It’s February! This month will be packed with the first voting phase of the Worldbuilding Awards and a ton of community-organized challenges! So strap in and let’s take a look at what’s coming.
As always, our team has been busy improving World Anvil this month!
😶🌫️ New atmospheric locations!
You asked, and we answered! We’ve added a bunch of different location types in the Geographical Location template for the sky and oceans, including jet streams, wind belts, cloud bands, and more—your sky-sailing adventures can now become a reality!
📣 Calling all Sages! If you have a custom domain, this will be super useful for you!
Sometimes, when viewing your world through your custom domain, some icons fail to load (due to technical limitations). To solve this issue, you can now use this new option to set up a custom FontAwesome kit:
- Get a custom FontAwesome kit (check the FontAwesome documentation for details).
- Copy your FontAwesome kit URL.
- On World Anvil, click the gear on the left side, then the art palette to access your world’s Styling settings.
- Click on the CSS tab and paste the FontAwesome kit URL in the “FontAwesome Custom Kit URL” field.
After saving changes, your world will pull icons from your custom kit rather than World Anvil’s kit.
Check out the Changelog page on World Anvil for the full changelog.
🗓️ February events
We have several awesome events this month, to inspire you and help you achieve your goals!
- 🏆 5th Worldbuilding Awards: submit your best worldbuilding to the Worldbuilding Awards (WAWA) before the 8th! Then, on February 15th, the first voting round will begin! Check the event page for details.
- 🤩 Friendship February: this month we’re shining the spotlight on the challenges YOU are organizing! Check the unofficial challenge round-up and join the community with #UnofficialChallenge!
- ✨ Community Day: this month’s World Anvil Community Day will be on February 22nd! Here’s the programme:
- 🎓 Sage Seminar: The ULTIMATE Crowdfunding Spreadsheet—explained (5pm UK/9am Pacific): In this month’s Sage Seminar, author Laura VanArendonk Baugh will share and explain all about her method to manage crowdfunding and all the math that comes with it (costs, stretch goals, rewards, etc)! Find the link in the Professional Portal (Sages only).
- 🙌 Friendship February: Unofficial Challenge Month Highlights (6pm UK/10am Pacific): join us on stream with other Anvilites to share and learn more about the creative events going on in the community!
- ☕ Inner Sanctum Coffee: if you’re a member of the Inner Sanctum, keep your eyes peeled for this month’s Coffee details on Discord!
Follow us on Twitch to learn when we go live!
🔥 Check if you won WorldEmber!
The winner list for WorldEmber is out now! Check if you’re in it and claim your prizes now. If you won and don’t claim your prizes before February 17th, you will miss your chance! Check the list and claim your prize here.
🌟 Community highlight
This month we’re featuring… The End of Humanity! This article by Stormbril is written and laid out as a newspaper, and is a gorgeous window to the dark world of Cathedris. Here’s what the author had to say:
This world means so much to me—it’s the creative outlet I never knew I needed, it’s what made me realize that I can share the things I make with the internet at large, and that while scary, it’s incredibly exciting to see how people react and respond to your work. I’ve learned so much about design, and honed my creative craft so much with Cathedris. It’s the project that got me into Architecture school. It gives me a chance to go wild and try new things again and again, with this article being a great example of pushing myself to create different unique themes for articles to hammer home specific themes that I really want to highlight. I’d always wanted to do a really cohesive newspaper-style article, and I’m overjoyed at how it came out in the end. It was so exciting to pack so much lore into the article with this framing device, allowing the format and theme to tell as much of the story as the text itself.
Personally, I love good healthy competition. I love creating along side all of these extremely talented people. It pushes me to try new things, to take chances and to hone my own skills. While I generally don’t create things with the idea of winning the Worldbuilding Awards in mind, I’d be lying if they didn’t provide an incentive to put just that little bit extra polish on my articles. The excitement about WAWA is infectious, the ideas that are generated are fantastic and inspiring. Seeing past winners, and future winners, provides me so many opportunities to learn and improve. And, of course, being a winner myself has been an enlightening process as well—it lets me know what works and what doesn’t, what resonates, and where best to direct my energy.
The article won the Strength & Honor Award in the Worldbuilding Awards 2024, so check it out now for an amazing dose of inspiration!
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