Get ready for a host of helpful UI updates to improve your WA experience, and details for our online worldbuilding Summer Camp challenge… because June is PREP MONTH!

Dev updates this month

✨ New right sidebar menu

The new sidebar on the right gives you access to all the account-level options, such as the Community portal, the News, the Learn documentation, and more. It’s like the old top menu bar, but moved to the right! Thanks to this change, it’s now always available and doesn’t overlap with anything. Here’s a quick video that shows the before and after:

YouTube player

🕸️ New Diplomacy Webs

Create visual and interactive relationships between your factions, countries, corporations, and other organizations! Include them in any article to give your readers (and yourself) a quick reference of inter-faction politics. This feature was previously available in the old edit interface, but is now available in the new editor too! To get started, edit an Organization article and click the new Diplomacy button in the bottom toolbar, or check the guide to Diplomacy Webs for more details.

new diplomacy webs

📂 Automatic category order

Tidy up your categorized articles with this new option! With the new “Order by” button in the Article Management tab, you can easily order your articles alphabetically, by creation date, or by last update. Changes are reflected in both edit and view modes! Check the Learn guide for more details.

order by button in article management

🎨 CSS editor improvements

The live CSS editor in view mode has received a few updated to improve your CSS editing experience. It now supports syntax highlighting, error checking, autocomplete, and resizing the editor window. To get started, view your world and click the art palette icon on the right side of your screen! Check the guide to CSS for details.

A screenshot showing the new live css editor

⚙️Other minor improvements

We’ve been hard at work with other minor improvements and bug fixes too!

  • When editing an article (in the article manager or in the quick edit modal), you can now collapse the article sidebar panels on the right! So if you want to focus on the main article content—or just have a small screen—you can now optimize your screen space.
  • A refreshed Help Center modal: click the question mark icon on the right sidebar to see it.
  • We also fixed a few bugs, including:
    • The order of categories and articles is now the same in edit as in view mode.
    • We fixed a bug that prevented users from deleting comments in Manuscripts.
    • Fixed an issue that prevented manual save from properly saving some newly created articles.

Check the changelog for the full list of changes


Upcoming events in April

🗓️ June events

Here’s everything going on this month!

  • 🍨 Summer Camp Preparation: In July, we’ll challenge you to answer between 8 and 32 prompts in your world in one of our main worldbuilding events of the year. So this month, it’s time to get ready! Check the challenge details.
  • 🎒 Hitchhiker’s Guide winners: On June 20th, we’ll reveal the winners of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Your World challenge, selected by Mur Lafferty and David green! Don’t miss the stream on our Twitch channel at 6pm UK/10am Pacific time.
  • 🎓 Sage Seminar: Building a Queerer World. On June 13th, Janet will hold her Sage Seminar about exploring opportunities to “build queer” into the fundamentals of your setting, using both historical and fictional examples! She’ll also go over opportunities to explore themes of found family, identity, and self-expression. Find the link in the Professional Portal.
  • ☕ Inner Sanctum Coffee: If you’re a member of the Inner Sanctum, join the bi-monthly Coffee on June 13th, at 4pm UK/8am Pacific! Dimitris and Janet will be discussing recent updates, gathering your feedback, and sharing secret new projects! The link will be shared on the Discord channel on the day.

🔜 Upcoming Events on World Anvil!

Here’s a list of our upcoming challenges and community events, to help you get ready:

  • June: Summer Camp prep challenge. Check the details now!
  • July: Summer Camp! Answer anywhere between 8 and 40 worldbuilding prompts based on four themes. Click for more info.
  • August: After a marathon month of worldbuiding in July, in August we kick back with our Reading Challenge. Move over, trashy beach novels, because this month we’re taking some time to enjoy worldbuilding from the World Anvil multiverse.

All our challenges launch first on community live stream, so follow us on Twitch to get the news first!

June 2026 3-month calendar (1)

💡 Did you know…?

In the Article Manager, toggle on status indicators to see which articles are public/private and published/drafts. Or toggle them off to reduce visual noise. Check Learn for more information!

📹 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:

  • 8 ways to use tarot in D&D: Tarot decks are beautiful, and they can enrich your setting with mysticism and unpredictability. But unless a game specifically calls for a tarot deck, it’s hard to know what to do with one. This video offers 8 fun and interesting ways to incorporate tarot into your gameplay!
  • How to create nested quests: Most GMs reuse the same plots without even realizing it, which leads to predictable adventures! But once you learn how RPG quest types actually work, you can nest and combine them in interesting ways using the power of story structure.
  • What is the J-Curve Hypothesis? And what the 5 pillars of revolutions? This is what this video is about! Learn how to create realistic revolutions and the formula for toppling authoritarian regimes in fiction.
YouTube player

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay on top of all our latest videos.


🌟 Community highlight: Keystone

This month, discover the women who inherit the power of a planet in the sci-fi universe of Solaris. “Keystone” is a beautiful description of a rank that carries immense power and duty, and it was selected as the Best Article in the Worldbuilding Awards 2026 by author CL Clark. Check out Keystone!

Keystone by nnie screenshot

Here’s what nnie, its author, had to say about her work:

Winning something as important as Best Article is all the sweeter when it’s with an article I’m this proud of. Keystones are one of the core concepts for Solaris, playing with the idea of the Planetary Guardians of Sailor Moon. I was so fascinated by their pasts as Queens and Princesses of their planets, and I wanted to imagine what a fully inhabited Sol System could be like.

I had so many things I wanted to explore with this. The fantasy of discovering you are the chosen one, with abilities unlike anyone else, and maybe even becoming a queen in the process! But also the ways that power, if you wanna wield it responsibly, comes with even more restrictions.

This article was also a personal challenge: I wanted to show I could write an article that was stood out without any art or fancy code. Now Keystones has been named the Best Article of 2026! I feel like when you’ve got a cool idea, you develop it so you really know what you’re talking about, and then you show what impact that concept has in your setting, you end up with a killer article that you can be proud of no matter what.


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