Happy New Year, Anvilites! We hope you had a fantastic holiday season and start of the year. From new community events being planned to an overview of the latest dev updates, here’s this year’s first monthly news!
🖼️ Mass Image Editing
Edit multiple images all at once! This update lets you select as many images as you want and edit all of them at once (for example, to move them all into a folder, to change their artist credits, etc). If you’re a Grandmaster of the Guild (or above), open the Image Manager and click the “Multiselect” button at the top right to get started:
Check the guide for more details!
☁️ Upload images from the Advanced BBCode Editor
If you use the Advanced BBCode Editor (aka Euclid), the new “Image” button will open your image gallery—so you can upload images and browse the images you already uploaded right from the editor! Click the “Image” button in the editor toolbar to get started:
⚙️ Articles & World Manager updates
We kept rolling out updates to the new Articles & World Manager based on your feedback, including…
- Categories are now fully editable in the new interface, rather than being split into two different interfaces. Learn more about categories!
- Added a new default filtering list for all WIP articles in the Article Manager. Click on the top of the left panel to access the default filter lists.
- Storyteller Notes can now be enabled or disabled from the account features page.
- …plus many more minor changes and bug fixes!
We also announced manual saving on articles will come back as an option after running a survey on the core of our community. Thank you to everyone who gave us their thoughts!
We also have a new tutorial video for the new interface, so check it out for guidance, and to see features and tricks you might have missed.
Check the changelog for the full list of changes
🗓️ All January events
Here’s everything going on this month!
- ❄️ New Year’s Resolutions: Learn from your fellow Anvilites and set your creative resolutions for the year! Check the challenge page.
- 💃 Beautiful People: We’ll soon start the WorldEmber Beautiful People event, and this year’s theme is Dressed for the Quest! Post a selfie inspired by the theme to the community feed (tag it #BeautifulPeople) or join our Discord server. On February 7th, during the WorldEmber Awards Ceremony, Janet & Dimitris will choose a winner!
- 📚 Reading month round robin: This community stream, we’ll hang out with Andi, Kummer Wolfe, Serukis, and Those2Nerds as we read and chat about this month’s challenge! Tune in on Twitch on Saturday 17th at 6pm UK/10am Pacific.
- 🎓 No Sage Seminar this month. There won’t be a Sage Seminar this month due to scheduling conflicts. But we want to know what you’d like the next seminars to be about! We have a poll open in the Sage Hall on our Discord server—join to let us know your ideas!
❄️ New Year’s Resolutions challenge
This month, we challenge you to set your creative resolutions for the year, and learn from your fellow Anvilites!
- Read 5 articles written by other Anvilites.
- Write about what you learned from them.
- Write a worldbuilding article inspired by the articles you read.
With this challenge, you’ll get a very strong start to the year, as making an achievable resolution is the first step to getting your creative goals! Plus, reading other people’s worlds is a great way to learn, so you’ll also be learning and expanding your world as you do. Check the challenge page to take part!
🏆 Worldbuilding Awards
The submissions period for the 6th World Anvil Worldbuilding Awards opens on February 7th. Get your worldbuilding ready by then for a chance to be recognized as the best work of the year! And, if you get nominated to one of the five major categories, you’ll be judged by industry experts including Tracy Hickman and Brian McClellan. Check the challenge page for the full details!
We’ve heard from some of you that the restriction around world being able to win multiple major categories has prevented some of you from wanting to enter. While we won’t change this year’s rule, we’ll bear this feedback in mind and consider it for subsequent years. Thank you everyon as always for letting us know your concerns!
🔜 Upcoming Events on World Anvil!
Here’s a list of our upcoming challenges and community events, to help you get ready:
- January: Start the new year by setting achievable creative resolutions. Check the challenge page!
- February: Submit your entries for the 6th Worldbuilding Awards.
- March: Worldbuilding Showdown! Details will be revealed later.
All our challenges launch first on community live stream, so follow us on Twitch to get the news first!
📹 YouTube video round-up
Need a little push to improve your worldbuilding? Or want some advice from a professional worldbuilder? Here are our latest YouTube videos:
- Second World Checklist: Second Worlds are entirely different realities like Discworld and Westeros—what most people picture when they hear “worldbuilding.” But don’t get overwhelmed! Here’s what you must establish from the start, the critical questions to answer… and what can wait till later.
- Worldbuilding Religion: If you’re worldbuilding a fantasy religion, don’t start with the gods—start with these 4 questions!
- Worldbuilding a Portal Fantasy or Isekai Setting: Portal Fantasy is a popular subgenre for middle grade and young adult audiences, but modern stories have given it a grown-up spin! Explore what portal fantasy is, see some famous examples and common tropes, and learn where to start worldbuilding with it!
- What is the Red Queen Hypothesis? Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass—and evolutionary biology—hold the secret to more dynamic, believable worldbuilding…. And even more, a way to weave natural conflicts, abundant story ideas, and a dangerous sense of “survival of the fittest” into the very fabric of your world. Here’s how to integrate these ideas into your world to make it more realistic!
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay on top of all our latest videos.
🌟 Community highlight
This month’s feature is Kena’an, by Imagica. In this world, the remnants of the gods were splintered into the divine runes—when they reunite, the Gods will return and the fate of the world will be sealed. Dive into this epic fantasy world that won the Best Newcomer award!
And here’s what Imagica had to say about Kena’an and her experience on World Anvil:
Kena’an began as a thought on a napkin. I had just discovered TTRPGs around 2009, and during a painfully slow café shift I grabbed a pen and started sketching a world of my own. I never really stopped thinking about it, but for years it mostly lived in my head.
World Anvil didn’t just give Kena’an a home; it helped my rough ideas grow in a year and a half more than they had in over a decade. More importantly, it gave me back my confidence as a writer and creator at a time when burnout had nearly taken both. Entering the Worldbuilding Awards became a test of that recovery. Exposure can be intimidating, but within the welcoming space of World Anvil, submitting felt absolutely right.
In my time here, World Anvil has become my shelter. Not a day has passed that I haven’t logged in: to write, to tinker, or to celebrate the work of others. It’s where I found not just a platform, but friends, encouragement, and a community that not only loves building worlds, but takes joy in uplifting the people who create them. In every way that matters, this place and its people have become my tribe!
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