by shifting War-time alliances with one side or another.

On the whole, the Houses rather wish everything on the map stayed as still as possible, but this is an increasingly thin hope as the fifty years of War cause the map to shift more and more. Much terminology exists describing the different "types" of worlds on the map, based on the ways in which they do or do not "move", including shooting star worlds, Time-Front Worlds, Scarred Worlds, Remote Worlds, Posthuman Worlds, Frontier Worlds, and the confusingly-named Non-Worlds (which do not physically exist in the universe but are still causally connected to the Spiral). It is also rumoured that certain areas in the Houses' maps of the Spiral Politic describe time-active individuals with an outsized influence on history rather than actual planets.

Other universes exist, in the form of "separate bubbles of matter and energy cut off from the Spiral Politic by immeasurable stretches of un-space". However, it is widely believed that crossing these distances is basically impossible, with only the Yssgaroth having ever managed to intrude on the Spiral Politic from the "outside".

The Great Houses
The Great Houses' recorded history begins with the anchoring of the thread. This event would later come to be understood as "merely" the point when the Homeworlders built their timeships and sealed their world in a bubble of enclosed time. However, it actually represents the point when they ascended to become "something 'other', something too fundamental to exist merely within the confines of the newly-created Spiral Politic" — gods, in a sense, although the word "suggests something primal, potent and ambitious" while individual members of the Houses became ontologically sterile and shrivelled and static as a result of making themselves anchors of static history. Indeed, they become biologically sterile, "not necessarily by design", around the time of the anchoring, forcing them to develop breeding engines that artificially weave together "base matter and biodata" to create new individuals. They also learn how to make themselves immortal, "at least in theory".

Deprived of organic evolution or the "spur" of mortality, the Houses remain stuck in a form of cultural stasis for the following ten million years during which they wield absolute power. They have little interest in high art (which they find incomprehensible), history (since everything in their being trends towards the status-quo), physical pleasure (their continued organic existence bothers them slightly, though not enough to discard their bodies, as that would be too radical). They occupy themselves with little more than "humanitarian" interventions to prevent lesser time-active parties from damaging causality, which is really born of self-interest too, being that history is an extension of them.

Eventually, the status quo begins to crumble with the Imperator Presidency, the rise of House Paradox, and of course the War itself. Now, fifty years in, life for the Houses on their own world remains as stuffy as ever, but their influence on the wider universe is much more immediate, with the War King and his agents steering the history of many worlds directly; moreover, allegiances are now split, with some Newblood bloodlines allying themselves with the House Military over the traditional Ruling Houses. In short, if the Great Houses are gods, then the War is a new War in Heaven.

The House Military
For most of its history, the Homeworld had no real army; symbolic constabularies were ordered around by various Houses to "keep the peace" but had little to do, as there was very little crime. When armed intervention was needed in the outside universe, constructs known as casts were employed. However, in the decades before the War, in addition to small flashes of the War to come, the Homeworld becomes more familiar to the outside universe and various doomed armies try to invade the Homeworld physically. Although they are unsuccessful, they make plain the constabularies' near-total uselessness.

This leads some of the more restless Houses, Oldblood and Newblood alike, to band together into a more effective House Military. Although they remain officially part of the same political entity as the other Houses, there is a clear ideological schism between their interpretation of the Protocols and the traditionalist Houses', which everybody in the field recognises. Indeed, many of the "time-front troops" spend their whole lives in the outside universe, which warps their understanding of reality far beyond the minds that a lifetime safe within the Homeworld's bubble of history could ever mould.

The early Waves of House Military soldiers are still humanoid, but even before the War, select field agents had been the subject of experiments with forms of regeneration refined for military purpose so that each new incarnation was "stronger, faster, and better-equipped", drifting gradually from the classic human form. As early as the Third Wave, forced regen missions have become a reality. At first the changes merely create more resistant or telepathic humanoids, but it soon becomes clear to the soldiers themselves that the form of regeneration with which they've been primed is designed to eventually turn them into totally inhuman war machines. House authorities reply to complaints from Second Wave veterans by pointing out that if they really wish to avoid this fate, all they need to do is fight so well that they avoid getting killed.

This development naturally widens the schism between the House Military and the ruling Houses: the force-regenerated soldiers simultaneously resent their fate, and come to view the Oldbloods as puny, weak, different, "and ultimately untrustworthy". It is forecast that if left unchecked for a few more centuries, the schism could result in House Military and regular Great Houses coming to be seen as two different species altogether, with a civil war between the two offshoots becoming inevitable.

The Celestis
Another group which appears in the centuries leading up to the War are a movement of interventionists who pursue personal ambition and flout the non-interference policy, committing multiple retro-genocides on lesser species without the approval of the Ruling Houses. They manipulate the politics of the other Great Houses and the Presidency, even sometimes going as far as to carry out assassinations, because they believe the Houses should act more like imperious Gods, actively reshaping the universe to their needs at their whim.

When War predictions notify them of the existence of a foe "just as 'divine'", they are thrown into existential despair by the idea of not only being killed, but being erased from history altogether, if the Homeworld were to lose the war. In a move that baffles the rest of the universe, they decide to dodge out of being erased from history by erasing themselves from history. Specifically, they use an engineer forced-paradox state to erase their physical forms from history while living on as disembodied minds and ideas, having banked on the fact that god-like beings like themselves never really needed physical bodies to hold court. They found a new base of operations called Mictlan on the "outer skin" of the universe and begin to call themselves the Celestial House.

However, they are widely reviled by the other Houses and the universe at large as traitors who abandoned their homeworld in its hour of need. Moreso than the bored gods they hoped to become and continue to believe themselves to be, they are viewed as demons, a state of affairs not helped by their habit of manifesting in monstrous physical forms to mortals, or theirconstant need to strike "Faustian bargains" with members of the lesser species to sustain their own existence: as living ideas, the Celestis can only survive as long as they are believed in. Having retained power over life and death, they lure these victims with promises of immortality and make them take their Mark of Indenture, which allows the Celestis to trap their minds in Mictlan forever after the destruction of their original physical bodies.

Insisting that they are above the Spiral Politic rather than parasites dependent on it, the Celestis have a limited impact on the War. However, some of them do get involved, claiming that they view it only as a game. Though they sometimes help their old compatriots of the Homeworld, they also sell conceptual entities to the enemy, for which reason they are not accepted as allies by the House Military, many units of which are ordered to destroy on sight the entities which the "proper" Homeworlders refer to as "the spineless monstrosities". However, they rarely enter the fray themselves in any case, preferring to act through their Investigators.

Faction Paradox
Headed by an epigraph by Cousin Eliza of the Faction Paradox Military Wing, the entry on Faction Paradox starts with a disclaimer that common encapsulations of the Faction as either a cult or a crime syndicate, while not inaccurate, miss the mark on the true essence of the organisation, which is more of an unending carnival existing in parody of the universe: the Faction does not act to acquire power, nor out of any "inherent sense of sadism", but simply to make a point and out of a sense that "the universe would be lacking if nobody did it".

The history of what would become Faction Paradox starts on the Homeworld, five centuries before the War. The Homeworld is experiencing a sense of unease and more changes than in the million years prior. The Ruling Houses are naturally outraged when a member of an old, eccentric bloodline comes before them to announce he is founding a new Great House, something which had remained enshrined in law but which had not been done in long ages. Compounding the shock is his declaration of the new family's name — "House Paradox", with him becoming "Grandfather Paradox" — is, according to legend, his attire, includes the the first Faction Paradox skull mask. This fashion choice is of particular significance on the Homeworld because the rejection of organics there at this time was so great that many of the witnesses to the declaration had very probably never seen a skull before, and likely did not realise what the Grandfather was even wearing.

As the Grandfather anticipated, the Ruling Houses are too stunned and appalled by what he presents that they "let the matter slip noisily by" rather than thinking to veto his decision while there's still time. However, the nascent House Paradox wastes no time in beginning to experiment with alternative time-dynamics, in obvious breach of the Homeworld's laws on how history should work. This provide grounds for their exile from the Homeworld, adopting the name of Faction Paradox and becoming the first cuckoo-House, recruiting members of the lesser species into its rank instead of relying on breeding engines.

However, on the cusp of the War, the Grandfather deletes himself from existence. Leader-less, the Faction is made more practical by the necessities of War and becomes a political-criminal organisation spanning the entire Spiral Politic, with cabals in hundreds of locations, agents on hundreds of worlds, and a predilection for "stirring up even more trouble" between the other Houses and the enemy. They try to build themselves an army in the form of the Remote so as to boost themselves up to the status of a major power with a chance against the big two, but these crude attempts at power-base-building are decimated by the Second Wave, and they retreat to a more patient, calculating demeanour, waiting to pick over what will be left once the two main sides have annihilated each other.

Now, fifty years into the War, the Faction are beginning to recover from the Second Wave, with links being reestablished between the Eleven-Day Empire and the diaspora of Faction cabals. They hope that the Houses' now-total commitment to fighting the Enemy means that they can live in relative peace from now on and focus on their work — "whatever that work may turn out to be".

The Faction Paradox Family
Inset in the Book 's entry on the Faction is an overview of the ranks used by the Faction and their significance, icluding, in order, Little Siblings, Cousins, Parents, and Godparents. The Grandfather himself is also listed, in an entry which reveals that he "never actually existed — and has now never actually existed for over two hundred years", having purposefully erased himself from time. He left behind a few relics, such as the knife purportedly used in the Act of Severance, and his name is rarely invoked in vain by members of the Faction because they believe that too much invocation might summon him back into existence, and that this would only irritate him.

The Spiral Politic

 * The Remote
 * Lesser Species
 * Yssgaroth

The History of Faction Paradox

 * The Anchoring of the Thread
 * Armour (Faction Paradox)
 * Audience of the Ruling Houses
 * The Caldera
 * The Eleven-Day Empire
 * Fashion Paradox, London
 * The Gregorian Compact
 * History
 * The Imperator Presidency
 * Intervention
 * Protocols of Linearity
 * Loa
 * London (Eighteenth Century)
 * Godfather Morlock
 * House Paradox
 * Recruitment (Faction Paradox)
 * Ritual (Faction Paradox)
 * The Act of Severance
 * Sombras que Corta
 * The Stacks
 * Father Stendec
 * Tower Hill
 * The Unkindnesses
 * New Palace of Westminster

The History of Earth

 * The Analytical Engine
 * The Book of Enoch
 * Captain Sir Burton
 * George Gordon, Sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale
 * Ada Byron
 * Canon per Tonos
 * The Clockwork Ouroboros
 * The Eleven-Day Empire: The 1834 Attack
 * Ghost Clusters
 * The Grand Families
 * Grindlay's Warehouse
 * Grotesques
 * Karachi
 * Liber Sanguisugarum
 * Mal'akh
 * The Maltese Incident
 * The Mountains of the Moon
 * The Musical Offering
 * Napoleonic Era
 * The "Princess of Parallelograms" Letters
 * The Shelley Cabal
 * The Society of St. George
 * John Hanning Speke
 * The Star Chamber
 * The Walking Dead
 * House Xianthellipse
 * Robert Scarratt

The A-Z of the War
With the inclusion of the prior and subsequent entries, "Robert Scarratt" and "Jungle Children", this section includes one entry for every letter of the alphabet.
 * House Strategist Entarodora
 * The "Monsters" Coda
 * Xenoprediction
 * "You" Diversions
 * The "Probability" Doctrine
 * Confusion
 * Utterlost
 * Zero Time
 * Gravity Spiders
 * Time-thickening
 * Apportation
 * Women (Dressing Up As)
 * Nechronomancers
 * HEM (Highest Entropy Matter)
 * Ordifica
 * Intercreationals
 * Leviathans
 * Quintessence
 * Redemption Cult
 * Forced Regen Missions
 * D-Mat
 * Burlesque Devices
 * "Killerbots" (Autonomic)
 * Vaccinations (Temporal)

Houses and Orders

 * Jungle Children
 * Hauserkinder
 * "Justine's Story"
 * House Arpexia
 * Babels
 * Casts
 * House Catherion
 * House Ixion
 * Lethean Campaign
 * Order of the Weal
 * Chatelaine Thessalia
 * War Predictions: Chatelaine Thessalia
 * Zo la Domini

The History of the Homeworld

 * Closed Session (of the Ruling Houses)
 * Dronid
 * House Dvora
 * The enemy
 * The Faraway Declaration
 * The First Message from the Enemy
 * The Head of the Presidency
 * The Homeworld
 * House Lineacrux
 * The Nine Homeworlds
 * Noosphere
 * The Presidency
 * Protocols of the Great Houses
 * Regen-Inf
 * The Ruling Houses
 * Sex
 * Space (Five Famous Battles)
 * Timeships
 * Laura Tobin
 * Academician Umbaste
 * The War King
 * Inset: The War King's Inaugural Address
 * Carmen Yeh
 * Appendix III: Carmen Yeh's "Fantastical Travels in an Infinite Universe"
 * Compassion

The History of Posthumanity

 * Earth: History
 * Posthumanity
 * Praxis
 * Siloportem
 * Time-Travel: Posthuman
 * War Predictions: The Rivera Manuscript
 * Appendix IV: Notes on the Rivera Manuscript

The Academician's Story

 * Academicians for Game Logic
 * Academician Devonire
 * Grandfather Paradox (Representations)
 * The Grandfather's Arm
 * Kaiwar
 * Paradox Anxiety
 * The Thousand-Year Battles
 * Waves of the House Military
 * Appendix I: The Beginning of the War (A Chronology)

The Non-History of the Celestis

 * Anarchitects
 * Chaotic Limiter
 * Conceptual Entities
 * Fluxes
 * Gargoyles
 * Meme
 * Mictlan
 * Order of the Dragon
 * The Ottoman Purges
 * Sacrifice
 * Shifts

The Shift's Story

 * Beshielach
 * Dating War Era Events (Difficulties)
 * The Greater Autrobulan Franchise
 * The Lords Celestial
 * Memeovore
 * Planetesimals
 * Personality Reboots
 * Worldofme

The City of the Saved

 * City of the Saved
 * The Timebeast Assault
 * Former Citizen Verrifant
 * House Mirraflex
 * Lady Armourer Mantissa
 * Het Linc
 * Secret Architects (of the City of the Saved)
 * Uptime Gate
 * Amanda Legend Lefcourt
 * Gargil Krymtorpor
 * Ghetto of the Damned
 * Lord Foaming Sky
 * Order of the Iron Soul
 * Cousin Pinocchio
 * The Rump Parliament
 * Father Timon
 * House Halfling
 * The Piltdown Mob
 * Sons of Tepes

The Impaler's Story

 * Tirgoviste
 * Ulterior Worlds
 * Vlad III of Wallachia
 * Wallachia
 * Djinn
 * The Edimmu
 * Gragov
 * Lord Halved Birth
 * Investigators
 * Investigator Thirty-One
 * Mark of Indenture
 * The Poenari Relic
 * Grigori Efimovitch Rasputin

The Thirteen-Day Republic

 * Cousin-Thrice-Removed Anastasia
 * The Cult of Celebrity Death
 * Father-Twice-Removed Dyavol
 * The House of Lords
 * The Malachite Room
 * Cousin-Once-Removed Nadim
 * Cousin Octavia
 * The Red Burial
 * Removal of Members
 * The Thirteen-Day Republic
 * Battle of Valentine's Day
 * The Winter Palace
 * Witch-blood

Labyrinths

 * Biodata
 * The Diaspora
 * Eremites
 * Faction Precursors
 * Mrs. Foyle
 * The House of the Rising Sun
 * Labyrinths
 * The Remonstration Bureau
 * Voodoo Charter
 * The Venue Accords
 * Weaponstores (Remote)

The Ghost Dance

 * A'daltem Ano'nde
 * Cousin Belial
 * Catch-the-Bear's war bonnet
 * Ghost Shirts
 * North American Warrior Tribes
 * Nunaha'wu
 * Open Doors
 * Pai'ngya
 * Peyote Dream Runners
 * Sand and Snow Ammunition
 * Tenskwatawa
 * Appendix II: From the North American Journals of Cousin Belial

The History of the Remote

 * Anchormen
 * The Broken Remote
 * Fallahal
 * The Jallama Reed Transmissions
 * The New Young Gods
 * Remembrance Tanks
 * Shadow-Masks
 * Simia-KK98
 * The Viewers and Listeners Protocols
 * Wovoka

Faction Hollywood

 * Michael Brookhaven
 * Brookhaven's Follies
 * Christopher Rodonanté Cwej
 * Cwejen
 * Faction Hollywood
 * The Fat
 * The Gauntlet
 * GCI Processor
 * Hollow Spectaculars
 * Inset: Brookhaven's Ghost Kingdom: The Six Central Characters
 * The Hollywood Bowl Shooting
 * The House of the Seven Gables
 * The Mount Usu Duel
 * "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"
 * The North Los Angeles Cabal
 * Order of the White Peacock
 * Production Hell
 * "Through the Eye of Eternity"
 * Chad Vandemeer

The End

 * "Briefings"
 * Humanity
 * Nanotechnology
 * Ronald Bela Nevitz
 * Time-Travel: Biodata Principle
 * The Younger World Story

Coda

 * House Lolita
 * House Tracolix

Characters

 * Devonire
 * Eliza
 * Grandfather Paradox
 * Godfather Morlock
 * Lord Smoking Mirror
 * Lords Twin Leopard
 * The War King

Who wrote what?
Simon Bucher-Jones, Daniel O'Mahony, Ian McIntire, Mags L. Halliday, Helen Fayle, Philip Purser-Hallard, Kelly Hale, Jonathan Dennis, Mark Clapham, and Lars Pearson all contributed material to the book. Each contributors mostly worked on their stories independently, only discovering Lawrence Miles's added intersections with other stories once the book was released. It was deliberately kept unclear as to which authors contributed which entries, but later releases provided some clues.
 * As editor, Lawrence Miles was responsible not only for writing many entries but also for rewriting and interweaving the other writers' contributions. The "Faction Paradox Family" section was credited to him in the book's notes, and it had been previously released on the Faction Paradox website.
 * Simon Bucher-Jones contributed slightly more than any other writer besides Lawrence Miles. The final edition of The Book of the War included at least one entry by Bucher-Jones for every letter of the alphabet, including "Lords Celestial", which was interrupted by the Shift. Perhaps relatedly, the "Design Specs for Advanced Users" included a "The A-Z of the War" section which featured entries for many concepts also explored in Bucher-Jones' novels The Taking of Planet 5 and The Brakespeare Voyage, such as the Leviathans and Robert Scarratt, who was credited to Bucher-Jones in the acknowledgments of Weapons Grade Snake Oil. The Order of the White Peacock also appeared in The Book of the Enemy and early drafts of The Brakespeare Voyage.
 * Daniel O'Mahony came narrowly in third place for words contributed to the book. He wrote far more for The Book of the War than ended up in the final draft, and Bucher-Jones only overtook him in the final edit. He drew heavily from his rejected BBC Books novel proposals, saying "the entire plot of one outline is embedded in there somewhere, while a lot of the background for another became a major part of the Faction universe." The planet Lethe, mentioned in the entry for the Lethean Campaign, previously appeared in O'Mahony's Doctor Who short story The Parliament of Rats, itself a scene from a BBC Books novel proposal. He would later use babels, Thessalia, and the Order of the Weal in his novel Newtons Sleep. He stated that he had no involvement in Michael Brookhaven's filmography.
 * Ian McIntire introduced Carmen Yeh in his unlicensed short story Schrödinger's Botanist for the 1998 charity anthology Perfect Timing. The related entries were co-written with Mad Norwegian Press CEO Lars Pearson. He also contributed to the entry for the War King, including the detail of the unfolded hypercube on his desk, which was intended as a link to one of his other, ultimately-rejected entries.
 * Mags L. Halliday wrote about Anastasia and the Thirteen-Day Republic. She later used Cousin Octavia in Warring States.
 * Helen Fayle wrote the material about the Mal'akh, the Shelley Cabal, and the Star Chamber. Her fan award-winning The Book of Taliesin fanfiction series was inspired by Alien Bodies and depicted Simon Bucher-Jones' "version of what the 'Enemy' might have been".
 * Philip Purser-Hallard wrote the articles concerning the City of the Saved, which he had originally developed for his ultimately-unproduced Iris Wildthyme novel Iris Wildthyme in the City of the Saved. He later revisited the City in his novel Of the City of the Saved… and in Obverse Books' City of the Saved anthology series. He also wrote the entry for House Mirraflex, although Miles thoroughly rewrote it in editing. Purser-Hallard commented that he had not written the articles on Wallachia, Michael Brookhaven, Grigori Rasputin, or the Spiral Politic.
 * Kelly Hale, who herself is part Native American, wrote the entries concerning Cousin Belial and the Faction's Remote experiments on Native American warrior tribes. She later returned to Native America and Wounded Knee in Project Thunderbird.
 * Jonathan Dennis, who had previously written the story The Hollywood Life for the 1999 charity anthology Perfect Timing 2, created Faction Hollywood for The Book of the War. However, those entries also included major contributions from at least three other writers, including Lawrence Miles and Simon Bucher-Jones. Dennis also contributed one other full plotline and several miscellaneous entries. He later revisited Faction Hollywood in his stories Remake/Remodel and Hyponormalisation, and he co-write The Brakespeare Voyage with Bucher-Jones.
 * Mark Clapham and Bucher-Jones had previously explored the Celestis in their cowritten Eighth Doctor novel The Taking of Planet 5.

Unincluded entries
The book credits Lance Parkin, David A. McIntee, and Eddie Robson as writers who "wanted to play but whose material didn't quite fit anywhere". Additionally, Simon Bucher-Jones wrote two extra entries, "Protective Neotony" and "Instant Animals", for the proposed CD-ROM expansion of the book; after the cancellation of that project, he published the entries on his blog. Bucher-Jones returned to the concepts from "Protective Neotony" in his 2018 Faction Paradox short story The Short Briefing Sergeant's Tale as the "Hausanthropic equations".
 * Parkin's contribution included an entry about his character Mister Saldaamir, who had previously briefly appeared in his novels Beige Planet Mars, The Infinity Doctors, and Father Time. Although it was excluded by Miles because "it wasn't very good", it was later published in the 2003 fanzine Myth Makers 13 and in 2021 as a standalone short story. It mentioned Last Contact, a concept mentioned in several of Parkin's stories connected to the War, including several charity anthology short stories, the unproduced novel pitch Enemy of the Daleks, and his book The Gallifrey Chronicles.
 * McIntee spoke with Lars Pearson about contributing but never actually submitted any material.
 * Robson's five submitted entries were published online by Niki Haringsma in 2017; they told a story about Faction Paradox's Father Katzmary, his "Minimediras Project", and his daughter Tanya Glassman. They also further explored the concept of the Nine Gallifreys and the character of Mother Festen. Robson would later reuse some elements of these ideas in his Bernice Summerfield audios Beyond the Sea and Resurrecting the Past, both of which involved the planet Maximediras.

Continuity

 * A broken generation of renegades was produced some time before the War, attributed to "impurities" in the breeding engines. One of its members, the founder of Faction Paradox was a member of an old bloodline that was widely considered "eccentric" even before his emergence. (PROSE: Lungbarrow, Crimes Against History)
 * Shortly before the War, failed invasions of the Homeworld by members of the lesser species showed that the ceremonial constabularies were useless against any real threats. (TV: The Invasion of Time, AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element)
 * The Shift was a liquid life-form before it was transformed into a shift; it then received the Mark of Indenture and was enslaved to the Celestis. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)
 * An interventionist member of the Great Houses was believed to have died as the fighting began on Dronid. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)
 * Homeworld weapons like babels and casts were used on the planet Lethe. (PROSE: The Parliament of Rats)
 * Dronid was the chosen homeworld of the renegade Presidency. (TV: Shada, PROSE: Alien Bodies)
 * The Homeworld was plunged into crisis by the rise to power of a great Imperator, Morbius. (TV: The Brain of Morbius)
 * Chris Cwej was recruited as an agent of the Great Houses. (PROSE: Dead Romance)
 * A Homeworld colony was located on Simia KK98. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, Dead Romance)
 * Several groups of Gallifreyans left Gallifrey during or following Rassilon's rise to power. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, Interference)
 * The Faction Paradox created the Remote on Ordifica. They reproduce through Remembrance Tanks. (PROSE: Interference)
 * Grandfather Paradox was imprisoned in the Great Houses' prison. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet, Interference)
 * House Mirraflex was an illustrious Great House. (AUDIO: The Conscript)
 * Investigator One was the Celestis' head field agent. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5)
 * The Homeworld was ruled by six ruling Houses. (TV: The Deadly Assassin, PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)
 * Compassion was the first and only 102-form timeship. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)
 * The Homeworld is ruled by Great Houses. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible)
 * House Lolita is an up-and-coming force in the War. (PROSE: Toy Story)
 * The Babewyn are connected to humanity's noosphere. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
 * The frontier in time exists beyond the edge of the Great Houses' noosphere in the posthuman era. (PROSE: Frontios)
 * An Arcadian faction of self-named "guardians" was mainly composed of survivors from Earth who established a new home on the nearest Earth-like world. (TV: The Ark)
 * Multiple Homeworlds were constructed during the War. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, The Taking of Planet 5, The Shadows of Avalon)
 * The leader of the Homeworld during the War used the title War King. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)
 * The Star Chamber ran secret operations in Great Britain and around the world. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
 * The House of Dvora was one of Gallifrey's Great Houses. (AUDIO: Panacea)
 * The Yssgaroth fought a war with the Great Houses at the beginning of history. (PROSE: The Pit, TV: State of Decay)
 * Stendec wanted to put a menagerie in the Eleven-Day Empire's version of the building on the Strand which housed a zoo in the 18th century and famously had an elephant winched to one of its higher stories. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)