Splatbook
Splatbooks are sourcebooks devoted to a particular facet, character class, or fictional faction in a role-playing game, providing additional background details and rules options. For example, a "swords and sorcery" fantasy game might offer splatbooks for each of the races in the setting: humans, dwarves, elves, and others. The first game to use such books was Dungeons & Dragons, though not described as "splatbooks". The term originally rose to describe the sourcebooks published by White Wolf Game Studio for its World of Darkness games. Many of these books were titled using similar patterns: "clan"books in , "tribe"books for , "tradition" books  for , and so forth. In newsgroups, these were called "*books" (the asterisk on a computer keyboard being used as a wildcard character). Since the asterisk is also known as a "splat", this gave rise to the term "splatbook". This term was subsequently used retrospectively for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books such as "The Complete Book of Dwarves" and "Complete Arcane", or the numerous Codices for "Warhammer Fantasy Battle" and "Warhammer 40,000". By extension, the term "splat" is used for the character class described in a splatbook.