This week, we have an awesome new upcoming features, a discussion board tutorial, and a character sheet for Worlds in Peril made by a member of our community! You can also find out the latest from our FAQs including upcoming events like map making advice streams, and a stage on naming in worldbuilding as part of our ongoing Settlements Flash challenge!

Look at these Awesome Community Feature Releases!

We have been cranking out mini features like FontAwesome6 support, and the PDF Viewer, but now, get ready for the latest character sheet release, and a SUPER AWESOME upcoming major feature release within the next few days, and an official Discussion Boards tutorial!

Play as a superheroes with the new character sheet for Worlds in Peril!

Want to play as a superhero with a focus on narrative creativity and flexibility? Worlds in Peril is a superhero TTRPG system and this is World Anvil’s character sheet made by greatest Taellosse! If you are interested on getting your hands on this character sheet and testing out the limits of your character’s superpowers, World Anvil has you covered. To set up a character sheet, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new World Anvil account.
  2. Create a new character and choose “Worlds In Peril” as the RPG system.
  3. After you’re redirected to the character’s profile, click on the Sheet tab and click the Choose your Sheet button.
  4. Use the drop-down to select “World in Peril Character Sheet” and click the button.
  5. Fill in the sheet!
  6. Don’t forget to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

And that’s it, folks!

Coming Soon: Major Community Feature Release!

On top of all the bugs squashed this week, and of the three major projects ongoing behind the scenes, we expect to release a new feature coming out next week. It’s shiny, it’s awesome, and those of us visually-inclined are gonna LOVE it! Stay tuned next week for our Community Livestreams to learn more about it!

Learn more about our Discussion Boards!

We’ve released a Discussion Boards tutorial! You can find it on our Youtube Channel for a guide on how to look for a way to Play by Post, manage downtime, interact with your fans, gather feedback, and grow your community! Give it a shot and feel free to share the love on how you are using your Discussion Boards!

Join educational Live Events this week!

Wanna create better maps, learn how to worldbuild better names, and worldbuild collaboratively? Well, we’ve got the events for you!

Twining Imaginary Cities: Collaborative Worldbuilding Exchange (Stage)

Worldbuilding with friends, family, and loved ones? We’re chatting making cities with our creative partners in crime live this Thursday on a World Anvil Discord Stage!

  • Topic: Twining Imaginary Cities
  • When: Thursday 24th at 11:00AM PT / 7:00PM UK
  • Where: World Anvil Discord (World Anvil Radio)

Learn to build better maps! (Trash my Map Livestream)

Learn to build better maps with the experts! On Trash My Map you can submit your maps for review by professional cartographers, get your map questions answered, and pick up some great tips and tricks too. Oh, and if you love free goodies, there’ll be a live stream raffle too!

  • Topic: Trash my Map – live critique from the experts
  • When: Friday 25th February at 11:00AM PT / 7:00PM UK
  • Where: World Anvil Twitch channel

New Features Revealed and Live Support! (Community Livestream)

New features revealed, plus your World Anvil questions answered? Yes, you can tune in to Ask us Anything, learn what’s happening, and take part in the livestream raffles too!

  • Topic: Community Livestream
  • When: Saturday 26th February at 11:00AM PT / 7:00PM UK
  • Where: World Anvil Twitch channel

How to name things when worldbuilding? (Stage)

Coming up with names can be a chore, but Question of the Week is here to make it easier on everybody! Do you use your fellow Anvilites names? Pick your favorite bottles of wine? steal Borrow the names of neighborhoods to inspire you? Learn all about how to name things this Sunday on a World Anvil Discord Stage

  • Topic: Question of the Week
  • When: Sunday 27th at 11:00AM PT / 7:00PM UK
  • Where: World Anvil Discord (World Anvil Radio)

Get involved with World Anvil community’s challenges

As always, challenges are an amazing way to motivate yourself, and a great reason to share your worldbuilding with the community and the wider world!

  • You still have time to join the Nerdbuilding Flash Challenge! Want some ideas to help fan the fires of your forge? We will have a Question of the Week stage starting February 26th at 11:00AM PT / 7:00PM UK
  • The Bard Challenge submissions are now closed, and we announced the shortlist on stream! Right now, the judges are selecting their favorite article! Winners will be announced on March 5th!
  • WorldEmber prize claim is now closed! You should receive an email with your prizes within the next few days. And now, thanks to everyone who filled out the google form, and to all the lovely beans who made WorldEmber awesome just by taking part! 

Bard Challenge Shortlist

The Bard Challenge was our biggest challenge yet! You can check out the contestants in the shortlist below! The premier league consists of those who have won the challenge before, and the regular league as our winners-to-be for this challenge.

Regular League Bard Challenge Shortlist:

Premier League Bard Challenge Shortlist:

Challenge Help FAQs!

We have an ongoing flash challenge right now about building a settlement on the edge using Nerdbuilding generator as a springboard for inspiration. Here are some questions we had about the challenge!

(Have your own question for us? Throw it into the comments below and we’ll get you an answer ASAP!)

Do the Author Notes add to the word count cap for community challenges?

Author’s Notes should not add toward the word count cap for challenges. Basically, anything at the start of the text of your article including your sidebars and before your meta is what counts toward the cap. Anything outside those bounds shouldn’t count.

How do we use nerdbuilding.com for the settlement flash challenge?

The tool is meant to inspire whatever you create, but you can use as much of or as little of the prompts as you like. First, check out the tool to see how it works, and then use what makes sense in your world to influence what you create for your settlement “on the edge”!

Once the short list is out, we can tinker with the article?

If you are not on the short-list, you can still tinker with your articles. If you are on the shortlist, don’t tinker with your articles! The judges are currently reading through the short-listed articles to determine the winner; we ask that you do not edit your articles to keep the process fair between contestants.

Creative Help FAQs! 

The community livestream is one of the best places to get creative advice from the founders of World Anvil and the community. Here are some questions we had from worldbuilding to writing!

How do you get out of a writing slump? 

The most important thing to help you out of a writing slump, is to get those cogs turning again to get back to writing.

You could first try to give yourself a break and read a book. The book does not need to from the genre or like a plot you are writing. Instead, use this book as a way to get a different perspective and listen to a different writing voice. Seeing someone else’s ideas on paper can help give you new ideas on how to approach what you are writing and keep your own words flowing.

Another great tool to use is to a side project with a definite and finite end. Maybe you like making region maps, or maybe you’ve been dying to create a piece of character art! Whatever the case, make sure that your side project ends within a month period at maximum. You don’t want to pour all your inspiration into a new, shiny project for your old project to gather dust. Use these tools tp give you fresh eyes when coming back to your writing, and see if this helps get you out of your slump.

How do you start creating a map of a big city?

This depends on what kind of city you are building. Did the city start out as a small-town and sprawled out unexpectedly, or was the city planned from the start? Geography can also affect the shape of the city, how roads would form, how close it could be to a body of water. By figuring out these ideas first, you can then make roads to match the origins and size of the city. You can figure out generally who lives in the area, why they live there, and where people would work to inform where they live. From there, you can fill in any gaps with the most important civil buildings. This growth methods weaves a tapestry of life.

… Alternatively, you can derive great inspiration from google maps and even historical maps!

How do you get back into an old project that you don’t remember well?

World Anvil’s meta is perfect for ironing out quick details related to a project. Your meta helps bring you back into the head-space from when you began the project. However, if you are working without this, it will be difficult to recapture what your original ideas were before. You can try to do so by watching the same movies and listening to the same music as you had at the time. Otherwise, give yourself some grace and acknowledge that you have grown and changed as a person since that time. With fresh eyes, you can go back and review your work, find inspiration therein, and build out a meta and series bible to help you regain your footing.

What is a series bible, and how is it different from World Anvil’s Meta?

Story Bible is your world’s codex, like a wiki, and holds the information about the world. Technically, your World Anvil is your story bible, because it is the book that should hold all you need to draw your story from. Your World Anvil Meta is a worldbuilding guide that creates a vision for your world as you start worldbuilding, and is designed for ease of use. When combined, your meta’s focus and vision paired with the information you’ve built up around your story is what helps give your world a sense of fullness.

How do you convert a large world history into a timeline on World Anvil?

Please wait for Chronicles! – Dimitris

For now,  start with what inspires you and excited you. These are likely milestone events that really changed the world. Milestones for your world are significant events, likely recorded and remembered. From there, start with present day, and go backwards through time, filling in the most recent, the oldest, and any interesting inspiration sparks in between. If you get stuck, a typical trope for writing history is to have a cataclysm and dark age in the past as this happened in human history. Where you deploy this trope can help set up where history has gone since, and how that dark age has affected the rest of history.

How would you make a map of an arcology that houses a community bigger than the largest cities on earth?

For the uninitiated, an archology is a structure with an enclosed system that houses everything a civilization needs to survive and self-perpetuate. As a note, these are very fragile systems that when they fail mean the death of a great amount of people. The denser the population, the more likely something might go wrong.

To make a map of an arcology, you’d be stacking stories of a building. Depending on the population density, you’d need a taller space and the ability to get the things that everyone needs to survive to and fro.This might mean that the structure stretches high into the sky, buried underground, or sinks into the ocean. To make a map of an arcology, start with the basic systems a civilization needs to live. If architects future-proofed the arcology, multiply these based not just on the size of the population for the future size as well.

What details would you recommend to include when worldbuilding gods?

If you intend to have your gods be an active part of your world, first set what your god is in charge of or what they represent. Then, for drama, choose gods they like and gods they don’t like. Importantly, this adds onto the sibling-rivalry vibe some pantheons have and can create great drama later.

Check Out these Awesome Beans: Anvilite Spotlight!

Finally, time for our favorite thing! Let’s shout out some amazing members of our community and give away amazing goodies.

Community Stream Raffle!

During our latest stream, we raffled off an AWESOME GACUCon 100$ voucher. Congratulations to the raffle winner! If you would like to participate in these community raffles as well, you are always welcome to join our Twitch Streams. By chance, if you aren’t able to make it, you can always participate in our challenges for a chance to earn prizes and/or community recognition!

Read on for Lore from the Community Livestream!

From wine snakes to haunted lights to star potato’s theme song, we had a blast in the stream last week. Here are just a few humorous bits before we say goodbye:

Wine Snakes

The wine was so good this stream that it became the code word to turn off and on the lights behind Janet and Dimitris! Not only that, we learned about a Greek idiom; someone who hangs around the wine and secretly drinks it all is known as a wine snake. The more you know!

Haunted Lights

Did I say code word to turn off and on the lights? Indeed! The wall lights behind Janet and Dimitris seemed to turn off and on with the utterance of the word “wine snake”. It was later that Dimitris called for total silence and we watched the lights twinkle out. As magical as wine snakes are, the lights were on audio-mode.

Star Potato: An Origin Story

And that’s when things got terribly fun! See, Janet can sometimes become a “max potato” – a tired bean whose only dream is to lounge comfortably on the couch, rest, and otherwise do nothing. But sometimes she transforms a la the sailor scouts of yore into “Star Potato” to which Janet created a theme song. We were then all serenaded on stream. – An eventful end to an lovely livestream.

 

That’s all for this week, lovely beans! See you next week for the recap, and until then – grab your hammer, and go worldbuild!

Follow World Anvil Blog on WordPress.com

Want more posts like this? Subscribe to the World Anvil blog!